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Why Paul Schrader had to change Harvey Keitel’s character in ‘Taxi Driver’
Earlier this month, it was announced that Paul Schrader, the American screenwriter and director, was to be celebrated during this year’s 79th Venice International Film Festival. The Hollywood veteran will be awarded the lifetime achievement named ‘Golden Lion’.
Schrader’s illustrious career in film began in 1974 with his first script, titled The Yakuza. He co-wrote the Japanese crime drama alongside his brother Leonard. The script entered an unprecedented bidding war, eventually selling for $325,000. The resulting film wasn’t commercially successful and seemingly drifted off into the cultural abyss, but it brought Schrader under the noses of the Hollywood elite.
If The Yakuza script was Schrader’s ticket, Martin Scorsese was the bus. The two met in the mid-1970s after Scorsese had voiced a deep interest in Schrader’s Taxi Driver script. Scorsese agreed to direct the film, and as we know, Taxi Driver became one of the defining moments of ’70s cinema.
The story, set in 1970s New York, starred Robert De Niro as the taxi driver and followed his downfall into rage and madness after becoming disgusted by the crime and urban decay he experienced on the streets of the Big Apple. The feature also starred Harvey Keitel, Cybill Shepherd and a 12-year old Jodie Foster, who played the controversial role of Iris, a child prostitute.
Foster’s initial casting raised some red flags during the film’s production. Foster once recalled an interview with Scorsese for the part. “I had done Alice [with Scorsese]. He called my mom about the [Taxi Driver] part, and she thought he was crazy. But I went in to meet him for an interview. My mom thought, with my school uniform on, there was no way he’d think I was right for it. But he said yes, and she trusted him.”
Producer Michael Phillips recalled the initial red light: “We had to get approval from the Los Angeles welfare board, and we were running into a roadblock, so we hired Pat Brown [former governor of California] as an attorney, and magically the problem went away.”
Fortunately, playing the role at such a young age didn’t end up having any negative impacts on the young Foster and instead launched her into a successful career. “I’m just so grateful to have been part of something that’s really an American classic,” Foster told The Hollywood Reporter. “[Taxi Driver] is Part of our golden age of cinema, which to me really is the ’70s.”
Before filming could begin, there was another hitch that needed ironing out. Columbia Pictures raised concerns about the pimp character, Matthew “Sport” Higgins. As Schrader remembered: “I had written the character of the pimp as black, and we were told by Columbia we had to change it to a white guy because the lawyers were concerned, ‘if we do this and Travis kills all those black people at the end, then we’re going to have a riot.’”
Schrader adapted the script to change “Sport” to a white man to avoid any friction or concern about the final scene when De Niro shoots up the brothel. Harvey Keitel was subsequently cast for the role.
Revisit part of Keitel’s brilliant performance as Sport, the pimp in Taxi Driver below.
