The Making of 'Taxi Driver'

The Making of ‘Taxi Driver’

Taxi Driver saved writer Paul Schrader from suicide, cemented Martin Scorsese’s reputation as a master filmmaker and made Robert De Niro a legend. But child star Jodie Foster wasn’t quite so lucky. And neither was the President of the United States…

Paul Schrader: (screenwriter)

In 1973, I had been through a particularly rough time. My marriage broke up, and I had to quit the American Film Institute. I was out of work, out of the AFI; I was in debt.

I fell into a period of absolute isolation, living more or less in my car. One day, I went to the emergency room in severe pain, and it turned out I had an ulcer. While I was in the hospital talking to the nurse, I realised I hadn’t spoken to anyone in two or three weeks.

It hit me, an image that I was like a taxi driver, floating around in this metal coffin in the city, seemingly in the middle of people but completely alone.

Martin Scorsese: (director)

The whole film is very much based on the impressions I have as a result of growing up and living in New York City.

Paul Schrader:

At the time I wrote it, I was very enamoured of guns, I was very suicidal, I was drinking heavily, and obsessed with pornography in the way a lonely person is, and all those elements are upfront in the script.

Right after writing it, I left town for about six months; I returned to LA after feeling a little stronger emotionally and decided to go at it again. I was a freelance critic at the time. I had written a review of Sisters and interviewed Brian De Palma at his place on the beach.

That afternoon we were playing chess, and somehow the fact that I had written a script came up. So I gave it to him; he liked it and wanted to do it.

Brian De Palma: (producer)

I loved the script. Paul said he had based it on Arthur Bremer, the psychopath who had tried to assassinate [right-wing Alabama Governor] George Wallace. But it was the script’s autobiographical quality that made it genuinely compelling.

Julia Phillips: (producer)

After I read the script, I refused to be alone in the house with Schrader. He was following [John} Milius around and had brought his own .45, an act of romantic adulation.

Martin Scorsese:

Brian told me Paul had this script, Taxi Driver, that he didn’t want to do or couldn’t do at that time, and he wondered if I’d be interested in reading it. So I read it, and my friend read it, and she said it was fantastic; we agreed that this was the sort of picture we should be making next.

Julia Phillips:

Schrader always scared me. When we first met him, after Brian De Palma gave us Taxi Driver, he was so shy he talked into his armpit.

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 Academy Award for The Godfather Part II. Ellen Burstyn won the award for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and Paul had sold The Yakuza to Warner Brothers, so it was all coming together.

Michael and Julia Phillips, 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 meagre budget of $1.3 million. In fact, for a while, we even thought of doing it on black-and-white video!

Paul Schrader:

At one point, we could have financed the film with Jeff Bridges playing Travis, but we elected to hold out and wait until we could do it with De Niro.

Brian De Palma:

It’s true, Neil Diamond screen-tested for Taxi Driver. Neil wanted to get into movies, and someone thought this would be appropriate. Then Jeff Bridges got an Oscar nomination, and he became the preferred choice. Bob [De Niro} was always in the frame, though. He was Travis Bickle.

Julia Cameron: (producer)

In Martin, Bobby found the one person who could talk for 15 minutes about how a character would tie a knot. I saw them go at it for ten hours non-stop once.

Martin Scorsese:

Paul said, “What about De Niro? He was great in Mean Streets.” And it turned out Bob had a feeling for people like Travis.

Julia Phillips:

I think Travis is someone people should know about. I know he is out there, created by American culture and etched in stone by the Vietnam War.

Robert De Niro: (lead actor)

There are underground things about yourself that you don’t want to discuss. Somehow these things are better expressed on paper or on film.

Jodie Foster: (lead Actor)

At first, I didn’t want to do the part, but only because I was worried my friends would tease me about it afterwards. I thought, Wow, they’ve got to be kidding. It was an excellent part for a 21-year-old, but I couldn’t believe they offered it to me. I was the Disney kid.

Martin Scorsese:

I never had any doubts about Jodie. She’s always very fresh and unequivocal in her personality. She takes direction exceptionally well and has a natural craft, a natural capacity when acting, which is a delight.

Jodie Foster:

Harvey Keitel: (lead actor)

When we did Mean Streets, I lived in Greenwich Village, and by Taxi Driver, I had moved to Hell’s Kitchen. I had seen a lot of pimps in my neighbourhood. I just put a number of them together, and out came Sport.

