When Lars von Trier threatened to remake ‘Taxi Driver’: “It was a terrible idea”
Remakes don’t always have to be shameless cash grabs, but they often are. There are exceptions to the trend of Hollywood remakes, of course, like Brian De Palma’s reinterpretation of Scarface, which saw it go from being a 1930s pre-Code drama to a flashy epic loaded with drugs and violence.
How about Funny Games, as well? Ten years later, Michael Haneke remade his acclaimed 1997 Austrian satirical horror in English, specifically trying to target American audiences, whom he believed needed to see the movie—a meditation on screen violence—the most.
Evidently, remakes can be innovative and complex, but there are some films that just don’t need to be touched. Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver is a movie that definitely doesn’t need to be remade, even if it was Scorsese behind the wheel again. The film is a 1970s masterpiece, carefully dissecting the mental deterioration of a man suffering from war-induced PTSD and insomnia, slowly losing his grip on reality as he witnesses the violence and disorder on the grimy streets of New York.
However, just over a decade ago, the controversial Danish director Lars von Trier expressed his intention to remake Taxi Driver. Known for films like Breaking the Waves, Dogville, Dancer in the Dark, and, more recently, The House That Jack Built and Nymphomaniac, von Trier has divided audiences with his polarising and violent works. Could von Trier have done Taxi Driver justice if he’d actually remade it?
According to various interviews, von Trier wanted to remake the project in the style of his 2003 documentary The Five Obstructions, which saw him challenge his friend Jørgen Leth to remake his film The Perfect Human in five alternative ways. It’s experimental and certainly puts an interesting spin on the idea of remaking a movie, but Taxi Driver writer Paul Schrader wasn’t having any of it.
Talking to The Independent, Schrader said, “Marty and Lars were talking about it in Cannes and somebody in Lars’ camp stupidly talked about it, but in Marty’s mind, it never was something that should be done. We really have fought over the years to keep people’s hands off Taxi Driver, to keep it from being a video game and to keep it from having a sequel. It’s a one-off kind of film.” He added, “It was a terrible idea.”
Evidently, even someone as skilled at making controversial and violent films as von Trier wasn’t going to get away with reinterpreting Schrader’s award-winning screenplay, no matter how experimental the Danish director’s idea. With Robert De Niro in the lead role of Scorsese’s classic, he delivered a performance that helped to catapult his career to great heights. As Travis Bickle, De Niro was unforgettable, and it’s hard to imagine anyone else stepping into the role of the war veteran taxi driver, especially all these years later.
Von Trier is at his best when he’s writing original material, which has allowed him to become one of the most notorious yet acclaimed filmmakers of his generation. Whether you love von Trier’s work or think he’s pretentious, it’s safe to say that it’s probably for the best that he hasn’t touched Taxi Driver.
