"I'm no pusher. I never have pushed."
November 20, 2015 10:09 AM   Subscribe

It really hit me, an image that I was like a taxi driver, floating around in this metal coffin in the city, seemingly in the middle of people, but absolutely, totally alone. - Paul Schrader

Behind the scenes of Taxi Driver.
posted by porn in the woods (13 comments total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
For a recent, interesting look at the milieu they were trying to capture, the BBC's Philip Glass: Taxi Driver is worth checking out:

America's soon-to-be most successful contemporary composer continued to earn a living by driving a taxi until he was 42. "I would show up around 3pm to get a car and hopefully be out driving by 4. I wanted to get back to the garage by 1 or 2am before the bars closed, as that wasn't a good time to be driving. I'd come home and write music until 6 in the morning."

Glass's new musical language - consisting of driving rhythms, gradually evolving repetitive patterns and amplified voice, organs and saxophones - reflected the urgency of the city surrounding him. New York, on the brink of financial collapse, was crime-ridden and perilous. Driving a cab offered more than a window on this gritty, late night world. Almost every other month, according to Glass, a driver colleague was murdered. Glass escaped altercations with gangs and robbers in his cab.

One of the most successful films at the time was Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver starring Robert DeNiro. Glass couldn't bring himself to watch it until years later. He says, "I was a taxi driver. On my night off, I was not going to go watch a movie called Taxi Driver."

posted by ryanshepard at 10:18 AM on November 20, 2015 [6 favorites]


All the animals come out at night - whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets. I go all over. I take people to the Bronx, Brooklyn, I take ‘em to Harlem. I don’t care. Don’t make no difference to me. It does to some. Some won’t even take spooks. Don’t make no difference to me.
posted by growabrain at 10:44 AM on November 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


Time to watch it again. Thanks for the reminder.
posted by Splunge at 11:30 AM on November 20, 2015


Yeah, I'm overdue for a rewatch too.

That movie is so iconic I'll bet you could ask people who've never seen it what it was about and they'd have at least some idea, and probably know at least a few lines.

Somehow, though, it never seems to get old.
posted by ernielundquist at 12:20 PM on November 20, 2015


Should I even ask what a "skunk pussy" is? Damn you, curiousity!
posted by Captain l'escalier at 12:53 PM on November 20, 2015


One fact about Taxi Driver that I learned from Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is that the woman that Travis Bickle hits on at the porno theater was Robert DeNiro's girlfriend at the time and evidently they were fighting throughout filming the movie.
posted by jonp72 at 1:07 PM on November 20, 2015 [3 favorites]


Should I even ask what a "skunk pussy" is? Damn you, curiousity!

Be careful what you ask for.
posted by fairmettle at 1:17 PM on November 20, 2015 [1 favorite]


Somehow, though, it never seems to get old.

I managed to make my way through an undergraduate degree in film studies without watching a single Scorsese film. Towards the very end of it, I watched Hugo, found myself blown away by the sheer level of care and attention paid to even the littlest details—I love Coen brothers productions, and even they don't hold a candle to Scorsese—and decided I really needed to give Taxi Driver a watch, though I knew literally nothing about it, not even the thing about the mohawk.

It blew my mind. I've since realized that I'm not particularly a fan of how Scorsese approaches his material; his themes don't really resonate with me, his work never strikes an emotional chord, so I'm left feeling entertained but relatively cold, and that feels a problematic way to respond to material as lurid and sexualized as the stuff his recent films deal with. But the man has an understanding of composition, pacing, and technique that borders on obscene. In retrospect it made sense for him to make a children's movie about George Méliès: Scorsese's showmanship leaves even Baz Luhrmann cold.

Obviously there're the famous visual scenes to point to—the empty hallway, the endless tableaux of blood, the opening and ending visuals of the city in the rain shot so impeccably that they've mostly withstood being turned into cliche. But what really got me is that Scorsese has a knack for turning seemingly mundane sequences, utterly low-key and non-quirky and energetic, into tense, packed gems that I'm sure affect viewers without them quite knowing what's hit 'em.

My favorite instance of this, which I've never seen anybody comment on, happens immediately after the opening credits. It's a quiet scene, innocuous on many levels. Hints of trouble abound, of course: mentions of an army history, talk of insomnia, so on, so forth. But what really gets me is the sheer claustrophobia of the composition, which does a brilliant job of never calling attention to itself. The guy De Niro's talking to is sitting in front of either a mirror or a window—I'm not sure which—that takes up a full quarter of the frame. If it's a mirror, it manages not to reflect anything we see whenever the camera's on De Niro, making this room seem almost impossibly full. In that frame, we see two people talking energetically; occasionally, their voices spill over the main conversation, though never egregiously so.

Then, just as De Niro mentions being in the marines, the camera pans up, for seemingly no significant narrative purpose. As it pans, it reveals a third person inside this frame-within-a-frame, sitting in a way that creates a perfect line out of the three heads—a line asymmetrical to every other line and angle in the shot. Then, as that line holds for just a split second, somebody wedges their way between the interviewer and the camera, virtually pressing themselves against the camera lens, shattering the composition altogether. The extent to which De Niro is being squeezed into this space is made manifest, particularly because the raised camera is now much closer to eye-level, and has made itself very definitely his point of view.

