De Niro: A Life (26 page)

Called
Taxi Driver
, it concerned one Travis Bickle, a Vietnam veteran from the Midwest who finds himself living in Manhattan and taking the only work he can get: driving a cab through nighttime New York, the darkest, dirtiest, most degraded, and most dangerous environment conceivable, a Dantean nightmare of prostitutes, pimps, thieves, corruption, sin, and death. When normal human relationships prove impossible, Bickle’s thoughts turn to murder, and he drives himself—literally and figuratively—toward a self-immolating holocaust of violence and purgation.

Even in the wild Hollywood of 1972, after
Midnight Cowboy
and
Easy Rider
, with
The Godfather
and
The Exorcist
combining elements of exploitation cinema and mainstream entertainment and achieving critical acclaim and mammoth box office such as nobody had ever seen, this was very, very strong stuff. Schrader sent the script to Kael, who was completely unnerved by it. “
I was so upset when I finished it that I took it down the hall to my linen closet and put it face down under a pile of sheets,” she recalled. “I didn’t want to think about it at night. It was brilliant, but very frightening.” (Later, she asked Schrader why he would write about such a distasteful character, which seemed, from her vantage, to have nothing to do with him. “
It is me without any brains,” he told her.)

He also gave a copy of it to Brian De Palma, who was making headway in Hollywood after migrating west. Despite a healthy macabre streak of his own, De Palma couldn’t imagine a film of the material—“
It was the strongest stuff I had ever read. I didn’t think the movie would ever be made,” he said. But he passed it along to yet another friend, the up-and-coming producer Michael Phillips, who with his wife, Julia, and their partner, Tony Bill, was developing some juice at a few studios, with a film called
Steelyard Blues
in the pipeline at Warner Bros. and another, by the same screenwriter, David S. Ward, in the works at Universal, a picture about con men called
The Sting.
There was enough in
Taxi Driver
for Bill/Phillips Productions to offer Schrader an option on it: $1,000 for six months, with a second optional six-month period to follow at the same price. Schrader, broke and desperate to get out of LA, took the deal.

One more person had a chance to see the script in this very early phase: De Palma had passed it along to Martin Scorsese, who was still engaged in making
Mean Streets.
He, too, was stunned by what he read: “
I almost felt I wrote it myself,” he told Schrader years later. “Not that I could write that way, but I felt everything. I was burning inside my fucking skin; I had to make it. And that’s all there is to it.” (After the fact, he explained further, “
I
had to make
that movie. Not so much because of the social statement it makes but because of its
feeling
about things, including things I don’t like to admit about myself. It’s like when you’re in therapy and the doctor takes a videotape of a session and then shows it to you.”) But, of course, it was a moot point: nobody was going to make a film on this subject, and certainly not with the Phillipses, who had no track record, nor with the creepy Schrader, nor with Scorsese, who at that moment had only a student movie and a Roger Corman film to his name.

Within a year of the option on
Taxi Driver
being signed, though, the balance of the equation had changed. The Phillipses (who had ended their marriage, as well as their partnership with Tony Bill) had delivered
The Sting
, which would go on to massive box office and a haul of seven Oscars, including Best Picture; they parlayed the success into a multiple-picture production deal at Columbia Pictures. And Schrader, along with his brother Leonard, who had spent several years teaching
in Japan, had become a hot Hollywood commodity on the basis of
The Yakuza
, a screenplay about the Japanese gangster underworld that sold for more than $300,000, a record sum at the time; he was now being asked to write and rewrite scripts all over town (he marked his ascent with a blue Alfa Romeo with a license plate that read
OZU
, in honor of his favorite Japanese director).

With all that heat, it seemed suddenly that
Taxi Driver
could happen, but nobody knew exactly how. There was talk of Jeff Bridges playing the lead role for director Richard Mulligan; of Al Pacino playing the part; of other directors, such as Irvin Kirschner, Lamont Johnson, or John Milius, taking the reins. Nothing seemed right. And then the Phillipses and Schrader saw an early cut of
Mean Streets
, and they knew they had their director. Scorsese would be given the opportunity to deliver a cinematic version of the hellish New York of the script—but
only
if he could deliver Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle. And, of course,
only
if a studio would bite on financing it.

