NEW YORK — Four decades later, Robert De Niro still can't shake his Taxi Driver character.
"Every day for 40 years, at least one of you has to come up to me and said, 'You talking to me?' " De Niro smiled, introducing Martin Scorsese's gritty 1976 classic at the Tribeca Film Festival Thursday. The psychological thriller, celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, follows Vietnam War veteran Travis Bickle (De Niro) as he takes a job driving cabs and becomes increasingly unhinged.
To celebrate the milestone, festival co-founder De Niro hosted a Taxi screening and Q&A at New York's Beacon Theatre, joined by Scorsese, screenwriter Paul Schrader, producer Michael Phillips, and co-stars Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel and Cybill Shepherd. Here's what we learned:
1. The script started as "self-therapy." Despite common belief that Taxi is based on Arthur Bremer, who attempted to assassinate presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972, screenwriter Paul Schrader said it was introspective. "There was a person who I was afraid of becoming and that was this taxi driver," Schrader said. "I felt if I wrote about him, I could distance him from me and it worked. It does show that art has therapeutic powers."
2. De Niro drove a cab to prepare for his role. Fresh off a supporting-actor Academy Award win for The Godfather: Part II and filming 1900 in Italy, De Niro had just two weeks in New York before shooting started on Taxi. "I started driving a cab," De Niro said. "At least for 10 days, but I drove it as much as I could." Scorsese added: "You told me there was a guy who got in the car and noticed it was your name on the driver's license and said, 'God, you just won an Oscar. Is it that hard to get jobs?' "
4. But he didn't really go bald. Travis' third-act mohawk was inspired by a friend of Scorsese's who served in the Army's Special Forces in Southeast Asia, where some of his fellow soldiers sported the haircut. Because he was about to shoot The Last Tycoon, De Niro opted to wear a prosthetic. While it was being fitted, "I dozed off for a minute and then I felt a tap on my shoulder," Scorsese said. "I opened my eyes and you were there with this thing. It was terrifying."
3. Foster almost couldn't appear in the movie. The actress was only 12 years old when she played runaway teen prostitute Iris. Because of her age, she endured a four-hour interview with a psychiatrist after the Los Angeles Welfare Board refused to give her a work permit, due to the film's violent content. "They said no, I couldn't have one, so we hired a lawyer and they decided to determine if I was psychologically sane enough to play the part," Foster said. "I guess I passed."
5. Keitel "trained" with a pimp. The actor sought real-life inspiration to play Iris' hustler Sport, who meets a bloody end at Travis' hands. Performing in a play in New York at the time, Keitel met a man on the street who claimed to be a former pimp. "I don't know what that means, but we improvised together," Keitel said, joking: "He taught me what it was like to (be) a real pimp. I played the girl, he told me what to do, and he'd be the guy. We had a good business together."
6. Foster hated Iris' outfits. While she admitted to loving the buckets of fake blood, there were some things the child actress couldn't stand. "The hot pants and the dumb hat and the sunglasses," Foster said. "The first day (on set), I cried."
