“If I don’t write about him, I’m afraid I’ll become him”: The making of “Taxi Driver at Fifty” | Taxi driver

If Travis Bickle were real and alive today, he wouldn’t be a taxi driver, but would likely be sitting in his parents’ basement, exploring the dark, misogynistic depths of the internet.

“We call them incels now,” says Paul Schrader, who wrote the screenplay for the movie Taxi Driver, released 50 years ago on Sunday. “‘Incels’ wasn’t a word at the time, but these are the men who, seeing themselves as incapable of connecting with women, have a pent-up buildup of anger and resentment and imagine some kind of glorious transformation through violence.”

The film, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel, and Cybill Shepherd, is a masterpiece of urban alienation. The film follows Bickle, a lonely and mentally unstable Vietnam War veteran working as a New York taxi driver, who is disturbed by the crime, corruption, and moral decay he sees around him, and develops a dangerous savior complex.

Bickle narrates: “All the animals come out at night: the whores, the skunks, the buggers, the queens, the fairies, the drugs, the junkies—the sick and the venal. One day, a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.”

Schrader grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in a Calvinist family, and did not see a movie until he was seventeen. He then became a film critic and student of Pauline Kael of The New Yorker. But at the age of 26, he faced a difficult situation and wrote “Taxi Driver” as a form of self-therapy.

“I lost my job, I left my wife, I left the girl I left my wife for, I had no place to live, I was drinking a lot, I was living in my car and I had a gun in the car. This went on for a few weeks,” the 79-year-old recalled, speaking by phone from New York.

He haunted adult movie theaters in New York because they were open day and night. “You can sleep for four or five hours on the balconies of old porn palaces. Sometimes people around you will wake you up, but you can get a few hours of sleep that way.”

One day, Schrader felt pain in his stomach, so he went to the emergency room, and it turned out that he had a bleeding ulcer. He was 26 years old. “In the hospital, I came up with this image of a taxi and I said: This is me: I am this child trapped in this yellow box floating in the sewer, who seems to be surrounded by people when he is completely alone.”

“While others at the time associated taxi drivers with your affable, talkative brother-in-law, I saw in the taxi driver the heart and soul of Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man.”

Before he started writing, Schrader reread the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. “I wanted to take this character that existed in European literature and American literature – the secret man, the existential hero – and bring him to cinema.”

He got the first draft written in just 10 days. “I wrote one draft and immediately started rewriting. I needed to exorcise this character. If I don’t write about him, I’m afraid I’ll become him.”

Among Taxi Driver’s many memorable scenes is that of Bickle, whose head has been shaved into a mohawk, attending a political rally with the aim of assassinating a presidential candidate. But Secret Service agents discover Bickle putting his hand inside his jacket and approaching him, which escalates into a chase.

The inspiration for it was Sarah Jane Moore’s attempt to assassinate President Gerald Ford in San Francisco in September 1975. “She shot Gerald Ford. But she missed and she was on the cover of Newsweek the next week.

“And this is where I said, ‘This is where our culture has come? “You shoot the president, you miss, and now you’re on the cover of the biggest publication in the country.” And here comes the premature end to Taxi Driver: The Irony of Becoming Famous.

Schrader showed the script to the film’s director, Brian De Palma, who passed it on to Scorsese, who immediately believed in it and even saw something of himself in The Secret Man. So who will play Bickle? Harvey Keitel was the early favorite. “Bob was in Main Streets but Marty went further with Harvey,” Schrader says.

“I got it [co-producers] Julia and Michael Phillips participated. He showed us an early clip from Mean Streets. Julia and I came out and looked at each other and said, “It’s not Harvey, it’s Bob.” Marty realized this was the truth but then had a little problem with what to do about Harvey.

Schrader, Scorsese, and De Niro didn’t talk much about Bickle before production. They didn’t need that. ““We all know this kid,” Schrader says.

Schrader originally wrote the character Sport, a pimp, in black to reflect what he observed on the streets. But Columbia Pictures executives demanded that the role be changed to white, fearing that a white protagonist who only kills blacks in the final shootout would spark a riot and trigger liability.

“I wrote Black Pimp because [Bickle] He is a racist and kills black people. “If only black people were killed, there would be violence in the theater,” the studio said. Then suddenly there was a role for Harvey.”

Keitel asked Schrader to find a real white pimp to model the character on. “I never found the great white pimp,” Schrader admits, but Keitel took on the role anyway. Foster, just 12 years old, was cast as the young sex worker Iris and held her own when she and De Niro dialogued.

There was more improvisation required when Bickle stared at himself in the mirror and imagined the confrontation. “The script was that he takes the gun, plays with it in the mirror, points it at the mirror, pretends to shoot it, and talks to himself,” Schrader explains.

“What does he say to himself?” Bobby asked me. “Which line will it be?” I said, “Hey, it’s like when you’re eight years old and you’re playing cowboy, you shoot in the mirror and you’re like, ‘Hey, gotcha! I’m faster than you!’ Stuff like that.”

And when the moment came, De Niro came up with a line for the ages: “Are you talking to me?” In 2016, during a screening of Taxi Driver at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, he told fans: “Every day for 40 years, at least one of you has come up to me and said—what do you think—? Are you talking to me?“

To get an R rating without cutting the footage, Scorsese desaturated the color of the final shootout, turning the bright red blood a “tabloid” brown. Also vital is the score by composer Bernard Hermann, who completed the recording sessions hours before his death.

