Did a crab give Robert De Niro the key to Travis Bickle?
The greatest movies of all time feature complex emotional characters at their core. Just take Marlon Brando’s Don Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather, Harry Dean Stanton’s Travis Henderson in Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, or Robert De Niro’s timeless performance as Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese’s moody 1976 Palme d’Or winner, Taxi Driver.
Penned by Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver is one of Scorsese’s most challenging films of his filmography, telling the story of a deeply troubled Vietnam War veteran struggling to come to terms with the changes he sees in the city around him. De Niro stars as the brooding title character, prowling the streets in his distinctive yellow cab, where he witnesses the change in American society at the tail-end of the 20th century first-hand.
Schrader later revealed in an interview that he wrote the 1976 film as self-therapy, stating: “Taxi Driver was my first script, and I wrote that as self-therapy…I was in a dark place, drinking and driving, I didn’t have a place to live, I had a gun in the car, and I had a pain in my stomach…I hadn’t spoken to anybody in weeks, I had just been drifting through the city with this anger, here in town in Los Angeles”.
Continuing, he added: “The idea of this taxi cab came to me, this yellow metal coffin floating through the sewer of the city with this boy trapped inside who can’t get out who looks like he’s in a crowd, but he’s desperately alone.”
A celebrated method actor, De Niro took to Schrader’s script with total physical and emotional dedication, using an unlikely source as inspiration for his character of Travis Bickle.
“I got this image of Travis as a crab,” De Niro told Playboy in a 1989 interview, “To prepare for that, I swam around underwater and looked at the sea life. [Almost laughs] I don’t know, I just had that image of him. You know how a crab sort of walks sideways and has a gawky, awkward movement?”.
Indeed, the comparison of Bickle to a crab isn’t a juxtaposition we’d thought of whilst watching Taxi Driver, but De Niro’s explanation provides some glimpses into his interpretation of a character who views life through an entirely different lens. “Crabs are very straightforward,” he adds, “but straightforward to them is going to the left and to the right. They turn sideways; that’s the way they’re built.”
Fascinatingly, this wasn’t the only character in his filmography inspired by an animal: “Sometimes. I’ve used a cat, a wolf, a rabbit, a snake, an owl. Certain animals give you certain feelings. I can use the image, take one little thing from that, and it can help me do something. Take a different slant to how you can approach a character, give you an idea, a different rhythm.”
Later in the interview, when speaking about his character in 1982’s King of Comedy, De Niro went about yet another animal comparison, calling him “some kind of bird. Gawky. A bird whose neck goes out as he walks,” before agreeing with the interviewer’s suggestion, “A chicken! Exactly.”