Julia Phillips:

Marty’s misogyny was apparent from his casting of Cybill Shepherd as Betsy. We had interviewed just about every blonde on both coasts, and he kept looking.

I liked Farrah Fawcett’s delicate bones, aquiline profile, big teeth and thin body. I always felt that Marty picked Cybill for her big ass, a retro Italian gesture. Ultimately, he had to give her line readings, and De Niro hated her.

Martin Scorsese:

The process of making the film, for me, was more important than the final result.

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 for a couple of nights. He said he got the strangest feeling when driving the cab, 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 Niro:

I am usually a fairly quiet man, but I chatted with my passengers, keeping within the character I was about to play.

Martin Scorsese:

One time he picked up a guy who happened to be an actor. The guy recognised Bob and said, “Jesus Christ, one year you’re winning an Oscar, and now you’re driving a cab? Guess it’s hard to find a steady job?” Bob explained what he was doing. the guy just put a hand on his shoulder and said, “It’s OK, Bobby, I’ve been there too.”

Harvey Keitel:

I worked with a pimp for a few weeks in creating the role. We wrote nearly all of the dialogue, me and this pimp. I recorded the improvisations we did. He’d play this pimp, and I’d play the girl; I’d see how he’d treat me, then I would play the pimp, and he’d play the girl. We did that for a few weeks over at the Actors Studio.

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 the set when Robert De Niro said a dirty word.

Martin Scorsese:

Everything was story-boarded, even the close-ups because we had to shoot so fast. It would have to be, “Get this shot!” Then, “OK, got it.” Then “Go on, OK, next.” That’s the way it had to go.

Jodie Foster:

You rarely have a director like Martin Scorsese or a co-star like Robert De Niro, who rehearses and rehearses until you get the feeling that he is the character for the time you’re with him. It’s so real it’s frightening.

Martin Scorsese:

The scene I did in the taxi cab 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 I meant it.

And then I understood. His move had to be a certain way; if he didn’t feel it, the movement wouldn’t be right. For me, it was a pretty terrifying scene to do.

Jodie Foster:

Marty chews his nails, scratches his head, and pulls his shirt out, worries and worries and worries. He worries so much about moviemaking that he winds up in the hospital with ulcers at the end of every movie.

Martin Scorsese:

I was accused in Mean Streets of just showing the garbage on the streets. When I was shooting Taxi Driver, it was filthy because of a garbage strike, and everywhere I aimed the camera, there were mounds of garbage.

I said, “They’re going to kill me! Guys, take some of the garbage and move it out of shot.” In LA, with Mean Streets, we had to put garbage in the streets to make it look like New York.

Paul Schrader:

The dialogue is somewhat improvised. The most memorable piece of dialogue in the film is an improvisation: the “Are you looking at me?” part. The script says that 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.

Martin Scorsese:

Victor [Mahnotta, a friend of Scorsese’s from NYU] came back from Vietnam, and we went out for dinner with him. He told us about what he had done or had happened to him — horror stories.

During dinner, Bob was asking him questions about the special forces. [Victor] told us that, in Saigon, if you saw a guy with his head shaved – like a little mohawk – that usually meant those people were ready to go into a specific Special Forces situation. You didn’t go near them. They were prepared to kill. They were in a psychological mode to go. That’s where we got the idea for Travis’s shaved head in the final part of the film.

Jodie Foster:

The only thing that could have had a harmful effect on me was the blood in the shooting scene. It was really neat, though. It was red sugary stuff. And they used Styrofoam for bones. And a pump to make the blood gush out of a man’s arm after his hand was shot off.

Robert De Niro:

I once told Marty that we should put together a movie of outtakes. That whole slaughter scene in the hallway took us about four or five takes to shoot. Things went wrong technically.

There are a lot of special effects, and something always goes wrong with those things. You have this sort of serious, dramatic carnage going on, and suddenly, somebody drops something, or the machinery breaks down.

It just blows the whole thing, and it turns out to be funny. Oddly enough, everybody’s ready to laugh in that sort of scene because it’s so gruesome. There was a lot of laughing and joking during the shooting between takes. I remember that. It was a lighter period, even though the material was very heavy.

Albert Brooks:

My role was only indicated in the script, 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 don’t understand? You understand Harvey Keitel and Travis Bickle perfectly, but the guy who works in the campaign office, you’re not so sure of?

