Robert De Niro’s wild paths: fifty years on, "Taxi Driver" is still a duel with the viewer

He says that as a child he wanted to become a priest, but was surrounded by the gangsters of Little Italy in the 1950s; and so Martin Charles Scorsese, born in New York in 1942 to a family originally from Polizzi Generosa and Ciminna, in the province of Palermo, became the director who, more than anyone else, has explored in all his films the themes of good and evil, violence and forgiveness, sin and redemption, corruption and faith. With a rock and roll soundtrack, preferably by the Rolling Stones. A unique and irreplicable blend that quickly became his highly recognisable directorial signature, celebrated throughout the world. Even though many of his films have always been accompanied by controversy linked to violence, which he has portrayed with unrivalled creativity and grace. Exactly fifty years ago, Scorsese’s fifth feature film, "Taxi Driver", was screened at the 29th Cannes Film Festival, and a storm of criticism had erupted on the Croisette; yet, unexpectedly, the film won the Palme d’Or: even though it was well known that the jury president, Tennessee Williams, had not appreciated the overwhelming violence – a fact he naturally did not hide from Scorsese himself – the film was awarded the prize whilst the director had already returned to Los Angeles, convinced it would be a flop.

Today, half a century on, two film scholars have published a book analysing its flawless screenplay, celebrating the rock-solid structure of a film that has entered the collective imagination thanks in part to Bob De Niro’s chameleon-like performance and famous lines that have become part of everyday parlance (one, above all, the famous ‘You talking to me?’, which was not originally in the script and which the actor improvised on the spot). "Taxi Driver" by Alessandro Canadè and Andrea Nobile, recently published by Dino Audino Editore, re-examines Scorsese’s masterpiece through a scene-by-scene thematic and stylistic analysis, analysing the dramatic architecture skilfully constructed by screenwriter Paul Schrader and highlighting the complexity of a work which, beneath an apparently chaotic structure, reveals a rigorous and original application of the classical dramatic canon.

The book is therefore a sort of in-depth analysis of a story which, despite the passing of the years, remains in perfect shape and shows no signs of ageing, whilst also offering plenty of food for thought on the present day and contemporary loneliness: “The film’s challenge, and its great uniqueness, lies in the construction of this character, the taxi driver Travis Bickle, who is in some ways the heir to Ethan Edwards from John Ford’s The Searchers,” Canadè tells Il Foglio, “but also to the tradition of French existentialism, or to the Dostoevskian characters from Notes from the Underground and Crime and Punishment.” Taxi Driver is a film that resembles a boxing match between the viewer and the violent, paranoid protagonist: Scorsese and Schrader engage in a ‘back-and-forth’, a constant struggle between identifying with the troubled character and abandoning him to a tragic fate. And all this is achieved in part through the clever use of narrative devices such as the voice-over or the diary in which Travis records his daily observations, which allow the viewer to remain within his thoughts, to enter his mind, his deepest innermost thoughts, only to succumb to his obsessive drift when he commits acts that cannot be condoned. But what exactly is Travis Bickle’s story? Schrader said in an interview that it is ‘the story of a man faced with two women: one he would like to have but cannot, the other he could have but does not want’. He also added: ‘Travis is me, without a brain’. We are in New York in the aftermath of the failed Vietnam War, and a 26-year-old former marine – or so he claims – works as a night-time taxi driver because he suffers from insomnia. He spends his days observing the city in solitude with a haunted look in his eyes, convincing himself that the city—corrupted by drugs, prostitution and crime on every corner—is beyond hope, and that action must be taken. He lives in a squalid flat and frequents desolate porn cinemas where other desperate souls take refuge in search of human contact they know will never come.

After all, that fictional New York faithfully mirrored the real city, which was ravaged by the terrible financial crisis that brought it to the brink of bankruptcy (President Ford, at the time, refused federal aid, and in October 1975 the Daily News ran the famous headline "Ford to City: Drop Dead"): the confirmed death toll that year stood at over 1,600. Urban decay and moral decay were exactly the same thing: one of the first victims of it all was the screenwriter Paul Schrader himself, who was going through the breakdown of his marriage and began wandering the streets at night. “I was 25 at the time; I was a film critic but I was going through a very dark period in my life. I was living in my car, sometimes sleeping in porn cinemas, and I wasn’t talking to anyone anymore,” Schrader recalls in the book, speaking of his painful past. “I drank, drank, drank. I had severe stomach pain, so I went to hospital and they told me I had a bleeding ulcer. Suddenly, whilst I was in hospital, I had a vision: a yellow taxi and a young man trapped inside it, a sort of coffin wandering, floating, through all the city’s sewers. A metaphor for loneliness: a young man surrounded by so many people, yet trapped inside this metal box. I knew I had to write about this young man because I was in danger of becoming like him; to avoid that, I would have to turn him into a fictional character. Travis Bickle was the person I was afraid of becoming; I knew him very well.”

Andrea Nobile, a screenwriter by profession, tells "Il Foglio" the secret behind this painstaking yet successful work: "Even great masterpieces adhere to formal rules. The greatest value of "Taxi Driver" is yet another demonstration that even in an arthouse film – which we always believe to be free from any structure or rule – it is in fact possible to find archetypal narrative structures. So for a young screenwriter wanting to break into this world, it is important to understand how it is possible to find structures and forms even in what is probably considered by everyone to be the most auteur-driven film of that period – the 1970s – perhaps the freest of all. By studying the sequence of events, the three-act structure becomes immediately apparent and crystal clear, as does the character’s arc of transformation.”

