Martin Scorsese nearly murdered an executive over ‘Taxi Driver’ shootout scene
Taxi Driver is one of the most celebrated films of the 1970s. Frequently described as the director’s masterpiece, it won Martin Scorsese the 1976 Palme d’Or and immortalised actor Robert De Niro in the process. Unsurprisingly, there are numerous legends about the making of this blood-spattered psychological thriller, including one claiming that the director nearly murdered somebody to get it an R rating. Introducing the movie for Sky Cinema, Quentin Tarantino recounted the story. “It’s one of those things that’s fallen down into Hollywood legend,” he began. “I have no idea if it’s true.”
Scorsese had just finished Taxi Driver. The movie was in the can, so fellow director Steven Spielberg was surprised to receive a call from Marty asking him to come to the cutting room. Scorsese, it turned out, was having some trouble with the final shootout scene. He sat Spielberg down and showed him the scene in question. The director was utterly lost for words. It was only then, with Spielberg still reeling from the sheer brilliance of what he’d just seen, that Scorsese revealed that the MPAA had just told him to cut it from his movie. Turns out Scosese’s masterstroke was just too violent for the Motion Picture Association, so they slapped the film with an X rating.
This was very bad news. If Scorsese wanted to get his film out, he needed to either remove the scene altogether or edit out the shots of fingers exploding and people gargling on their own blood. The issue was, as anyone who’s seen Taxi Driver will tell you, that this meant getting rid of some of his most inventive camerawork. Scorsese was now faced with the prospect of destroying his masterpiece simply to appease the suits over at MPAA.
Scorsese might look like a benevolent Santa Claus character these days, but according to Spielberg, he was a touch more violent back in the ’70s. As the rumour goes, Marty was plotting murder. After allegedly spending the whole night getting drunk with a loaded gun on his lap, the director concluded that the only thing to do was shoot the executive who had made him cut Taxi Driver. Spielberg and a few other amicable filmmakers came to the rescue, staying up with Scorsese in an attempt to dissuade him from committing this irreversible act.
During that all-night vigil, Scorsese had an idea. What if, rather than cutting the scene, he could trick the MPAA into thinking it wasn’t as violent as they had initially thought? “The idea that came to him was just to desaturate the colour in the final shootout by two degrees,” Tarantino explains, “turning what was candy apple red into a more burgundy blood.” It was a stroke of genius. Scorsese altered the saturation, the MPAA gave Taxi Driver an R rating, and the director got his uncut masterpiece.
