Fifty years after it first hit the screen, ‘Taxi Driver‘ is still one of the most unsettling movies ever made. But the story behind the script is just as dark and lonely as the film itself.
At a 50th anniversary screening and panel at the Tribeca Festival early this month, screenwriter Paul Schrader, now 79, opened up about the awful time in his life that led to the film. Back in his 20s, he was living in his car, nursing an ulcer, and feeling “down on everything”.
Paul Schrader Wrote the Script as Self-Therapy
Schrader was joined at the event by director Martin Scorsese and stars Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster. He explained that Travis Bickle wasn’t born out of some big career move. It was more like a need to save himself. He wrote the script as a kind of “self-therapy” to push out the demons that were eating him alive.
“I was in a period in Los Angeles, down on everything, living in my car and ended up in the hospital with an ulcer,” Schrader told the audience. While he was in the hospital, a metaphor came to him. “When I was talking to the nurse, I realized I hadn’t spoken to anyone in weeks,” Schrader recalled in a previous interview. “That was when the metaphor of the taxi cab occurred to me. That is what I was: this person in an iron box, a coffin, floating around the city, but seemingly alone.”
The Yellow Metal Coffin That Inspired Travis Bickle
Schrader’s life was a wreck back then. He had fallen out with his mentor, the famous New Yorker critic Pauline Kael, had split from his wife, and then from the woman he left his wife for. He was drowning in debt, drifting around Los Angeles, sleeping in his car, and dealing with insomnia so bad he would wander the streets and porn theaters at night.
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“The idea of this taxi cab came to me, this yellow metal coffin floating through the sewer of the city with this boy trapped inside who can’t get out, who looks like he’s in a crowd but he’s desperately alone,” Schrader explained. “I figured, if I could write about him, I don’t have to become him, and it worked.”
How Paul Schrader Wrote the ‘Taxi Driver’ Script in 15 Days
And write he did. In just 10 to 15 days, the script “jumped from my mind almost intact,” Schrader said. He has also admitted to keeping a loaded gun on his desk while writing to keep himself focused. It was a harsh reminder of the violent path he was trying to steer clear of.
When ‘Taxi Driver’ came out in 1976, it won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and got four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. The movie’s raw look at loneliness in the city, helped by De Niro’s famous “You talkin’ to me?” line he came up with on the spot, hit a nerve in America after the Vietnam War.
Looking back, Schrader feels like a stranger to the man who wrote that script. In a 1988 interview, he said the person who wrote ‘Taxi Driver‘ is “long gone,” adding, “I don’t even know if I would recognize him if I saw him.”
As Schrader said at the Tribeca Festival, the reason the film has stuck around for fifty years is its honest, terrifying loneliness. “He’s not a garrulous, friendly guy,” Schrader said of Bickle. “He’s terrified. He’s angry. He’s lonely… sealed up in a yellow coffin.”
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