Taxi Driver

This year marks the 50th anniversary of 'Taxi Driver', which is somehow even more relevant now than it was in 1976. But the truth is 'Taxi Driver' almost didn't make it to the screen. This week, Chris and Lizzie break down how Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader fought to make a dark, deeply uncommercial script on a shoestring budget, that made the studio nervous from the start. Discover why the Board of Education nearly blocked Jodie Foster's controversial casting, and how Robert De Niro stepped in as her de facto acting coach on set. Plus find out how Scorsese wound up as a last minute replacement for one of his own actors, and why the production almost drove him to go full Travis Bickle on the studio execs... until Steven Spielberg talked him down. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Winterbauer?

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• 0:31Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:15Lizzie Bassett?

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• 1:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, full stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone one that young men will understand is perhaps a critique of certain aspects of masculinity and not something to aspire to. We'll get into it. As always, I am Chris Winterbauer, joined by my co-host, my intrepid explorer of the manosphere, so to speak. As one of our listeners said, Chris hangs out with the Muppets while Lizzie has to research neo-Nazis. And I said, Lizzie chooses to research neo-Nazis, and she chooses to research Travis Bickles. Lizzie, what do we have today?

• 2:36Lizzie Bassett?

  We have Taxi Driver, Chris. It's the 50th anniversary of Taxi Driver this year, and I think that's pretty remarkable because it really feels like a movie that could have come out yesterday.

• 2:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, it would be called Uber Driver.

• 2:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 2:50Chris Winterbauer?

  But yes.

• 2:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But just as scary. We have a lot to talk about. I'm very excited. Before we get into it, if you have not listened to Friday's out-of-frame episode, it does cover the entire story of Jodie Foster and the stalker that she acquired, kind of because of Taxi Driver, John Hinckley Jr., and then his attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan, and it features Red Handed. So, go back and listen to it. You don't need to listen to it before this, but it is a nice companion piece to this episode. So, with that being said, Chris, had you seen Taxi Driver before as a young man, a young man? And what did you make of it, watching it this time?

• 3:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Had seen it as a young man, and now watched it as an old man. I re-watched Mean Streets, and then I re-watched Taxi Driver, and then you actually asked me to watch another movie, which I did, which will come up later that we'll talk about, and then also watched the Louis Theroux Manosphere documentary in anticipation, which I know you did as well.

• 3:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 3:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Taxi Driver is an incredible movie. I feel like in Mean Streets, you can see everything that Scorsese wants to do, and sometimes does it incredibly well. I love Mean Streets. It's great Harvey Keitel performance, amazing Robert De Niro performance. You see the roots of Travis Bickle very much in that movie with his character. And it feels like he really finds himself as a director in Taxi Driver. Hundred percent. But I think a large part of that is Paul Schrader's incredibly focused, incredibly incisive screenplay that is layered and nuanced and funny and extremely dark and disturbing. And there is such commitment to exposing the many layers and facets

• 4:32Chris Winterbauer?

  of various forms of, I would say like male pickling, or like the toxicity of men left in isolation, right? In some of these instances, the real kind of gross underbelly of a lot of the feelings that we as men, I'll speak as a man, can have, especially if we feel spurned in some way. I don't think I've had any Travis Bickle like thoughts, but I have had the thought of, you know, I'll show them, I'll do something to prove, right? That, that idea, that fantasy. Then they'll see, right? And then wanting a sort of Taken-esque fantasy to sweep us off our feet. And of course, we've, as you mentioned, Lizzie, this, this movie, not only is it visually incredible, and I love the way that Scorsese uses the zoom lens, for example, to emphasize the distance between Bickle and the people around him.

• 5:16Chris Winterbauer?

