Taxi Driver - Production

Production

According to Scorsese it was Brian De Palma who introduced him to Schrader. In Scorsese on Scorsese, edited by David M. Thompson and Ian Christie, the director talks about how much of the film arose from his feeling that movies are like dreams, or like taking dope and that he tried to induce the feeling of being almost awake. He calls Travis an “avenging angel” floating through the streets of New York City, which was meant to represent all cities. Scorsese calls attention to improvisation in the film, such as in the scene between De Niro and Cybill Shepherd in the coffee-shop. The director also cites Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man and Jack Hazan’s A Bigger Splash as inspiration for his camerawork in the movie.

In Scorsese on Scorsese the director mentions the religious symbolism in the story comparing Bickle to a saint who wants to clean up both life and his mind. Bickle attempts suicide at the end of the movie as a way to mimic the Samurai’s “death with honour” principle.

When Travis meets Betsy to join him for coffee and pie, he reminds her of a line in Kris Kristofferson's song "The Pilgrim, Chapter 33": "He's a prophet and a pusher, partly truth, partly fiction—a walking contradiction." On their date, Bickle takes her to see Language of Love, a Swedish sex education film.

Shot during a New York summer heat wave and garbage strike, Taxi Driver came into conflict with the MPAA for its violence (Scorsese desaturated the color in the final shoot-out and got an R). To achieve the atmospheric scenes in Bickle's cab, the sound men would get in the trunk and Scorsese and his cinematographer, Michael Chapman, would fit themselves on the back seat floor and use available light to shoot.

In writing the script, Paul Schrader was inspired by the diaries of Arthur Bremer (who shot presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. The writer also used himself as an inspiration, prior to writing the screenplay Schrader was in a lonely and alienated position, much like Bickle. Following a divorce and a break-up with a live-in girlfriend, he spent a few weeks living in his car. He wrote the script in under a month while staying in his former girlfriend's apartment while she was away.

Schrader decided to make Bickle a Vietnam vet because the national trauma of the war seemed to blend perfectly with Bickle’s paranoid psychosis making his experiences after the war more intense and threatening. Thus, Bickle chooses to drive his taxi anywhere in the city as a way to feed his hate.

While preparing for his role as Bickle, De Niro was filming Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 in Italy. According to Boyle, he would "finish shooting on a Friday in Rome...get on a plane... fly to New York." De Niro obtained a cab driver's license, and when on break would pick up a cab and drive around New York for a couple of weeks, before returning to Rome to resume filming 1900. De Niro apparently lost 35 pounds and listened repeatedly to a taped reading of the diaries of Arthur Bremer. When he had time off from shooting 1900, De Niro visited an army base in Northern Italy and tape recorded soldiers from the Midwestern United States, whose accents he thought might be appropriate for Travis's character.

When Bickle determines to assassinate Senator Palantine, he cuts his hair into a Mohawk. This detail was suggested by actor Victor Magnotta, a friend of Scorsese's who had a small role as a Secret Service agent and who had served in Vietnam. Scorsese later noted, "Magnotta had talked about certain types of soldiers going into the jungle. They cut their hair in a certain way; looked like a Mohawk... and you knew that was a special situation, a commando kind of situation, and people gave them wide berths ... we thought it was a good idea."

Jodie Foster was not the first choice to play Iris. Scorsese considered Melanie Griffith, Linda Blair, Bo Derek, and Carrie Fisher for the role. A newcomer, Mariel Hemingway, auditioned for the role, but turned it down due to pressure from her family. After the other actresses turned down the role, Foster - an experienced child actor - was chosen.

In the original draft Schrader had written the role of Sport as a black man. There were also additions of other negative black roles. Scorsese believed that this would give the film an overly racist subtext so they were changed to white roles, although the film implies that Travis himself is a racist. Cab drivers in the film refer to Harlem as Mau Mau land, and Travis exchanges hostile eye contact with several black characters. Schrader set the film in Los Angeles; it was moved to New York City because taxis were much more prevalent there than in L.A. during the 1970s.