This was taken from the English film magazine Neon August 1998 CABBIN' FEVER Taxi Driver saved 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. When he first conceived the idea for Taxi Driver back in 1973, aspiring screenwriter Paul Schrader was in a bad way. Not only had he lost his job at the American Film Institute, the LA-based film critic had been kicked out of his house by his wife. Schrader's homelessness and unemployment brought with it alcoholism and depression. His spirits sank so low that he even considered suicide; instead he wrote a story of urban alienation that came to define the brutality of life on the American streets. 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 Schraders problems, it also marked the beginning of Scorsese's. The casting of 14-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 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 informed on the diaries of would-be assassin Arthur Bremer, who shoot and paralyzed right-wing governor George Wallace on 15 may 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 on 30 March 1981. While the debates over its political and sexual agenda continue, Taxi Driver's power remains beyond question. An outstanding movie from one of the most creative areas in US cinema, Scorsese's film represents the high points in the careers of its leading participants. The film also had the rather dubious distinction of being grouped in with the glut of vigilant movies that followed 1974's Death Wish, although Taxi Driver undoubtedly contains a redemptive quality glaring absent from it's rivals. 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." DRAMATIC PERSONAS Who was washing the scum from the street on Taxi Driver? Martin Scorsese (director): Acclaimed director whose impressive filmography has garnered much critical respect but no Oscars to date. Most recent film Kundun made as a favor to close friend Dalai Lama. Paul Schrader (screenwriter): Calvinist-raised film critic turned writer/director. Later wrote Last Temptation of Christ and Raging Bull for Scorsese. Last-but-one film, Touch, is out this month. Julia Philips (producer): Coke-powered player behind Close Encounters and The Sting. Wrote the famous Hollywood expose You'll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again. Robert De Niro (Travis Bickle): Method legend. Made his fortune playing a variety of scumbags and squinting gimps. Now owns a restaurant and film centre in Tribeca, Manhattan. Jodie Foster (Iris): One of the few child stars to cross over into 'adult' roles. Directed first film Little Man Tate in between collecting Oscars for The Accused and The Silence Of The Lambs. Harvey Keitel (Sport): Method nightmare. Superb turn as Iris's pimp does not excuse occasional errors of judgment (Saturn 3, Monkey Trouble). Albert Brooks (Tom): Actor, writer, director and occasional Simpson's contributor. Real name: Albert Einstein. Brian De Palma: Director whose penchant for Hitchcock 'homages' hides an otherwise highly original visual talent. Julia Cameron: Martin Scorsese's second wife. 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; I was out of AFI; I was 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 hospital talking to the nurse I had 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 absolutely, totally alone. Martin Scorsese: The whole film is very much based on the impressions I have as a result of growing up in New York and living in a city. Paul Schrader: At 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. 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. I had just written an interview on Sisters and interviewed Brian De Palma at his place on the beach. That afternoon we were playing chess and the fact that I had written a script came up. So I gave it to him and he liked it a lot and wanted to do it. Brian De Palma: 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 autobiography quality that made it truly compelling. Julia Philips: After I had read his script I refused to be alone in the house with him. He was following John Milius around and had bought his own 45, an act of romantic adulation. Martin Scorsese: Brian 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 my friend read it and she said that that it was fantastic: we agreed that this was the sort of picture we should be making. Julia Philips: Schrader always scared me. When we first met him, after Brian De Palma had gave us Taxi Driver, he was so shy he talked into his armpit. Martin Scorsese: Taxi Driver was 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; it was one of the strangest things. 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 Any More and Paul had just sold The Yakuza 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. In fact for a while we even thought of doing it in black-and-white video! Paul Schrader: At one point, we could have financed the film with Jeff Bridges, but we elected to hold out and wait until we could finance 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 an appropriate vehicle. Then Jeff Bridges got an Oscar nomination and he became the preferred choice. Bob was always in the frame, though. He was Travis Bickle. Julia Cameron: In 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 ten hours non-stop. 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. Julia Philips: 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: There are underground things about yourself that you don't want to discuss. Somehow these things are better expressed on film or on paper. Jodie Foster: At 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 Foster: I 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 played 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 Keitel: When 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. Julia Philips: Marty'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 keep looking. I liked Farrah Fawcett, her fine bones, her aquiline profile, her big teeth and thin body. 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 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 street. 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 Niro: I am a fairly quite 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 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?" Bob explained what he was doing. The guy just put a hand on his shoulder and said, "It's okay Bobby, I've been there too." 