After all, the merit of the books in the ‘Drama’ series published by Dino Audino Editore – edited by Stefano Locatelli and Andrea Minuz – as well as the legendary RAI courses for young screenwriters organised in the past by Audino, lies precisely in disseminating innovative American theories on screenwriting and introducing key authors such as Christopher Vogler, Linda Seger, Dara Marks and Syd Field, to name but a few. Through these invaluable resources, just as Canadè and Nobile did with the films of Scorsese and Schrader, both professionals and film enthusiasts can break down the great masterpieces of cinema, then try to reconstruct them and, why not, attempt to write new ones. For example, a work such as Vogler’s “The Hero’s Journey”, which analyses Joseph Campbell’s study of archetypes and, by extension, the philosophy of Carl Gustav Jung, has sought to transform the typically Italian approach to screenwriting and to break away from the romantic notion of the artist as an inspired genius – a notion that has proved extremely hard to shake off – by emphasising the importance of technique and training.

On this point, Nobile broadens the discussion, not limiting himself solely to the screenplay of "Taxi Driver": “Even David Lynch’s films have a three-act structure, despite their dreamlike and chaotic nature. If we take "Mulholland Drive", that too has three acts; there’s no getting away from it. Returning to "Taxi Driver", the film has its own complexity because it interweaves two love stories: one is the relationship between De Niro and Cybill Shepherd, the ‘angelic woman’ who is supposed to save him from the hell into which he is plunging; the other is with Jodie Foster, the child prostitute, who is instead the ‘cursed woman’ he wants to save. It is through this shift in narrative focus from one to the other that Travis/De Niro’s narrative journey unfolds. The film thus presents a deeply uncomfortable truth – probably the very feature that has ensured it has remained so firmly in the collective memory of audiences worldwide: that final outpouring of violence, which many viewers rightly find unacceptable, is in fact absolutely necessary to save the child prostitute, but also Travis himself.

It is the post-Watergate and post-Vietnam era, and a handful of young directors are envisioning a different kind of cinema, one capable of surviving the crisis of Hollywood’s traditional production system: Scorsese is one of them, alongside his friends Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma. It was De Palma himself who gave him a screenplay by a young writer and film critic who had grown up in a Calvinist household and been forbidden by his parents to go to the cinema: before becoming a screenwriter, Paul Schrader had in fact written a book on the transcendent in the films of Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer, and when the character of the existentialist taxi driver began to take shape in his mind, the question he kept asking himself was: why do I exist? Or, to quote Scorsese himself at the start of the beautiful five-part documentary "Mr Scorsese" by Rebecca Miller (daughter of Arthur): “Who are we? Or rather, what are we as human beings? Are we by nature good or bad? The bad side of everyone could become good. But I think everyone is capable of wickedness under the right circumstances.” In the same documentary, De Palma recounts that he was looking for something more commercial than "Taxi Driver": “I said: I can’t do it. Who would watch it? It’s pure madness.” Shortly afterwards, Scorsese had a revelation that illustrates his determination: “I really believed in it. I said: ‘Oh my God, it’s almost as if I’d written it myself.’ These were turbulent years for the young Marty: in 1973, he made a name for himself with "Mean Streets", which recounts his life on the notorious streets of Little Italy where he grew up.

“The public needs new stories in which to recognise themselves and characters with whom to identify,” writes Canadè in the book’s introduction, “Weak heroes, lacking strong motivations, who navigate a time that is difficult to decipher – such as Schrader and Scorsese’s Travis, who, for his part, perfectly encapsulates the dual influence that characterises the cinema of the so-called ‘movie brats’ (in addition to the filmmakers already mentioned, think of Coppola, Friedkin and Cimino), that generation of ‘brats’ who grew up on cinematic images and were, in many cases, trained at film schools: the spectacular and genre-based tradition of classic American cinema on the one hand, and the innovations coming from European cinema (Neorealism, Nouvelle Vague) on the other”. "Taxi Driver" was an instant success, and Scorsese lived dangerously for years on the crest of that wave of ‘creative madness’ between 1976 and 1978, from the end of filming the movie about the psychopathic taxi driver to the making of "New York, New York and *The Last Waltz*, the documentary about the band *The Band* by the great Robbie Robertson, who recently passed away and composed various soundtracks for his films. For a time, Scorsese and Robertson even lived together, watching films, making music and snorting cocaine from morning till night: “Staying with Marty could be artistically stimulating. We could really have worked side by side to make "The Last Waltz" something special, something that would stand the test of time," Robertson recounts in his entertaining memoir "Insomnia" (Jimenez, 2026), "Marty had been brilliant and unconventional in his use of music in his films "Mean Streets" and "Taxi Driver". He had a deep curiosity about music. I even had the feeling that he’d dreamt of being a musician. That’s why I knew he’d be perfect to direct the film, and it really made me want to share with him some artists and records that I knew would thrill him.”

Over time, the Scorsese–Schrader partnership would yield many other outstanding works, such as Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and After Life (1999) – all extremely violent and heavily criticised films, yet ones that have managed to portray the human condition like no other. As for Travis Bickle, who roamed the streets of New York like a relic of an era on the verge of disappearing, even another great master of cinema, Ingmar Bergman, gave him a pass: “Scorsese’s Taxi Driver is a film about violence, of the very highest artistic calibre.”