  It really feels like you thematically could make it today because we continue to deal with the problems of a directionless young man using violence to express himself. And Bickle's a little more complicated than other examples that are more black and white, I think, in recent memory. But that continues to be an issue that we struggle to address in society. And I would argue it's gotten worse in large part because of the systems we have created that continue to push young men down kind of gnarly, dark alleys. But anyway, I loved it and I really didn't understand it when I saw it when I was little. I was like, I didn't know what an anti-hero was. I was very confused by the movie. It made me very uncomfortable. That's all very much intentional. Again, it's not a movie I really love watching.

• 5:59Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a hard watch, but it's an, I think it's an amazing movie. So I'll kick it to you.

• 6:04Lizzie Bassett?

  You know, that's what I remembered. I saw this when I was a teenager, probably, and I don't even know if I saw the whole thing. It was, you know, one of those things where it's like, oh, you're supposed to have seen Taxi Driver. So I had seen at least parts of it, but I'd never gone back and revisited it. And I was expecting like, oh, God, this is going to be so grim. It's going to be a tough watch. It's, you know, it's going to be unpleasant. That was not my experience at all. I was glued to my seat watching this movie. It is so good. I think, I think it is entertaining on top of, you know, everything else. You're right, Travis is more complicated and we will get into that. I think that that was very intentional, particularly on Scorsese's part. Obviously, you know, Schrader wrote the screenplay,

• 6:47Lizzie Bassett?

  but as we will discuss, Scorsese put a lot of effort into, he thought, making it very clear that Travis was a Vietnam veteran and what that had done to him. Now, not everybody got that, but it's definitely there. It's so interesting to me because this movie has actually come up several times over the last couple of months as people talking about like, I was going to become like Travis Bickle, saying like, I understood that what I had to do was become a machine.

• 7:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Right. Tony Kay in American History X is maybe specifically you're referencing.

• 7:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Tony Kay, obviously John Hinckley Jr., which we discussed in the episode on Friday. But watching this movie, that is a wild takeaway to have from Taxi Driver. That is not the point. Like, I can't believe that anyone watched this and thought, oh, Travis Bickle is cool and like, he is, he's a loser and he's supposed to be. And the fact that anyone had that takeaway is so interesting and also disturbing.

• 7:55Chris Winterbauer?

  I can understand it, though, in the sense that when you're very young, you come into a movie with the expectation that the protagonist is the hero, and therefore it is your job to identify with them, et cetera. So that, which I do think is the tricky thing with, this isn't exactly satire, but with a movie that's ultimately attempting to very subtly undermine its hero, and Scorsese does it in very funny ways editorially and with music. I think a lot of people saw this and took maybe the wrong message from it. Not dissimilar from Fight Club.

• 8:22Lizzie Bassett?

  I was just gonna say, yeah, I mean, Fight Club it verges farther in the direction of making it cool than this does. I actually think Scorsese does an incredible job of, to me at least, making it very clear.

• 8:34Chris Winterbauer?

  I felt the same way, rewatching it.

• 8:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, which was sort of a shock to me because so many people have this kind of like obsession with Travis Bickle. You mentioned the Manosphere documentary. And Chris, you know, we talked yesterday and you were like, I think you should watch this. And so I did. And I'm curious what your take is on sort of the connection between that documentary, which, for the record, I have some problems with.

• 8:59Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't think it's a great documentary. I think it's very surface, but it does at least somewhat explore the phenomena of the Manosphere, which we're dealing with right now. I guess the biggest thing that I felt was there continue to be a lot of young men who are looking for somebody to look up to and who are looking for somebody to give them some sort of purpose, which is what Bickle is ultimately trying to do in the movie, right? He gives himself purpose. It's a very misdirected purpose ultimately. And I do think that's where the Vietnam thing ties in. He's a soldier without a mission, right? He's been dumped on the streets and he's very aimless. The thing that I felt with the Manosphere is somehow, I really felt all of these Manosphere men are so, not their followers, to be clear, but the main guys are worse than Bickle by a trillion miles because they're just grifters.

• 9:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 9:45Chris Winterbauer?

  They are all snake oil salesmen.

