Taxi Driver told the story of Travis Bickle, a naive, psychologically unstable loner whose loathing of the cities low-life inhabitants leads him to take arms against pimps and politicians alike. Dark and unrelenting, Schrader's script passed through the finger's of director Brian De Palma and producers Julia and Michael Phillips before it reached Martin Scorsese, a director from Roger Cormans stable who had just enjoyed a critical success with Mean Streets. Scorsese loved the script and knew that Mean Streets star Robert De Niro was just the man to play Travis Bickle.
Twelve months after he had contemplated suicide, Schrader signed his first major film contract. Although closing the deal resolved some of Schrader's problems, it also marked the beginning of Scorsese's.The casting of 12-year old Jodie Foster as a child prostitute caused charges of pedophilia, resulting in the presence's of a social workers during the shoot. Scorsese quarreled with producer Julia Phillips over the casting of Cybil Shepherd as Travis's fantasy woman, Betsy, and filming went way over schedule as leading man De Niro asked Scorsese about his "motivation" for everything - from killing Harvey Keitel's pimp, Sport, to such simple tasks as setting his cab's meter.
Even after filming stopped, questions continued to be asked about Taxi Driver. Although the book was based on Jean-Paul Satre's existentialist novel Nausea, it was also informed on the diaries of would-be assassin Arthur Bremer, who shot and paralyzed right-wing governor George Wallace in 1972. Ironically, the film was cited as a key influence on John Hinckley Jr, the deranged Jodie Foster fan who tried to impress his idol by shooting President Reagan in 1981.
As Schrader once explained: "There are warning signs in the film that could help prevent someone who is isolated like Travis Bickle. If you are on the edge, this film could help pull you back from the precipice. It certainly did for me."
MARTIN SCORSESE - Acclaimed director with an impressive filmography that garnered worldwide recognition.PAUL SCHRADER (screenwriter): Film critic turned writer/director and frequent Scorsese collaborator.
ROBERT DE NIRO (Travis Bickle): Legendary method-actor, two times Academy award Winner and owner of a film centre in Tribeca, Manhattan.
HARVEY KEITEL (Sport): Acclaimed method-actor and Scorsese's long-time friend and collaborator.
JODIE FOSTER (Iris): Child-star that crossed over into adult roles. Directed Little Man Tate in between collecting Oscars for The Accused and The Silence Of The Lambs.
JULIA PHILIPS (producer): Responsible for such hits of the 70's like Close Encounters and The Sting.
Paul Schrader
In 1973, I had been through a pretty rough time. My marriage had broken up and I had to quit my job at the American Film Institute. I was out of work; out of the AFI and in debt. I fell into a period of isolation, living more or less in my car. One day I went to the emergency room in serious pain and it turned out I had an ulcer. While I was in the hospital talking to a nurse, I noticed that I hadn't talked to anyone in two or three weeks. It really hit me. I was like a Taxi Driver, floating around in this metal coffin in the city, seemingly in the middle of people, but totally alone.
Robert De Niro
There are underground things about yourself that you don't want to discuss. Somehow these things are better expressed on film or on paper.
Paul SchraderAt the time I wrote it, I was very suicidal, I was enamored with guns, I was drinking heavily, I was obsessed with pornography in the way a lonely person is, and all these elements are up front in the script. Right after writing it, I left town for about six months and when I came back to L.A. I was feeling a bit stronger emotionally and went at it again. I was a free-lance critic at the time and had just interviewed Brian De Palma at his place on the beach. The fact that I had written a script came up, so I gave it to him. He liked it a lot and wanted to do it.
Brian De Palma (filmmaker)
I loved the script. Paul said he had based it on Arthur Bremer, the psychopath who tried to assassinate right-wing Alabama Governor, George Wallace. But it was the script's autobiography quality that made it truly compelling. But after a while, other projects got in the way and I couldn't make the picture.
Martin ScorseseBrian De Palma had told me that Paul had this script, Taxi Driver, that he didn't want to do or couldn't do, and wondered if I would be interested in reading it. So I read it and thought it was fantastic. It was the sort of picture I should be making based on the impressions I had growing up in New York and living in a city.
Julia PhilipsSchrader always scared me. When we first met him, after Brian De Palma gave us the script, he was so shy he talked into his armpit. After I read his script, I refused to be alone in the house with him. He was following (screenwriter) John Milius around and had bought his own 45 pistol, an act of bizarre romantic adulation.
Martin Scorsese
Paul said: "What about De Niro? He was great in Mean Streets." And it turned out that Bob had a feeling for people like Travis. The making became almost like a commission in a sense. Bob was the actor, I was the director, and Paul wrote the script. The three of us - Bob, me and Paul - just came together. It was exactly what we wanted.
Paul Schrader
Taxi Driver was as much a product of luck and timing as everything else - three sensibilities together at the right time, doing the right thing. It was still a low-budget, long-shot movie, but that's how it got made.
Martin Scorsese
That year (1974), De Niro was about to win the Oscar for The Godfather Part 2. Ellen Burstyn won the award for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and Paul had just sold his Yakuza script to Warner Brothers, so it was all coming together. Michael and Julia Philips, who owned the script, had won an award for The Sting and figured there was enough power to get the film made, though in the end, we barely raised the very low budget of $1.3 million. For a while, we even thought of doing it in black-and-white video! For me, making the film was more important than the final result.
