![]() I had made the decision that I didn’t want to go back into acting unless it was something really terrific.’ And that ‘something really terrific’ was just about to appear with his part in Raging Bull. The fella with the restaurant had been very nice to me and it was a different way to go for a while. I wanted to get away from all that and get back into the position where everybody treated you like a man. You get to the point out there where you bump into a wall and say, “Excuse me,” so as not to offend anybody so you can get a job. I was out of Hollywood where you’re at everybody’s mercy all the time and you wind up being a sissy. ![]() ‘I had been performing my whole life, from when I was a kid. ‘It wasn’t so much that I was finished, it was that I was disappointed, I wasn’t getting anywhere,’ Pesci says today. ![]() De Niro and Corman visited Pesci at work to sound him out. She found her man living above an Italian restaurant he was managing – Amici’s, a popular Bronx eatery on Arthur Avenue in New York’s Little Italy. It was left to Corman to track Pesci down. ‘What I liked was he seemed like he was so authentic that he, how should I say it, was an actor but he was not an actor. This guy is interesting.’ ‘I liked him,’ remembers Scorsese. ‘That’s how I saw Joe for the first time,’ recalls De Niro. Corman sent Robert De Niro a copy of the film. The film hadn’t made much of an impression, but the actor playing Joe, a debt enforcer for the mob, had. Sitting in a movie theatre as the credits rolled on The Death Collector (1975), Raging Bull’s casting director Cis Corman felt they could have found their Joey LaMotta.
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