De Niro himself doesn't get buffeted by this guy. We, the viewers, are. A conversation between two people is interrupted by four others, two of whom talk over it, one of whom physically interjects himself into it, one of whom is simply there, as an additional presence forcing themselves into the frame.

It doesn't call attention to itself. This isn't pristine enough to be a Kubrick or an Anderson tableaux; the discomfort isn't explicit enough to be one of the Coen brothers' uncanny sequences. It feels... well... normal. It's quiet. In terms of its color palette or its lines, it isn't anything special. You could achieve the same effect with a crappy art school camera and a couple of cheap lights.

It's the sheer intelligence of the arrangement that shines through. In a scene that's purely expositional, that's kept pretty out-of-your-face, we're given more beats and points of interest than occur in many action films over a similar period of time. Every time we cut back to the man behind the desk, a man who I don't believe we see again, something more is happening. The initial composition, the intensification, the interruption... and it all goes by so unobtrusively that, if you glanced away from the screen, you'd miss it.

Every shot of Taxi Driver is like that. Every scene is pulsing with liveliness. Never in the sense that it does anything more than the scene would have to do if it was just a run-of-the-mill blockbuster (not that the script would've ever become that), and I think it's that adherence to conventional Hollywood notions of entertainment that makes Scorsese such a popular director. But it's got more passion behind it than most directors ever even touch, enough so that you can feel it even if you haven't got the first clue about how moviemaking works. If Taxi Driver stands the test of time, it's because it's got a dedication and a commitment to it that won't go out of style. That, and because it's also just a very watchable movie, which if anything has gotten even more watchable as the era in which it was made fades into nostalgia.

I feel like Scorcese's gotten more noticeably bombastic as time's gone on. The Departed and The Wolf of Wall Street are so vivid and sharp and bright. Perhaps it's just their relative recentness, but I found myself way less impressed by their craftsmanship when all those details were shoved in my face. They also felt far less ambiguous, far less willing to present me with four or five different powerful emotions at a time. And this is an era where sharp, flashy filmmaking has seen new, exciting contenders. Quentin Tarantino and Edgar Wright push that kind of frenetic energy into the realm of caricature, leaving more recent Scorsese films feeling too worked-up and not worked-up enough (though your mileage may vary; the man is still clearly insanely good at what he does). It's why I continue to love Hugo, though; it gives off the same sense that Taxi Driver does, of a guy having fifty trillion ideas of how to work within a medium and packing all of them into a movie that still feels ridiculously slick and compelling.

Whenever I meet somebody who expresses a fondness for the visual arts, I see if I can get them to watch Taxi Driver. It seemingly never fails to leave them as reeling as it left me.
posted by rorgy at 1:18 PM on November 20, 2015 [9 favorites]




rorgy, flagged as fantastic.

So I saw Taxi Driver for the first time when the 35th anniversary rolled around and it got a theatrical rerelease.

I had seen bits and pieces of the movie over the years in snippets here and there, had all the pat references in my head. But. I'm glad it got the rerelease because I got to sit down in a theatre with a seriously moviegoing friend (at his urging) and drink it in on my first watch.

So, it was as you describe. Reeling, indeed.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 2:56 PM on November 20, 2015 [2 favorites]


I feel like Scorcese's gotten more noticeably bombastic as time's gone on. The Departed and The Wolf of Wall Street are so vivid and sharp and bright. Perhaps it's just their relative recentness, but I found myself way less impressed by their craftsmanship when all those details were shoved in my face. They also felt far less ambiguous, far less willing to present me with four or five different powerful emotions at a time.

That's right, he has become a lot more bombastic. His movies have less of that quiet, lurking character and are more in your face. The thing is that more bombastic style produced "Goodfellas" which IMO is also a very great movie, although in a very different and less subtle style. "Casino" is an interestingly underrated movie, it is less over-the-top than Goodfellas but addresses some of the same themes.

Some of his more recent movies have seemed to lack soul, to be more of a pure stylistic exercise. The Departed is weirdly comic book and in Gangs of New York any theme or heart is squeezed out by cinematic theatrics. On the other hand, I thought Wolf of Wall Street was good just because it was such a bravura performance all around, and it was so damn funny. Humor actually works well with his new style, it cuts the overbearing quality.
posted by zipadee at 3:20 PM on November 20, 2015 [3 favorites]


There's no way you can tell from those photos, but De Niro never shaved his head; it's a makeup effect by the legendary Dick Smith.
posted by effbot at 6:42 AM on November 21, 2015 [5 favorites]


I too got to see it on a big screen (in a revival circa probably 1999), and what struck me was how overwhelming the score was in a theater. Ever since, watching it at home may as well have been me watching it on my phone.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 9:27 AM on November 21, 2015 [1 favorite]


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