• 9:48Lizzie Bassett?

  And they know it.

• 9:49Chris Winterbauer?

  They know it and they are just... Awful. You know, it's a priest preaching an ideology, tithing the congregation, and then turning around and saying like, "Look at these fucking idiots. You guys are, you're gross." So honestly, like, my big thought was, by comparison, Travis Bickle is a hero compared to some of these guys.

• 10:10Lizzie Bassett?

  You know, there was one moment in the documentary that I actually, and to be clear, my issue with the documentary was, yes, it was very surface level, and also Louis Theroux is very, like, sort of feigning interest and compassion, and then it's like, he's 100% just trying to get these guys in a gotcha moment. And one of the guys even says that, and then it's like, "Yeah, bingo, sir. Like, that's what this is."

• 10:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 10:30Lizzie Bassett?

  But there is a moment where he is talking to one of the fans of one of the guys that he's met.

• 10:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, I had a lot of compassion, actually, for the fans.

• 10:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Me too, because it was this guy, and he'd said he'd been living in his car. He had been homeless. And then he's like, "But you know what they've taught me is, like, that's my fault. And like, I'm the only one who's in control of me. And so, like, I can turn my life around, and I just have to use these cheat codes, and I have to understand how to get better." And for me, he was the Travis Bickle in that movie.

• 10:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. And his brother had died by suicide.

• 11:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. Oh, god. It was so sad.

• 11:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, and there was just such a failure of any sort of system to catch him as he fell, right? So he falls all the way to the bottom, and then he sees these guys on Instagram.

• 11:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 11:14Chris Winterbauer?

  I completely agree. And I actually thought the documentary did a pretty good job of humanizing those two young men in Miami.

• 11:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Well, with that in mind, Chris, I would like to actually open with this. So Martin Scorsese was interviewed by Roger Ebert right before the release of Taxi Driver. And he mentioned that he was working on New York, New York, which, of course, would come out after Taxi Driver. And Ebert asked if that will be a feminist film. And he referenced that many thought that Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore was a pointedly feminist film. And Scorsese doesn't agree. Here is what he said instead.

• 11:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Actually, not Alice, but Taxi Driver. This is my feminist film. Who says a feminist movie has to be about women? Alice was never intended as a feminist tract. At the end, she's making the same mistakes. The first shot of her in Kris Kristofferson's house shows her washing the dishes, a big close up. Ebert says, "And Taxi Driver, where the hero can't relate to women at all, is?" And Scorsese says, "Feminist, because it takes macho to its logical conclusion. The better man is the man who can kill you." This one shows that kind of thinking, shows the kinds of problems some men have, bouncing back and forth between the goddesses and whores. The whole movie is based visually on one shot, where the guy is being turned down on the telephone by the girl, and the camera actually pans away from him.

• 12:33Lizzie Bassett?

  It's too painful to see that rejection.

• 12:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 12:37Lizzie Bassett?

  He gets it. Martin Scorsese is... He's been on our slash red pill. He understands.

• 12:44Chris Winterbauer?

  I feel like this movie is, intentionally or not, such a response to, you know, Dirty Harry, for example.

• 12:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 12:50Chris Winterbauer?

  With the 44 Magnum, which is funny, because my understanding is Dirty Harry is actually based on one of the detectives who was on the Zodiac case, who's played by Mark Ruffalo in Zodiac. And I don't know if he liked the character or not, but the irony, of course, being, one of the reasons that they never caught the Zodiac was that the systems, meaning the various sheriff's departments and police departments, didn't do a good enough job communicating with one another. It was a systemic breakdown. Not one person can actually do what these movies assume they can. And also, I think of something like Death Wish, for example, which I think had come out a couple of years prior. But this idea of the Lone Ranger, the man with the gun, the gunslinger, this is just the ultimate deconstruction of that.

• 13:26Lizzie Bassett?