Taxi Driver was released on February 8, 1976. Schrader recalls talking to someone at Columbia Pictures who thought the film would flop but feeling more optimistic. “We made a $20 bet, and the day the show opened at Coronet, I went there. I wanted to be there, on the first day, at the first show.

“It was about to start and I noticed there was a line around the stage and I thought, ‘Oh my God, they’ve got a problem and they’re not letting people in.'” In fact, that was the show’s line two hours later. By the time I walked in, Taxi Driver’s line came on with that music and the audience applauded it. This is the New York premiere, so it was all that word of mouth going around.

The film’s debut at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival sparked boos and some strikes. Playwright Tennessee Williams, who was president of the jury at the time, said: “Movies should not have the lustful pleasure of shedding blood and going on about terrible atrocities as if one were in a Roman circus.”

Foster recalls that except for the press conference, Scorsese and De Niro would sit in their hotel room, fearing everyone would hate the film. That left the young Foster, who could speak French, to give media interviews. However, “Taxi Driver” still won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

It also struck a chord with the Holden Caulfields of the world – young people filled with resentment, anger, self-loathing and an inability to communicate. “This target has hit the zeitgeist, but you can’t plan to do it,” says Schrader. “It either happens or it doesn’t. But you can’t plan to do it. It either happens or it doesn’t.”

“I remember one day in my office, I walked into my office and my secretary said to me, ‘Don’t go in there.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ She said, ‘He’s one of those kids.’ So I walked in and there was a kid and he jumped over the fence and came into my office. I asked him what he wanted. He said, ‘How do you know us?’ I quickly checked to see if he had a gun and I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘This movie, the taxi driver, who told you about me?’”

“Honestly,” said I, “no one has told me about you; “There are a lot more of you than you think.’ Then I said to him, ‘Have you ever been in a movie?’ And I said, ‘Well, let’s get a golf cart, and I’ll show you around the movie sets.’ He said, ‘Oh, that would be great.’ We drove around in a golf cart and a security guard came up to me and said, ‘Mr. Schrader, you need to come back.'”

Schrader’s interloper wasn’t the only one who took the taxi driver personally. In March 1981, John Hinckley, who had become obsessed with the film and was stalking Foster, attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in an attempt to impress her. Foster came under intense and unwanted media scrutiny at the time and has consistently refused to comment publicly on the incident.

Schrader recounts that years later, De Niro asked if they could bring Bickle back in a sequel. I said: “Bob, first of all, he’s dead, but if he’s not dead, he’s not riding in a taxi anymore. “He’s sitting in his cabin in Montana setting off bombs, and his name is Ted Kaczynski.”

A generation later, the natural heir is the disaffected young man hunched over his laptop, wandering through the atmosphere and potentially exploding into violence. “There’s now a whole recognized culture of incels. It’s kind of strange. These lonely kids who used to sit and get aggravated in their rooms are now getting aggravated in their rooms and talking to other lonely kids who are also getting aggravated in their rooms. Does this alleviate some of their psychosis or increase it? I don’t know which.”“

This cultural significance helps explain why The Taxi Driver has been around for 50 years, and will undoubtedly continue for another 50 years. “Every generation finds this truth,” Schrader muses. “When someone comes to me and says, ‘A taxi driver changed my life,’ I always say, ‘Let me guess, I saw that when you were 15,’ and he says, ‘How did you know?’”

“I say, ‘Fifteen is the age when you watch action movies and you hear about this movie, and that’s the first time you realize that you can have an action movie that’s not just about the action.’ And every generation of young people in particular seems to find that through this movie. There are few other movies like it that sum up a certain point in your life, so it’s a movie that won’t die.

Scorsese went on to produce films including Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, Casino, The Departed, and The Wolf of Wall Street. De Niro has starred in The Deer Hunter, Raging Bull, Once Upon a Time in America, Goodfellas, Meet the Parents and many more.

“Bobby should have taken more chances,” comments Schrader, who continued to write screenplays and also directed films such as Blue Collar, American Gigolo and First Reformed. “He got heavily involved in real estate and it became an excuse to take money.”

“Marty once said to someone: ‘I paint frescoes: I paint the ceiling, I paint the floor; Paul paints Dutch miniatures. “If you want to paint frescoes, you need a lot of money – much more than I need to do Dutch miniatures.

For all its modern-day resonance, Taxi Driver also stands as a precious time capsule drifting into 2026 from an America disillusioned by Watergate and the Vietnam War. It’s a portrait of a city—a New York of high crime and hustlers that nearly went bankrupt in 1975—but it’s also a portrait of a moment.

Richard Brody, a New Yorker film critic, comments: “For me, the most powerful experience of Taxi Driver is not re-watching it; it’s watching it in its time as a teenager and feeling that he concentrated all the craziness of the time in that film—a kind of requiem for the political and social madness of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which by the time Taxi Driver had been depoliticized and into a world of madness.” An incomplete but serious crisis.

“Taxi Driver gave me the sense, when I saw it, that Scorsese felt a breaking point. He felt that old latches were coming off, that the volatile and unpredictable energies that had previously been channeled so directly were now released.”