I would say it's about 90 percent truth.'

'Sometimes you got to elaborate, but the picture they portrayed is pretty accurate. 'It's hard to believe, but I also didn't really use profanity,' says Jake. 'My mother would've threw him out of the house if he had spit on the floor.' 'They took poetic license, like when they showed Jake spitting on the floor in the house,' adds Joey, who was played in the movie by Joe Pesci. 'I was a little disappointed at the way they depicted Jake in the movie _ cruel, and all that,' pipes in brother Joey, who was also a pro boxer in the '40s and later managed Jake's career until they had a falling-out that lasted many years. 'I kept to myself, and I didn't trust nobody.' 'I don't know if I was really a nice guy at that time,' he adds.

Because if I hit 'em, they won't wake up. 'I was similar to what they portrayed _ or maybe even worse,' says LaMotta, who was made out to be an intensely insecure, insanely jealous wife-beater. But while LaMotta lauds the way Scorsese and star Robert De Niro captured the essence of his complicated psyche _ LaMotta is depicted as an animal both in and out of the ring _ he still maintains Raging Bull took too many liberties with his life story. Often cited as the best film of the 1980s, Raging Bull is having a 20th-anniversary rerelease in a new 35mm print at Film Forum in New York City, running through Thursday. Chain-smoking his way through lunch, decked out in a blood-red sports jacket, black cowboy hat and black shirt and slacks, LaMotta is reminiscing with younger brothers Joey and Albert about the making of the film that transformed him from a boxing has-been to one of the sport's living legends.

The making of raging bull