Martin Scorsese explains why ‘Taxi Driver’ doesn’t belong to him: “We interpreted it”
There’s something special about a Martin Scorsese movie in that you can pretty much immediately tell that it’s his. Across countless masterpiece works of film, the New York City-born director has doused his works in an aesthetic and production style that is unequivocally his own.
Looking back at Scorsese’s stunning filmography, we find some of the most ubiquitous pieces of American cinema of all time. Early into his career, Scorsese released the timeless efforts Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, which set him on his way to genuine stardom over the next couple of decades.
With the likes of Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, Goodfellas, Casino, Gangs of New York and The Wolf of Wall Street also to his name, it’s easy to see why Scorsese is as admired as he undoubtedly is. Still, Scorsese is not just a one-man band; he’s also reliant on the brilliance of his actors, writers and crew members, but then again, which director isn’t?
In fact, one of Scorsese’s most celebrated movies is one that he has once distanced himself from taking all the credit for. Scorsese has frequently worked with Paul Schrader on a number of his best movies, including Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ, and the screenplay of 1976’s Taxi Driver was initially a sole creation of Schrader then eventually fell in the lap of Scorsese and became one of his most cherished.
Taxi Driver is Scorsese and Schrader’s neo-noir psychological drama starring Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle, a traumatised Vietnam War veteran who takes a job as a night-shift taxi cab driver in a morally decaying New York City. Travis’ mental health is in severe decline, and he ends up becoming involved with a teenage prostitute and a campaigner for a presidential hopeful.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Scorsese once spoke of how he felt that people need to give more credit to Schrader for his writing on Taxi Driver, which is something that seems to be directed mostly at Scorsese himself. “Taxi Driver really is Paul Schrader’s. We interpreted it,” Scorsese said. “Paul Schrader gave the script to me because he saw Mean Streets and liked Bob in it and liked me as a director.”
According to Scorsese, both he and Robert De Niro had the “same feelings” about Travis Bickle according to the way that Schrader had created the character. “It was as if we all felt the same thing, like a little club between the three of us,” the director explained. “Paul Schrader and myself had a certain affinity about religion and life, death and guilt and sex. Paul and I are very close on that sort of thing.”
Scorsese wanted to drill the point home that the “original” concept of Taxi Driver was all Schrader’s without being “falsely modest”. In fact, Scorsese went on to suggest that when people referred to the film as “Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver“, it caused a feeling that was “very painful” in the writer, which is understandable, seeing as he wrote the movie.
Of course, Schrader is an acclaimed figure in the film industry in his own right and would go on to work with Scorsese on a number of brilliant occasions, but there would always be the guilt in Scorsese that he had stolen the writer’s thunder for Taxi Driver somewhat.
