Taxi Driver's Birthday
On February 8, 1976, Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" premiered in New York.
The film is based on a semi-autobiographical script by Paul Schrader, who suffered a nervous breakdown while living in Los Angeles. He was fired from his job, left by friends, rejected by his girlfriend. For several months, Schrader literally had no one to talk to, only pornographic cinemas. Schrader somehow got a job as a courier delivering food from restaurants. After spending long days alone in his car, he felt that he could just as well have become a taxi driver.
Initially, Paul Schrader conceived a script about loneliness, but as he worked on the script, he realized that he was writing about the pathology of loneliness. The main message of his script was the idea that for some reason some young people (for example, Schrader himself) subconsciously repulse others in order to maintain their isolation, even though this isolation is the main source of their torment. Schrader's script liked Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro when they read it.
Moreover, Robert De Niro liked the script so much that he agreed to star in the film for a relatively low fee of 35 thousand dollars (the equivalent of the current 175 thousand dollars). After signing the contract, he received an Oscar for his role in "The Godfather: Part II" (1974), and had every reason for a sharp increase in the size of the fee, which the Columbia Pictures producers were very afraid of and were even ready to even close the project if De Niro demanded it but De Niro said he would follow through on his original deal without changing the terms.
For the role of Betsy, the producers wanted "someone like Cybill Shepard." After numerous tests, Cybill Shepard herself was invited, whose fee was the same amount as that of Robert De Niro - 35 thousand dollars. Producer Julia Phillips claimed that Martin Scorsese cast Cybill Shepherd as Betsy because of the size of her buttocks, which added to her sex appeal. Phillips also said that Scorsese and Shepard were in a difficult relationship on set, and Scorsese had to literally train Shepard and constantly tell her lines which she was unable to remember.
An example of a professional approach to work: During the month before filming began, Robert De Niro worked as a taxi driver in order to get into the role. Apparently, De Niro got so deeply into the role of a simple taxi driver that, already an Oscar winner, he was recognized only once a month by one of his clients. In addition, he studied mental illness in-depth, and during his free time he visited the US military base in Northern Italy (Robert De Niro also starred in Bernardo Bertolucci's film "Novecento (1900)"), where he taped conversations with Midwestern soldiers in order to reproduce specific army accent. In addition, Jodie Foster recalled that Robert De Niro, in between filming, invited her for coffee, but during coffee drinking he actually resumed rehearsals.
Jodie Foster was only 12 years old at the time of filming. Therefore, in explicit scenes she was replaced by her 19-year-old sister Connie.
In the original script by Paul Schrader, the pimp, mobster, and hotel employee were all black. Martin Scorsese decided that, when combined with other events in the film, this could lead to accusations of racism, and suggested changing these characters to white people. Schrader relented. I wonder if the film was shot today, taking into account the current rules of the American Film Academy about the mandatory observance of certain proportions between the number of white actors and African Americans, would such a decision by Scorsese be perceived as racism or as an infringement of the rights of black actors?
In May 1976, the film was awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes International Film Festival. Moreover, the chairman of the jury of this festival, American playwright Tennessee Williams, was against such a decision and accused the filmmakers of an apology for violence. Sometimes it happens.
A year later, "Taxi Driver" was nominated for an Oscar, but preference was given to John Avildsen's "Rocky". In the same 1977 "Taxi Driver" was nominated for the British BAFTA awards in the categories Best Film and Best Director, but in both cases lost to the film "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and its creator Milos Forman.
This film was not shown in the USSR.
Roger Ebert rated the film with a maximum of 4 stars and included it in his list of "Great Movies". In his review of the film, he wrote:
"... utter aloneness is at the center of "Taxi Driver," one of the best and most powerful of all films, and perhaps it is why so many people connect with it even though Travis Bickle would seem to be the most alienating of movie heroes. We have all felt as alone as Travis. Most of us are better at dealing with it."
The famous Russian film critic Sergei Kudryavtsev rated the film 9.5 points on a 10-point system, noting in his review:
"And, of course, the magnificent performance of Robert De Niro, a constant actor and "alter ego" of Martin Scorsese, allows you to see the true human drama of a hero who is thrown to the sidelines of life and in despair himself has thrown a merciless challenge to society and the system."
73% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users gave Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" ratings from 8 to 10. Taking this into account and the above, the film's rating according to FilmGourmand's version was 9.088, which allowed it to take 145th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