Martin Scorsese:

I never thought Taxi Driver would make a dime.

Paul Schrader:

There was a very good feeling around the making of the film; everything felt right about it, and I remember the night before it opened, we all got together and had dinner and said, “No matter what happens tomorrow, we have made a terrific movie, and we’re damn proud of it, even if it goes down the toilet.”

And the next day, I got up and went to the theatre for the noon show. There was a long line that went all the way around the block, but I had to be let in. And then I realised that this vast line was already for the two o’clock show, not the noon show! So I ran inside and watched the film, and everyone was standing at the back, and there was a sense of exhilaration about what we had done. We knew we’d never repeat it.

Robert De Niro:

The whole alienation thing probably affected people. That’s the thing with movies. You do them in a personal way, and people are affected, and you never know exactly why.

Paul Schrader:

Jean-Luc Godard once said that all great movies are successful for the wrong reasons, and there were a lot of wrong reasons why Taxi Driver was successful. The sheer violence of it brought out the Times Square Crowd.

Martin Scorsese:

I was shocked by the way audiences took the violence. I saw Taxi Driver once in a theatre on opening night, and everyone was yelling and screaming at the final shoot-out. When I made it, I didn’t intend to have the audience react with that feeling – “Yes, do it. Let’s go out and kill!”

Jodie Foster:

I was literally skipping across the Yale campus with my friend when I heard Reagan had been shot [30th March 1981].

Martin Scorsese:

In terms of the John Hinckley shooting, people ask me how I feel about it. Well, I’m a Catholic. It’s easy to make me feel guilty.

Julia Phillips:

Hinckley had three obsessions: Jodie Foster, writing and Nazism – he’s one of the few people to have read Mein Kampf cover to cover. Before he shot Reagan, he’d planned to shoot Jimmy Carter.

Martin Scorsese:

I got to the [1980] Academy Awards, and we were the first ones let in. Then I had to go to the men’s room, and suddenly these three big guys came in with me.

Three big guys with jackets. I said, “Gee, this security s incredible tonight.” A few years earlier, when Jodie and I were nominees, I had received a threatening letter about Taxi Driver – “If Jodie Foster wins for what you made her do, you will pay for it with your life.” So we got the FBI, then.

So now I said, “well, this security is even better than the last time, this is fantastic.” I went backstage with Robert Redford to put some sort of statement together. The FBI didn’t want me moving around. Everybody knew why but me. Redford told me that a connection to Taxi Driver had been made in the shooting of the President. I never thought there was a connection with the film in a million years. It turned out that even the limo driver was FBI.

Julia Phillips:

I ran into [Easy Rider executive producer] Bert Schnieder at a soiree. “See, Taxi Driver wasn’t such a bad movie,” I smiled. And Bert said, “If it was really great Hinckley would have killed him.”

Martin Scorsese:

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. Bob and I are at one on this.

Paul Schrader:

I’m not opposed to censorship in principle, but I think that if you censor a film like Taxi Driver, all you do is censor a movie, not confront the problem. These characters are running around and can be triggered by anything.

Jodie Foster:

Taxi Driver completely changed my life. It was the first time anyone asked me to create a character that wasn’t myself. It was the first time I realised that acting wasn’t just this hobby you just sort of did but that there was some craft.

Paul Schrader:

When I talk to younger filmmakers, they tell me that it was the film that informed them, that it was their seminal film, and listening to them talk, I really can see it as a kind of social watermark. But it was meant as a personal film, not a political commentary.

Jodie Foster:

I think it’s one of the finest films ever made in America. It’s a statement about America. About violence. About loneliness. Anonymity. Some of the best works are those that have even tried to imitate that kind of film, that kind of style. It’s just classic. When I came home every day, I felt I’d accomplished something.

ADDITIONAL MATERIAL: Schrader On Schrader & Other Writings, edited by Kevin Jackson (Faber & Faber); Taxi Driver by Paul Schrader (script, Faber & Faber); Scorsese On Scorsese, edited by David Thompson and Ian Christie (Faber & Faber); You’ll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again, by Julia Phillips (Heinemann); Untouchable: Robert De Niro Unauthorised, by Andy Dougan (Virgin); Martin Scorsese: A Journey, by Mary Pay Kelly (Secker and Warburg); Jodie Foster: The Most Powerful Woman In Hollywood, by Andy Dougan (Orion Media).