Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver feels just as relevant today as it did when it premiered 50 years ago, and the line wrapped around the block for the Tribeca Festival’s anniversary screening can certainly attest to the film’s staying power.
But why is Taxi Driver still so relevant today? During a pre-screening discussion, moderator W. Kamau Bell put that question to Scorsese, as well as the film’s screenwriter Paul Schrader and stars Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster. The answer seems to lie in the universal feeling of loneliness.
“I was in Beijing in 1984,” recalled Scorsese, trying to answer Bell’s question in front of the sold-out crowd. “A kid came up to me from Kazakhstan. He said he loved Taxi Driver, but asked, ‘What do you do about the loneliness?’
“It’s about not being able to commit, not being able to connect,” Scorsese continued, citing feeling that stretch around the world. “For me, it’s universal, and it’s just always going to speak to many people, many young people, particularly.”
De Niro, also speaking to Taxi Driver’s relevance, said that he could see why the film’s protagonist Travis Bickle, a Vietnam War veteran who begins to unravel while driving a taxi cab alone at night through the streets of New York, could resonate so strongly today.
“I understand that people are lonely, especially after the pandemic and getting into their own worlds, getting into worlds that they shouldn’t get into,” said De Niro. “I can see it.”
“The beauty of the Travis Bickle character is that he presents an idea of this meaning he wants to be a part of, but there’s no real self-understanding,” Foster echoed. “He just allows the audience to witness his descent, his unraveling, and his attempt to connect. He doesn’t really understand himself, and that’s the draw for the antihero.”
That acidic, self-destructive loneliness is something that Scorsese said was baked into Schrader’s script from the start. “Each page was like a razor blade,” the screenwriter said. “You had to be careful.” But Scorsese, who’d read the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, felt instantly that he recognized Bickle in those Russian tales, saying to himself, “I could do this. I know this. I know who he is.”
Scorsese, who grew up downtown Manhattan on Elizabeth Street, didn’t always recognize the sinister energy of New York in the 1970s. “The city was the city,” he said, remembering a time he dismissed the giant mounds of trash as commonplace due to a regular garbage strike. But in hindsight, he can feel that dark energy seep into the film.
“You could feel a kind of violence all around you,” he remembered. “You really felt it all around at night, and you could taste it in a way. It permeated the picture. The city really was falling apart.”
Scorsese also translated that loneliness into the visual of an iconic New York yellow cab driving through steam at night, which he describes as having an “arc of despair.”
Similarly, De Niro instantly understood the character and what Schrader and Scorsese were trying to accomplish.
“I don’t remember even discussing the character or anything,” said Scorsese. “We just began. We knew, the three of us, somehow. There are shots of Bob and me talking on set, sitting on where the frozen food was. We talked about personal stuff. Very little to do with discussing character.”
While the final film may be a searing examination of male loneliness, the filming of Taxi Driver was anything but.
“It felt fun. It felt like a game, and it felt important but also whimsical,” Foster said of the shoot. “If you’ve directed and made art with your friends, there’s that feeling like, ‘This is the most serious thing on earth, but I cannot stop laughing.’”
Foster, who was only 12 years old when she filmed Taxi Driver, remembers Scorsese laughing while crafting the bloody prosthetics in the movie’s final massacre.
“When the guy’s face gets blown off, and in those days it was piano wire and five or six guys that were standing on either side trying to pull the pieces off at the right time,” Foster said, “[Scorsese] just thought that was hilarious.”
Addressing how she ended up acting in Taxi Driver opposite De Niro as a child prostitute, Foster recalled her mother taking her to see Mean Streets, and that as a child actor, she’d immediately asked to work with Scorsese, taking a small role in his film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. “I just wanted to be a part of this, so anything that [Scorsese] would have offered me, I would have done that.”
“I tried to be an extra in New York, New York,” Foster then said about Scorsese’s following film. “But it didn’t work out because I was under 16, and they wouldn’t let me work at night or something.”
While on set, De Niro took Foster under his wing, picking her up from her hotel and taking her to a diner to work through scenes before filming.
“He introduced me to improvisation, which I’d never done before,” Foster remembered. “It was like a light bulb went off in my head, and I remember getting all happy. I came to the hotel and said to my mom, ‘Oh my god, I think I want to be an actor.’ My acting was just saying words people wrote. I had no idea that there was anything more to it. [De Niro] probably didn’t realize that at the time, but it was a life-changing opportunity for me.”
Of course, no Taxi Driver reunion would be complete without some discussion of De Niro’s famous “You talkin to me?” scene. After Bell successfully entreated De Niro to recite the line, Schrader shared that while that scene was in the original script, the line “You talkin to me?” was not.
“It’s like a kid, who’s eight years old, standing in front of a mirror with his cap gun,” Schrader told the audience. “I never elaborated what exactly he was saying. I figured that was up to the actor.”
“I came up with it,” said De Niro, when prompted as to where it came from.
“[De Niro] got into a trance-like state and just went on and on that way,” Scorsese said, recalling the filming of that scene on one of the final days on set. “I remember just being on the floor with earphones on, and [De Niro] just started playing with the gun, and then this stuff started coming out. Pete Scoppa, who was his great AD in New York, was banging on the door, and I had to go open it. He said, ‘You’re two hours over, we got to get this thing done.’ I said, ‘This is good. Give us another few minutes.’”
Thank goodness Scorsese kept rolling. Otherwise, we’d be without an iconic line that people have been quoting for the last fifty years.
