How ‘Mean Streets’ ensured Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece ‘Taxi Driver’
There are very few people who would argue that Martin Scorsese’s 1976 neo-noir psychological thriller Taxi Driver is not one of the legendary director’s true masterpieces. There’s an unbridled intensity to Robert De Niro’s portrayal of traumatised Vietnam War veteran turned late-night cab driver Travis Bickle that is perhaps De Niro’s best-ever performance.
Also starring Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel and Albert Brooks, amongst several other talented cast members, Taxi Driver was written by Paul Schrader, who would collaborate with Scorsese on several occasions in the future, including Raging Bull and The Temptation of Christ. There’s a brooding violence to Scorsese’s fifth feature film, but that’s what makes it of such a high quality.
Discussing the process of getting Taxi Driver made, Scorsese once told GQ, “It really goes back to Brian De Palma and his independent cinema. Hollywood started saying, ‘Hey, maybe these indie films, these kids could work in the industry’. So, we were all out in LA, and he introduced me to Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver.”
Scorsese admitted that Travis Bickle came from Schrader’s vision and psyche and that he “connected with it” through Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes From The Underground. “It was enlightening,” the director said. “Brian gave it to me and said, ‘I don’t wanna do it. I can’t do it, but maybe you should.’”
However, despite Scorsese being interested in the project, he didn’t have “enough cache” to get it made, at least until the prospective producers saw his earlier film Mean Streets and “changed their minds”, especially when they saw Robert De Niro’s performance. If the two were to work together again, then the movie looked a more attractive prospect.
Mean Streets is Scorsese’s third feature-length film and marks the first of many times that he would work with De Niro. Harvey Keitel stars as Charlie Cappa, a young Italian American living in Little Italy in New York City, who becomes concerned with the recklessness of his friend ‘Johnny Boy’ Civello, played expertly by De Niro.
The film was also the first time that Scorsese received the kind of critical and commercial acclaim that he would become so used to, and most importantly of all, it looks as though it really paved the way for one of his masterpieces, Taxi Driver, to get the green light, although he also had the kindness of his fellow director Brian De Palma and the genius writing of Paul Schrader to thank too.