All of that, of course, was easier to imagine than to make happen. When the Phillipses and Scorsese bought the script (and at least one rewrite) from Schrader outright in January 1974, De Niro, still not a big enough name for anyone to hang a million-dollar-plus production on, was at work on
The Godfather, Part II
and on the verge of agreeing with Bernardo Bertolucci to appear in
1900.
Scorsese himself, also more of a succès d’estime than an actual hit, was engaged in the unlikely
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.
Not only, in short, were they rather small fish by studio standards, but they weren’t even available. If they were the perfect pair to make
Taxi Driver
and no one else would do, then it might be that the project would pass into legend as one of those great scripts that never got a chance to be the movies they might have been—like one of those what-if films that Orson Welles or Erich Von Stroheim never made.

By the end of the year,
Taxi Driver
was still not a go, in large part because the principals were suddenly so hot. Schrader had at least three scripts in some stage of development at various studios; Scorsese’s so-called women’s film,
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
, had been a box office success, winning an Oscar for Ellen Burstyn in the lead and opening doors for its director; the Phillipses were following up
The
Sting
with a number of projects, including one with Steven Spielberg that would become
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
; and De Niro, as his hapless agent Harry Ufland well knew, was the subject of multiple offers to appear in multiple films. Any of them could have gone in any direction, really. But when De Niro, hack license in his wallet, was in New York on Christmas hiatus from
1900
, he met yet again with Scorsese and Schrader to go over the most recent draft of the script, and he effectively made up everybody’s mind for them. “
I don’t know about anyone else,” he said, “but the next film I’m doing is ‘Taxi Driver.’ ”

U
PON REFLECTION
, it’s a bit hard to see how the minds of Scorsese and De Niro should settle on material coming from such a radically different place than either
Mean Streets
or their own cultural backgrounds. Schrader acknowledged that the script was born from a moment “
when I couldn’t really distinguish between the pain in the work and the pain in my life,” traumas that the actor and director didn’t share.

There
was
a strain of severity and even self-hatred in the film, derived from Schrader’s Calvinism, that harmonized with Scorsese’s Catholicism. “
It’s kind of an exorcism for me,” the director admitted once production had begun. He planned to surround the character with religious symbolism not in Schrader’s original script: “
There are a lot of Catholic references in the film,” he said later, “even if they’re only my own personal reference. Like the moment when he burns the flowers before he goes out to kill. And when he’s buying the guns, the dealer lays them out one at a time on the velvet, like arranging the altar during Mass.” (Scorsese revealed that they had even shot a scene of Bickle whipping himself with a towel—excoriating his flesh, in effect—before his murderous outing, but finally took it out “because it looked a little forced and unnatural.”)

In effect, Schrader and Scorsese made a perfect, if unlikely, collaborative marriage. “
My character wandered in from the snowy wastelands of Michigan to the fetid, overheated atmosphere of Marty’s New York,” Schrader said. “Travis Bickle is not a character that Marty Scorsese
would ever think of or come up with; and that atmosphere is not one that I would come up with.”

De Niro, though, had no particular religious upbringing and carried none of the anguished freight of his collaborators. For him, the script represented a chance to stretch beyond himself in a way that he was confident that he had sufficiently cultivated his craft to allow. There was an eerie coincidence, Schrader learned, in that De Niro had, during the period a few years prior when he considered writing material for himself to appear in, conceived of a script about a lonely man wandering New York City with guns and dreaming of an assassination. The script never came to be, but when De Niro told Schrader about it, the writer knew immediately what was going on: “
I said to him, ‘Do you know what the gun in your script represents?’ I said it was obvious to me that it was his talent, which was like a loaded gun hidden in him that nobody would let him shoot, and that if somebody would just let him fire once, the whole world would see the enormous impact his talent would have.” (It’s easy to imagine De Niro hearing this analysis without offering any response at all.)

