Conversations with Scorsese (23 page)

RS:
Yet there’s very little human about De Niro’s character, no religious feelings, no political ideas, no human connections—aside from the fact that he lusts after the
Cybill Shepherd character. Maybe you do get a sense of liberal impotence from the people around her. The candidate is an idiot, basically. And I love the patronizing
thing he does—you know, I learn more from talking to cabdrivers than I do talking to other people. The woman—a society campaign worker—is attracted to Travis because he’s so out of her league, as it were. Her Junior League, I guess. Which makes this notion of taking her to a porn movie—

MS:
Oh! I know. Well, you have to remember, a lot of people don’t remember now, but at that time, they were trying to make porn acceptable, with
Deep Throat
and
Sometimes Sweet Susan,
and pictures like that.

RS:
I went to a few of those.

MS:
It was okay to go with a girl. But
Brian De Palma and I went to see
Deep Throat,
and he said, Look at the people around us, it doesn’t feel right. There were couples. I said, You’re right. We should be with all these old guys in raincoats. It was a wonderful kind of hypocritical thing that was happening—it opened up the society.

I’m telling you, 42nd Street, Eighth Avenue, that was hell, shooting in those places. That was like biblical in my mind—hell and damnation and Jeremiah, and someday a real rain was going to come.

RS:
But that character, you know he’s drawn to that. He goes to porn movies all the time. On the other hand, I guess there’s a little bit of you in there.

MS:
I know. It’s upsetting. And it was an upsetting film to make. But we really felt strongly about it. De Niro and I never discussed it this way, by the way. It was nonverbal. It was just understood. I can’t speak for him, but I know he understood certain things about the rejection, about not being part of a group.

RS:
The famous scene, the mirror, where De Niro rehearses drawing—

MS:
It was an improv.

RS:
How much so?

MS:
It’s all improv. In the script, he sort of preens in front of the mirror, to get that maniacal expression on his face, to have the gun sliding in and out of his sleeve, which if you actually did it wouldn’t work that well. But in the film it worked well.

He comes from a Special Forces unit, in Vietnam. I had a friend, who went to school at NYU with me, who was in Special Forces, and then became a stunt man. Unfortunately he was killed on a movie doing a stunt, a sweet guy, and he showed us pictures of these guys who were going on these special missions. Their haircuts looked to me like Mohawks. That’s how we came up with the idea of that haircut. By that time, it was near the end of the shoot, and I was about five days
over schedule on a forty-day shoot. That’s pretty bad. We got hit with a lot of bad weather, all kinds of things.

Anyway, in the mirror scene, I really thought he had to say something to himself. I didn’t know quite what. But I remembered Brando doing something beautiful in
Reflections in a Golden Eye,
in a mirror.

So he just started. It was in an apartment that was going to be torn down on Columbus Avenue at 89th Street. We were in the front apartment on the second floor. You could hear the sounds from the street. I was on the floor, and he was in the mirror.
Michael Chapman had the camera, and Bob just started improvising—thinking about people coming up to him, saying things. If they said certain things he didn’t like, he would have to turn and say, Are you talking to me? Because that is not a good thing to say to me. Now you’re going to have to deal with me. Are you talking to me? He didn’t say the words I just said, but he got the attitude.

I was forcing this into the schedule. Meanwhile,
Pete Scoppa, who was the great AD [assistant director] at the time, was banging on the door between takes. “Come on,” he would say, “you’ve got to get back on schedule.” And I’m going, Give us two minutes, give us two minutes, this is really good. It was very noisy. And a couple of times I asked Bob to repeat, that’s all. But he got into his own rhythm. And then got into the wonderful line where he admits that he’s the only one there, so he must be talking to himself. And that did it.

RS:
At the end of the movie, he seems to me to be all right. He’s talking normally with cabbies. She gets in his cab, and she’s sort of sweet with him. And he seems like he’s not going to assault her.

MS:
No, he’s not going to assault her. Schrader very much liked
Harry Chapin’s song “Taxi.” I wasn’t that much of a fan of the song: the woman getting into the cab with a guy who hasn’t done well, while she’s done well; kind of sentimental, I thought. I had to find a way not to make the ending sentimental. So when she leaves the cab, I had him look in the mirror again, as if he just saw something happen. I wanted to give the impression that the time bomb is beginning to tick again. And it’s going to happen again. Sooner or later there will be a violent outburst from him. Or, there will be self-immolation. Or God knows what. Because he wanted to kill himself in that massacre scene, but he ran out of bullets.

