Taxi Driver

• 1. Introduction

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  Taxi Driver opens on a pair of eyes in a rearview mirror, catching the city through a fog of steam. The man behind those eyes is Travis Bickle, a Marine veteran of Vietnam who cannot sleep, cannot connect, and cannot stop watching. His city is New York in the mid-1970s, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, its West Side described by producer Michael Phillips as looking like "the dying gasp of New York." Martin Scorsese shot his film there in the summer of 1975, during a heat wave and a sanitation strike, turning the actual streets into a fever dream of neon and shadow.

  The film cost $1.9 million to make. Its composer, Bernard Herrmann, finished recording the score just hours before he died on the 24th of December, 1975. Its screenplay was written in under a fortnight by Paul Schrader, who had been living in his car after a divorce and a breakup, fighting insomnia by wandering through pornographic bookstores that stayed open all night. Every one of those facts matters, because Taxi Driver is a film assembled from real desperation.

  What follows is the story of how a low-budget film about one man's unraveling became one of the most argued-over, celebrated, and dangerous works in American cinema history.

• 2. The Script and Its Origins

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  Paul Schrader has described the image that gave him his screenplay: "a taxi cab and I said, 'That's me: I'm this kid locked up in this yellow box floating in the sewer, who looks like he's surrounded by people when he's absolutely alone.'" He wrote those words in a 1981 interview on The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder, describing the hospital visit for a stomach ulcer that broke his period of isolation and gave him the central metaphor of his script.

  Schrader drew on Arthur Bremer's diaries when shaping Travis Bickle's inner voice. Bremer had shot presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972, and his journals offered a template for a certain kind of American alienation. The Harry Chapin song "Taxi," about an old girlfriend stepping into a cab, also fed the screenplay. For the ending, in which Bickle becomes a vigilante celebrated by the press, Schrader took his cue from Sara Jane Moore's attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford, which landed Moore on the cover of Newsweek.

  Schrader made Bickle a Vietnam veteran deliberately. He felt the national trauma of the war blended with Bickle's paranoid psychosis, making his experiences feel both personal and culturally legible. The screenplay was drafted in ten days across two drafts. Schrader cited Robert Bresson's Pickpocket as a formal influence, and the French New Wave running through the film's bones would later surface in how cinematographer Michael Chapman described the crew's approach on set.

  Brian De Palma introduced Schrader to Martin Scorsese, and the two found common ground in Scorsese's belief that movies should work like dreams or drug-induced reveries, holding the viewer in a limbo between sleep and waking. Before Scorsese was attached, both John Milius and Irvin Kershner had been considered to direct.

• 3. De Niro Builds a Man

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  Robert De Niro was filming Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 in Italy when he began preparing for Travis Bickle. According to Peter Boyle, De Niro would finish shooting on a Friday in Rome, board a plane, fly to New York, drive a taxi for a couple of weeks, and then return to Rome to resume work on 1900. He obtained an actual taxi driver's license for the role.

  De Niro reportedly lost 35 pounds, or 16 kilograms, in preparation. He repeatedly listened to a taped reading of Arthur Bremer's diaries, the same criminal whose writings had shaped Schrader's script. When he had free time in Italy, De Niro visited an army base in Northern Italy and recorded soldiers from the Midwestern United States, studying their accents for what he thought Travis might sound like.

  The role had been offered to several other actors before landing with De Niro. Dustin Hoffman turned it down, reportedly telling Scorsese he thought the director was "crazy." Al Pacino, Jason Miller, and Jeff Bridges were also considered. For the character of Travis as a concept, Scorsese and Schrader had looked at Alain Delon's Jef Costello in Le Samourai as a model, and the role was at one point offered to Delon himself.

  The film's most famous single moment, the mirror monologue in which Travis rehearses a confrontation with an imaginary enemy, was reportedly improvised by De Niro. Schrader said the performance was inspired by an underground New York comedian De Niro had seen. Saxophonist Clarence Clemons, in his 2009 memoir, recorded De Niro's own account: that he had seen Bruce Springsteen say the line onstage at a concert. The American Film Institute later ranked "You talkin' to me?" as the 10th-greatest movie quote of all time.