De Niro, Schrader saw, would bring an energy to the film that neither he nor Scorsese could provide. “
De Niro’s contribution,” he said later, “was much of the schizophrenic quality of the character, which is not in the script. That quality in Travis of shooting the guy and then saying, ‘Oh, I don’t know what to do about this gun’—all those schizo elements come straight from his personality. The character I wrote was going crazy in a more linear fashion than the character Bobby acted; his characterization zigs and zags.” If they could make it, if they could get onto film what they knew they were capable of when they sat around discussing it, they would rattle audiences to the core.

B
UT THOSE WERE
still big ifs. In order to make it work, in order to make a film of such explosive material under the imprimatur of a movie studio, every participant in
Taxi Driver
would have to take a pay cut. De Niro, who could easily have asked $250,000 after
Godfather II
, signed for $30,000. “
Bobby was greatly pressured,” Schrader remembered. “He was being offered a half a million for something else.
He was one of the strongest ones behind it all—absolutely adamant about doing it.” Michael Phillips concurred that De Niro was the key to getting the film off the ground: “He could have demanded several hundred thousand … but he still agreed to honor his original deal. He was a saint.”

And, in fact, nobody got rich on the film, not at first. Schrader had already sold the script for roughly 10 percent of what he’d been paid for
The Yakuza.
And the film’s other main actors all worked for significantly less than they might otherwise: Cybill Shepherd, who was cast as the campaign worker of Bickle’s dreams; Peter Boyle, as a fellow cabbie; Harvey Keitel, still not the star that, say, Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman was or that De Niro was becoming, as the pimp; Jodie Foster, by some measures the most experienced actor of them all at age twelve, as the young prostitute whom Bickle wishes to rescue. Even the unions whose members would be involved in the production on the streets of New York made financial concessions.

The deal was struck regardless of money, as Michael Phillips explained, because the filmmakers “made a pact to do this movie.” Schrader concurred: “
It was an agreement made three years ago by friends when none of us were bankable. Even after we all got successful, we didn’t give it up until finally we offered Columbia such a good deal they couldn’t turn it down.” As he later said, that they all worked for so little money was, in fact, a source of strength for them: “
De Niro told me, when we were talking about whether the film could make any money, that he felt it was a film people would be watching fifty years from now, and that whether everybody watched it next year wasn’t important. That’s how we came to it, and that’s why we didn’t make any compromises; we figured if we were going to compromise on money, we’re certainly not going to compromise on anything else.” Finally, all of the important talent on the film was under contract for under $200,000, a budget of between $1.5 and $1.8 million was established, and production was scheduled for the summer of 1975.

T
HAT GAVE
D
E
Niro time build his character, to do the sort of biographical background work that he had come to rely on, and to practice
driving a taxi, which he was determined to do right. (What the hell: he’d been collecting unemployment only a few years before, so it couldn’t hurt to learn a trade, right?) In the course of his work, he had occasion at least once to give a ride to a writer from a film magazine, who would later confess to stiffing him on the tip … en route to see
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.
At other times De Niro let Scorsese ride around with him in the front seat. “
We drove up and down 8th Avenue,” the director remembered, “a bad neighborhood. The impression I had was that anything could happen. You have no control over what could happen. Your life doesn’t belong to you anymore. That was exactly what the character had to feel. Believe me, anyone who drives a cab in New York at night will be like Travis sooner or later.”

It was a foreboding atmosphere, Scorsese said, perfect for De Niro’s preparation. “
He got a strange feeling when he was hacking. He was totally anonymous. People would say anything, do anything in the backseat—it was like he didn’t exist.” But there was at least one light occasion. Not long after Oscar night, De Niro was putting in a shift in the taxi when, per Scorsese, “a guy gets in, a former actor, who recognizes his name on the license. ‘Jesus,’ he says, ‘you won the Oscar and now you’re driving a cab again!’ De Niro said he was only doing research. ‘Yeah, Bobby,’ says the actor, ‘I know. I been there, too.’ ”