Schrader said he would’ve preferred the ending to have been more Japanese
—Samurai Rebellion
by Kobayashi, or
Harakiri,
where there’s an explosion of sword fighting and violence, and the sacrificial blood is splashed all over the walls of the palaces, and finally the hero dies. I think we added the bit where he tries to shoot himself but there were no bullets. That was the right thing to do, I thought.

I didn’t think anybody was going to see it. Bob De Niro, Michael and Julia
Phillips [the film’s producers], felt that it would reach an audience. For me it was a labor of love, the kind of picture that should be made. Then again, I was going to make this musical that became
New York, New York,
which, of course, I thought everyone would want to see and nobody saw [
laughs
]!

But in
Taxi Driver
we felt we could say what we wanted to say, and be as honest as possible in the picture. And it was very, very controlled—everything storyboarded, because it was a hard shoot.

Marty’s sketch for
Taxi Driver
’s final, very ambiguous sequence.

RS:
How bitter is the irony that Bob’s character is responsible for this bloodbath and becomes a hero, and the papers write him up, and the family of Jodie Foster writes him this weird letter saying if he ever feels like visiting—they’re so grateful to him.

MS:
That’s wonderful.

RS:
Also his bland “everything’s fine” postcard to his own family—

MS:
Oh, that’s Schrader. It was so fun, so extraordinary. And the picture of the parents, looking at the TV set as the camera goes by them. I felt that is the way of the world. People pick up on certain figures and they become very famous, they become heroes. What is a hero?

RS:
Tell me.

MS:
That’s my question for most of my pictures. What is a man, and what is a hero? Does might make right? Or is it somebody who makes everybody reason things out and work it out? I think that’s harder. Hit somebody long enough, they’re going to stop. It works. For a while.

RS:
Well, how much of
Taxi Driver
is really coming out of that period in New York where a lot of us who loved the city and loved living here were just disgusted by it.

MS:
Oh, it was horrible.

RS:
I mean, there was a sense of the city just spiraling down into hell at that moment.

MS:
That was just beginning. But I’m a New Yorker, so when it starts to go down, it seems part of the cycle. I mean, I knew that 42nd Street and
Times Square was hitting a new low. It was not a safe area. But being a lover of the city, I knew that the city was just going through a phase and it would come back.

I was more aware of, and more attracted to, this new expression of open sexuality. Where I came from, sexuality was restricted and repressed. I tried to understand and tried even to join in—as a person. But I always say, when I try to be amoral, I turn out to be immoral. So it wasn’t for me. In
Taxi Driver,
I didn’t enjoy shooting in those X-rated areas. The sense of wallowing in it was, for me, always filled with tension and an extraordinary depression.

And the film
is
very, very depressing. The key is when De Niro tries to open up to
Peter Boyle [playing a fellow cabbie]. The guy can’t talk to him. He’s not a philosopher. He just isn’t. And Bob did an improvisation, and he said, You know, I have these thoughts, and Peter says, Oh, you’ll be okay. And he said, No, I’ve got these bad ideas in my head. And that for me was as close as he’s going to get to it. What are these bad ideas? His feelings of rage, his feelings of anger, his feelings of acting out. He did act out before, when he was in the war. But what’s the next step? To pick up a gun again? Or kill someone? He’s trying like hell to keep those feelings down, but they’re coming out, and the guilt over that, too, is strong.

Marty riding the boom on
Taxi Driver.
Exploring New York’s lower depths in the mid-seventies was, Scorsese says, among the most troubling experiences of his directorial career.

RS:
So he does have a measure of what you could call moral self-consciousness.

MS:
Yes.

RS:
He is truly struggling with these impulses.

MS:
I think so. I can’t speak for Paul. I’m just saying what I felt, that he didn’t want to do what he does at the end—commit multiple murders. But he does. He’s driven
to it. It’s just dealing with the human condition; that’s what we’re dealing with in a Travis Bickle.

RS:
On the other hand,
Pauline Kael did call this a comedy.

MS:
That’s pretty funny.

RS:
Well, she liked the movie, of course.

MS:
Why is it a comedy? Okay, there are some funny scenes …

RS:
It
is
funny, in a cringing sort of way, when he takes her to the porno movie.

MS:
I remember
Cybill Shepherd that night got nervous shooting there. We were shooting fast and moving quickly, but she, I believe, identified with that character so strongly that she really got upset. I tried to get her in and out as fast as possible, but I couldn’t. Poor kid—she really felt it, and didn’t like it.