Taxi Driver is re-released in Argentina, the day Martin Scorsese turns 80

Every time a classic is revisited, new things are discovered. And every time a film is re-released in theaters, it’s a cause for joy for moviegoers around the world. This Thursday November 17th Taxi driverfrom Martin Scorseseit will be exhibited again in some rooms in Argentina.

And the date was not chosen by chance: on November 17, but 80 years ago, Martin Charles Scorsese was born, so the party will be double.

It was not Taxi driver the first meeting between the director born in Queens, New York, and Robert Anthony DeNiro Jr.since it had been wild roads (1973).

The film, probably Scorsese’s best, on a podium where they are Wild bull Y New York gangsIt was like a break in those 70s, probably the best Hollywood ever had and from which it failed to recover that courage and attraction with audiences of all latitudes.

Happy birthday

We’ll be talking about Martin in particular when he blows out 80 candles at the weekend, but now we’ll focus on the film about Travis Bickle, a Vietnam War veteran who makes a living driving a cab on the streets of New York, which he begins to see around sufficient reasons for the violence it had contained, to have its own escape route. Travis chooses to drive his cab anywhere in the city to fuel the hatred of him.

Travis is solitary and introverted, has difficulty talking to others and socializing, suffers from insomnia and takes pills as well as drinks. A combination that enters Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a young woman who works in a politician’s campaign.

• The film was nominated for 4 Hollywood Academy Awards and won none. And they were all relevant: Best Picture, Best Actor (De Niro), Best Supporting Actress (a Jodie Foster who was 12 when he shot it and Scorsese had already given him a role Alice no longer lives herewith Ellen Burstyn) and Best Original Score, for Bernard Herrmann, Hitchcock’s favorite composer and also that of The citizenby Orson Welles.

• Destiny wanted the premiere in our country to be exactly one year after the coup d’état of ’76. On March 24, 1977, it premiered Taxi driverwhich had a small budget (1,360,000 US dollars), but which in the United States alone would have raised more than twenty times that amount.

• Between the time Robert De Niro signed a $35,000 contract to appear in the film and when filming began, he won an Academy Award for The Godfather II (1974). The producers were concerned De Niro would ask for a raise, as Columbia Pictures was looking for excuses to cancel it, but De Niro said he would honor his original deal. Paul Schrader agreed to receive roughly the same amount for the screenplay as him, when he was asking ten times as much. Scorsese was paid $65,000. Less than $200,000 went to cast salaries.

• Scorsese said the most important shot in the film is of Travis talking on the phone trying to get another date with Betsy. The camera pans slowly to the side and walks with him down the long empty corridor, as if to suggest that the telephone conversation is too painful and pathetic to bear.

• Robert De Niro worked fifteen hour days for a month driving cabs in preparation for this role. He has also researched mental illness and in his spare time during filming twentieth century (1976) visited a US Army base in northern Italy and recorded conversations with Midwestern soldiers to acquire their accent.

• Jodie Foster (the prostitute girl) was 12 when she made the film, so she couldn’t make the scenes more explicit (her character was also 12). Connie Foster, Jodie’s older sister, who was 19, was her stunt double for those scenes.

• When Brian De Palma joined the project, he wanted Melanie Griffith to play Iris, but after two weeks of casting, both Griffth and De Palma were fired. Martin Scorsese replaced Griffith with Linda Blair. However, Blair also dropped out and Jodie Foster entered, but there were over two hundred applicants for the role including Carrie Fisher, Mariel Hemingway, Bo Derek, Kim Cattrall, Rosanna Arquette, Kristy McNichol and Michelle Pfeiffer.

• Mia Farrow wanted the role of Betsy, but Martin Scorsese turned her down.

• The story was partially autobiographical by Paul Schrader. The screenwriter suffered a nervous breakdown while living in Los Angeles. He was fired, lost friends in the middle of a divorce and then rejected by a girlfriend. Schrader literally didn’t talk to anyone for many weeks, went to pornographic theaters and developed an obsession with guns. Schrader decided to move the action to New York – taxi drivers are much more common there.

• Bernard Herrmann, when an almost unknown Martin Scorsese called him to ask him to do the score, refused. “I don’t write music for automotive films,” he told her. She then read the script and wrote a highly original score, using dissonant brass instruments to accentuate Travis’ inner emotions. Herrmann died on Christmas Eve 1975, hours after completing the recording sessions for the film, dedicated to his memory.

• The scene where Travis talks to himself in the mirror was completely improvised by Robert De Niro. The script simply said, “Travis looks in the mirror.” And the famous “Are you talking to me?” it may have been inspired by De Niro’s training with Stella Adler, who had her students practice different interpretations of the same sentence as an exercise. But De Niro claimed that “Are you talking to me?” was inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s pranks with his audience at a concert in the 1970s. Go find out the truth.

• Harvey Keitel tried out with pimps to prepare for his role. The scene where Sport and Iris (Jodie Foster) dance was improvised and is one of only two scenes in the film that doesn’t focus on Travis.

• Fiction imitates reality and vice versa. John Hinckley Jr.’s assassination attempt on US President Ronald Reagan (Monday, March 30, 1981) was apparently triggered by the film’s haunting character and his plot to assassinate a presidential candidate. The bombing caused the 53rd Academy Awards to be postponed by one day, until Tuesday, March 31, when De Niro won his Academy Award for Best Actor for Wild bull (1980).

• Scorsese apparently offered the role of Travis to Dustin Hoffman, who turned it down because “I thought (Scorsese) was crazy.” He has since regretted his decision. And Schrader had written the role with Jeff Bridges in mind.

• For his famous cameo scene (in the back seat of the taxi) Scorsese had to sit on a blanket so he could be seen in the front seat. He measures 1.60 m.

• The confrontation between Martin Scorsese, the Motion Picture Association and Columbia Pictures executives over violent content was famous. Faced with the possibility of being rated X, and having to edit the film to get an R, lower rating, and to be seen in commercial theaters, Scorsese is said to have stayed up all night drinking with a loaded gun in his hand, preparing to shoot an executive at Columbia Pictures the next day. His filmmaking friends convinced him to tone down the colors in the violent climax, and it earned an R rating. Other rumors suggest that Scorsese planned to commit suicide, and also that he even took the gun to Columbia Pictures and threatened the executive, until he didn’t give in.

• Finally, one who wanted to ride the wave was Oliver Stone. Director of Platoon says he was a role model for Travis, as Scorsese taught him at NYU film school and, like Travis, was a Vietnam vet turned cab driver in New York, wearing his olive drab army coat while on duty.