• 4. Filming on a Dying City

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  Columbia Pictures had offered Scorsese a budget of $1.3 million back in April 1974. By the time production began, the figure had risen to $1.9 million, and even that required actors to accept pay cuts. De Niro and Cybill Shepherd each received $35,000. Scorsese himself was paid $65,000. The total allocated to performers across the entire film was $200,000.

  Shooting happened on New York's West Side during a summer heat wave and a sanitation strike. Producer Michael Phillips described block after block of condemned buildings, a landscape so decimated that the production team barely needed to build sets. The cinematography carried the influence of Jean-Luc Godard and his regular collaborator Raoul Coutard, a debt that Chapman acknowledged openly, explaining that the crew could not afford the time or money for traditional setups.

  To capture Travis inside his cab, the sound technicians rode in the trunk while Scorsese and Chapman crammed themselves onto the back seat floor and shot using available light. The overhead tracking shot above the film's climactic shootout required three months of preparation. The crew had to cut through the ceiling of the actual apartment to position the camera.

  The mohawk Travis wears when he plans to assassinate Senator Palantine came from actor Victor Magnotta, a friend of Scorsese's with a small role as a Secret Service agent who had himself served in Vietnam. Magnotta explained that in Saigon, a shaved head with a small mohawk was a signal that a soldier had entered a certain Special Forces mindset. Scorsese quoted him directly: "You didn't even go near them. They were ready to kill."

  The title designer Dan Perri built the opening sequence from second-unit footage he color-treated through film copying and slit-scan, producing the lurid neon imagery of the city's underbelly. Perri had been Scorsese's original choice for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore in 1974, but Warner Bros. had blocked the hire. By the time Taxi Driver went into production, Perri had established his name on The Exorcist, and the obstacle was gone. He would go on to design the title sequences for Star Wars in 1977 and Raging Bull in 1980.

• 5. Herrmann's Final Score

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  Bernard Herrmann had scored Brian De Palma's Obsession, and it was De Palma who connected Herrmann with Scorsese. Scorsese had wanted Herrmann as his composer specifically; he described Herrmann as his "first and only choice" for Taxi Driver. In Scorsese's view, the score was not background texture but structural: "It supplied the psychological basis throughout."

  Herrmann completed the recording for the soundtrack just hours before he died on the 24th of December, 1975. The film is dedicated to his memory. The score received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score at the 49th Academy Awards, and Herrmann was also nominated for a Grammy for the album.

  Alongside Herrmann's original score, the film incorporated existing music. The album The Silver Tongued Devil and I by Kris Kristofferson was used, a choice that followed Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, in which Kristofferson had played a supporting role. Jackson Browne's "Late for the Sky" also appears in the film.

• 6. Controversy and the MPAA

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  The climactic shootout tested the limits of the rating system. The Motion Picture Association of America considered giving the film an X rating for its graphic violence. At the Cannes Film Festival, audiences booed the scene. To secure an R rating, Scorsese had the colors desaturated, making the blood less vivid on screen.

  In later interviews, Scorsese said he was pleased by the change and considered it an improvement. His cinematographer Michael Chapman took the opposite view. On the special-edition DVD, Chapman expressed regret about the decision and noted that no print with the original unmuted colors survives, because those originals have since deteriorated.

  Jodie Foster's casting generated its own controversy. Foster was twelve years old when she played Iris, a child prostitute. Before being given the part, she was required to attend psychological testing sessions with a UCLA psychiatrist, in compliance with California Labor Board requirements for child performers. Foster herself has said she was present during the setup and staging of the special effects in the shootout, that every step was demonstrated for her, and that she found the behind-the-scenes process fascinating rather than frightening.

  Scorsese reportedly struggled with how to direct Foster on set. He relied on Robert De Niro to relay his directions to the young actress. Foster has spoken about De Niro becoming a mentor to her during filming, and about how his advice shaped her acting career.