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 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. 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. Martin Scorsese: Everything was storyboarded, even the close-up, because we had to shoot so fast. It would have to be, "Get this shot!" Then, "OK, I 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 for the time your with him he is the character. It's so real it's frightening. 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 Foster: Marty chews his nails, scratches his head, pulls his shirt out, worries and worries and worries. He worries so much about movie making that at the end of every movie he winds up in the hospital with ulcers. Martin Scorsese: I 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." In LA, with Mean Streets, we had to put garbage in the street 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. 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. Martin Scorsese: Victor( Magnotta, a friend of Scorsese's from NYU) came back from Vietnam and one night we went for dinner. He had told some of the things that had happened. Horror stories. During dinner Bob asked him about Special Forces, Victor told us, 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 ready to kill. They were in a psychological mode to go. Jodie Foster: Actually I think the only thing that could've had a bad effect on me is the blood in the shooting scene. It was really neat through. It was red sugary stuff. And they used Styrofoam for bones. And a pump to make blood gush out after the man's hand had been shot off. Robert De Niro: I once told Marty we should put together a movie of outtakes. That whole hallway slaughter scene took us about four or five takes to do. Things went wrong technically. There were a lot of special effects and with those something always goes wrong. 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 it turns out to be funny. Oddly enough - in that kind of scene, I guess because it's so gruesome everybody's ready to laugh. There was a lot of laughing and joking during shooting between takes. I remember that. It was a lighter period, even though the material was heavy. Albert Brooks: My role was 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 didn't understand? You understood Harvey Keitel and Travis Bickle perfectly, but the guy who works in the campaign office you're not sure of? Martin Scorsese: I never thought Taxi Driver would make a dime. Paul Schrader: There was a very good feeling about the making of the film, everything felt right about it, and I remember the night before it opened we all got together for dinner and said, "No matter what happens tomorrow we 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 over to the theatre for the noon show. There was a long line that went all the way around the block, but I absolutely had to be let in. And I realized this huge line was already for the 2 o'clock show, not the noon show! So I ran inside and watched the movie and everyone was standing at the back and there was this sense of exhilaration about what we had done. We knew we would never repeat it. Robert De Niro: The 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 why. 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 was shocked by the way the audience 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 the audience to react with feeling - "Yes, do it. Let's go out and kill!" Jodie Foster: I was literally skipping across the Yale campus with a friend when I heard Reagan got shot (30 March 1981). Martin Scorsese: In terms of the John Hinckley shooting, people ask me how I feel about it. Well, I'm Catholic. It's easy to make me feel guilty. Julia Philips: 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 shoot 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 with me. Three big guys with jackets. I said, "Gee, this security is incredible tonight." A few years earlier, when Jodie and I were nominees, I had received a threatening letter about Taxi Driver - "If Jodie 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, "This security is even better than 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 besides me. Redford told me that a connection with the Taxi Driver had made with the shooting of the President. I never thought in a million years there was a connection with the film. It turned out even the limo driver was FBI. Julia Philips: I ran into (Easy Rider executive producer) Bert Schneider 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 if you censor a film like Taxi Driver all you do is censor a film, you don't confront the problem. These characters are running around and can be triggered by anything. A few years ago, they were doing a study on incitement to rape, and the thing that cropped up most was that old Coppertone suntan oil ad - it had a little puppy tugging at a girl's swimsuit. It had just the right mixture for these rapists of adolescent sexuality, female nudity, rear entry, animals, violence.. Jodie Foster: Taxi Driver completely changed my life. It was the first time anyone had asked me to create a character that wasn't myself. It was the first time I realized acting wasn't some hobby you just sort of did, but that there was some actual craft. Paul Schrader: When I talk to younger filmmakers they tell me that it was really the film that informed them, that it was a seminal film, and listening to them talk I can really see it as some kind of social watermark. But it was meant as a personal film, not as a political commentary. Jodie Foster: I think it's one of the finest films that's ever been made in America. It's a statement about America. About violence. About loneliness. Anonymity. Some of the best works are those that have tried to imitate that kind of film, that kind of style. It's just a classic. I felt when I came home every day that I had really 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 Philips (Heinemann); Untouchable: Robert De Niro Unauthorized by Andy Dougan (Virgin); Martin Scorsese: A Journey by Mary Pat Kelly (Seker and Warburg); Jodie Foster: The Most Powerful Woman In Hollywood by Philippa Kennedy (Macmillian); Martin Scorsese by Andy Dougan ( Orion Media). TRANSCRIPTED BY THOR MAGNUSSON