Julia PhilipsIn Martin, I think Bobby found the one person that could talk for 15 minutes about how a character would tie a knot. I saw them go at it for ten hours non-stop. I think Travis is someone people should know about. I know he's out there, created by American culture and the Vietnam War.
Paul Schrader
Bob was so determined to get the character of Travis down, he drove a cab for a couple of weeks. He got a license, had his fingerprints taken by the police and hit the streets. He made quite a lot of money.
Martin Scorsese
I drove with him a couple of nights. He said he got the strangest feeling when he was hacking, like he was totally anonymous. People would say anything, do anything in the back of his cab as if he wasn't there at all.
Robert De NiroI am a fairly quiet man, but I chatted with my passengers, keeping within the character I was about to play. One time I picked up a guy who happened to be an actor. The guy was like, "Jesus Christ! One year you're winning an Oscar and now your driving cabs? Guess it's hard to find a steady job!"
Martin Scorsese
The scene I did in the taxicab was filmed during the last week of shooting. I learned a lot from Bob in that scene. I remember saying "Put down the flag! Put down the flag!" De Niro said, "No. Make me put it down." And Bobby wasn't going to put down the flag until he was convinced that I meant it. And I understood. His move had to be a certain way and if he didn't feel it, the move wasn't going to be right. For me, it was a pretty terrifying scene to do.
Jodie FosterAt first I didn't want to do the part, but only because I was afraid my friends would tease me afterwards. I thought, "Wow! They've got to be kidding!". It was a great part for a 21-year old, but I couldn't believe that they were offering it to me. I was the Disney kid!
Martin Scorsese
I never had any doubts about Jodie. She's always fresh and clear about her personality. She takes directions very well and has a natural craft; a natural capacity when acting, which is a delight.
Jodie FosterI spent four hours with a shrink to prove that I was normal enough to play a hooker. It was the role that changed my life. For the first time I was going to play something completely different. But I knew the character I had to play - I grew up three blocks away from Hollywood Boulevard and saw prostitutes like Iris every day.
Harvey KeitelWhen we did Mean Streets, I was living in Greenwich Village, and by Taxi Driver, I had moved to Hell's Kitchen. I had seen a lot of pimps in the neighborhood. I just put a number of them together and out came Sport.
Jodie Foster
There was a welfare worker on the set every day and she saw the daily rushes of all my scenes and made sure I wasn't on set when Robert De Niro said a dirty word.
Harvey Keitel
I worked with a pimp for a few weeks creating the role. We wrote almost all the dialogue, me and this pimp. I recorded the improvisations we did. He'd play the pimp I would play the girl. I'd see the way he treated me, then I would play the pimp and he would play the girl. We did that for a few weeks over at the Actors Studio.
Julia PhilipsMarty's misogyny was apparent from his casting of Cybill Shepherd as Betsy. We had interviewed just about every blonde on both coasts and still he kept looking. I liked Farrah Fawcett for her aquiline profile and thin body, but Marty picked Cybill for her big ass. A retro-italian gesture, I always felt. In the end, he had to give her line-readings and De Niro hated her.
Martin ScorseseI was accused in Mean Streets of just showing the garbage on the streets. When I was shooting Taxi Driver, it was so filthy because of a garbage strike and everywhere I aimed my camera, there were mounds of garbage. I said, "They're going to kill me! Guys take some of the garbage out!". While shooting Mean Streets in L.A., we had to put garbage in the streets to make it look like New York.
Paul SchraderThe dialogue is somewhat improvised. The most memorable piece of dialogue in the film is an improvisation: the "You talkin' to me?" part. In the script it just says, Travis speaks to himself in the mirror. Bobby asked me what he would say and I said, "Well, he's a little kid playing with guns and acting tough.", so De Niro used this rap that an underground New York comedian had been using at the same time as the basis for his lines.
Albert BrooksMy role was indicated in the script, but it had no lines. So I had to write it. Paul Schrader once said the funniest thing to me. He said, "Thank you! I didn't understand that character." And I thought, "That's the character you didn't understand? You understood Travis Bickle and Harvey Keitel perfectly, but the guy who works in the campaign office, you're not sure of?"
Martin Scorsese
Victor Magnotta, a friend from NYU, came back from Vietnam and one night, we went for dinner with Bob and he told us some of the things that had happened. Horror stories. Bob asked him about Special Forces and Victor told us that in Saigon, if you saw a guy with his head shaven like a Mohawk, that usually meant these people were ready to go into a Special Forces situation. You didn't go near them. They were in a psychological mode. Ready to kill.
Robert De NiroThat whole hallway slaughter scene took us about four or five takes to do. Things went wrong technically. You have this sort of serious, dramatic carnage going on and all of a sudden someone drops something or the machinery brakes down. It just blows the whole thing and I guess because it's so gruesome, everybody's ready to laugh, even though the material was heavy.
Martin ScorseseI was shocked by the way the audience took the violence. On the opening night, everyone was yelling and screaming at the final shoot-out. When I made it I didn't intend the audience to react with that feeling - "Yes! Do it! Let's go out and kill!". But in reality, movies don't kill people. People kill people. I do not regret having made Taxi Driver. Nor do I believe it was an irresponsible act. Quite the reverse in fact.
Paul Schrader
Jean-Luc Godard once said that all great movies are successful for all the wrong reasons, and there were a lot of wrong reasons why Taxi Driver was successful. The sheer violence of it brought out the Time Square crowd.
Martin Scorsese
I never thought Taxi Driver would make a dime.
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