  The film's most far-reaching controversy arrived five years after its release. John Hinckley Jr. cited Taxi Driver as a central element in the delusional fantasy that led him to attempt the assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Hinckley said his goal was to impress Foster, on whom he was fixated, by mimicking Travis's mohawked appearance at the Palantine rally in the film. His defense attorney concluded the case by screening the film for the jury. Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity. When Scorsese learned of Hinckley's stated motivation, he briefly considered leaving filmmaking entirely.

• 7. What the Ending Means

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  Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times posed the question that has followed the film for decades: did Travis survive the shootout, or is the newspaper-clipping epilogue a dying man's fantasy? Ebert concluded that the ending "plays like music, not drama" and closes "not on carnage but on redemption."

  Critic James Berardinelli argued against the fantasy reading, emphasizing the irony that the same man who nearly assassinated a senator is celebrated as a hero for killing a pimp. Berardinelli saw the epilogue as a precise statement about fate and media: had Travis drawn his gun a moment sooner at the Palantine rally, he would have been reviled rather than praised.

  Scorsese, on the 1990 LaserDisc and subsequent home releases, acknowledged critics who read the ending as a dying dream. He also said the final shot of Travis glancing at something unseen in his rearview mirror suggests the character is "a ticking time bomb" who will fall back into rage.

  Schrader's own position is the most formal. In his commentary on the 30th-anniversary DVD, he stated that Travis "is not cured by the movie's end" and that "he's not going to be a hero next time." When asked on Reddit about the ending, Schrader described it as a loop: he envisions the last frame as something that could be spliced directly to the first frame, so the film starts over again.

  The disclaimer that appears on television broadcasts, noting that "the distinction between hero and villain is sometimes a matter of interpretation or misinterpretation of facts," was assumed to have been added after the Reagan assassination attempt in 1981. In fact, it had already been mentioned in a review of the film as early as 1979.

• 8. Reception and Legacy

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  Taxi Driver opened at the Coronet Theater in New York City and grossed $68,000 in its first week, a house record. It went on to earn $28.3 million in the United States, ranking as the 17th-highest-grossing film of 1976. At the Cannes Film Festival, despite the booing that greeted its violence, it won the Palme d'Or. At the 49th Academy Awards, it received four nominations: Best Picture, Best Actor for De Niro, Best Supporting Actress for Foster, and Best Original Score for Herrmann.

  The American Film Institute ranked the film 52nd on its centennial list of the greatest American films and placed it at number 47 on an earlier version of the same list. Travis Bickle was voted the 30th-greatest villain by the AFI. In 2022, Sight and Sound placed the film 29th in its critics' poll and 12th in its directors' poll, tied with Barry Lyndon. In 1994, the U.S. Library of Congress designated the film as culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant and selected it for the National Film Registry.

  Paul Schrader has described Taxi Driver, American Gigolo, Light Sleeper, and The Walker as a series he calls the "Man in a Room" or "Night Worker" films, in which he considers the four central characters to be one figure who has aged across different stories. The film directly influenced Jacques Audiard, who based the protagonist of his 2015 Palme d'Or-winning film Dheepan on Travis Bickle, and whose vigilante ending echoed the structure of Scorsese's climax. Todd Phillips cited Taxi Driver as a source for his 2019 film Joker.

  Meryl Streep, who had not originally planned to become a film actor, watched De Niro's performance and said to herself, "That's the kind of actor I want to be when I grow up." The question of a sequel surfaced publicly in late January 2005, when De Niro and Scorsese announced one at a 25th-anniversary screening of Raging Bull. By November 2013, De Niro confirmed that Schrader had written a first draft, but that he and Scorsese considered it insufficient to proceed. In a 2024 interview, Schrader offered his own account of that dinner, calling the sequel "the worst fucking idea I've ever heard" and describing a counter-proposal: Travis as a Ted Kaczynski-style figure, sitting in a cabin, making letter bombs. De Niro, Schrader noted, did not warm to that idea either.