  It is, and I just, I love the way that he explains this. I love that he's like, "Just because there are women in the movie does not mean it's a feminist movie." Which is 100% correct. And I also, you know, in looking at this, I definitely saw some people being like, "Oh, Martin Scorsese, like, he doesn't really care about women. He hasn't made that many great women characters." I don't agree at all. I think he has. I think he's very interested in women and in, you know, the way that certain types of men interact with them. Anyway, I love him.

• 13:55Chris Winterbauer?

  I think there's an argument, he is the most influential filmmaker of the last 50 years.

• 13:59Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm not gonna... Argue with that.

• 14:00Chris Winterbauer?

  He's got bangers in every decade from 1970 through today.

• 14:03Lizzie Bassett?

  He does. All right. The details as always Taxi Driver was directed by Martin Scorsese. It was written by Paul Schrader. It was produced by super producer, husband and wife duo, Michael and Julia Phillips, who have come up before. It starred Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Cybill Shepherd, Harvey Keitel, Peter Boyle, Albert Brooks, and many more. And as always, the IMDb logline is, "A mentally unstable veteran works as a nighttime taxi driver in New York City where the perceived decadence and sleaze fuel his urge for violent action." Main sources for today are Columbia Pictures Portrait of a Studio by Bernard Dick and a really wonderful oral history of Taxi Driver by The Hollywood Reporter that I definitely

• 14:46Lizzie Bassett?

  recommend you all read, and many, many more. Let's get into it. First of all, I know we both loved First Reformed. Listeners, if you have not seen First Reforms, please go watch it. Paul Schrader is such a freak and he's the absolute best. It's so good. And I would like to start by talking about Paul Schrader because he's really where Taxi Driver starts. So he was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1946. And speaking of First Reformed, he was born into a Calvinist family. Now Calvinism is a form of Protestantism based on John Calvin's teachings. And as far as I can tell, it is pretty hardcore.

• 15:22Chris Winterbauer?

  It is.

• 15:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Do you know what like the basic tenet of it is?

• 15:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay, tell me if I'm right, because I'm just guessing here, but is it both predestination and transcendentalism? Are those the two big aspects of it?

• 15:35Lizzie Bassett?

  God, I hate when you use big words. It's, uh, it's basically the deal with Calvinism is everybody's a sinner. Everybody's real bad and humanity is inherently corrupt and only a select few are able to be atoned. They are chosen by God. You cannot escape your fate if you are one of the chosen few. And I don't believe you can really change your fate if you're not.

• 15:57Chris Winterbauer?

  So that's the predestination, but transcendentalism, very different. And I think I was getting confused with. Schrader's writing on transcendental cinema and something like First Reformed.

• 16:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. So basically, nothing is in your control. God comes first in every element of life, and he has complete sovereignty. And also, you're bad, bad, bad, bad.

• 16:17Chris Winterbauer?

  You can feel that in Schrader's work, for sure.

• 16:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, yes. And in 1928, the Calvinist church had actually forbidden movies, labeling them worldly amusement. And that category also included all things fun, like drinking, smoking, dancing, playing cards. Basically, just you can't go to Las Vegas. When he was seven years old, Schrader begged his mother to let him see Disney's Living Desert in theaters, and she said she couldn't do it. She said, "It doesn't matter if the movie itself is innocuous, because the money that I would be spending on this movie is going towards an evil industry, and I can't support it." So Paul Schrader didn't see a single movie until he was 17 years old. And he actually attended Calvin College, which was a Christian seminary school in Michigan, because his father was desperate for both him and his brother Leonard to become ministers.

• 17:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Spoiler alert, they both became screenwriters.

• 17:10Lizzie Bassett?

  But one summer in college, Schrader studied at Columbia University, and he took every film class he could get his hands on. And one night, he was hanging out at the West End Bar in New York City. Not very Calvinist of you, Paul. And he started talking to a stranger about this book that he'd read called I Lost It at the Movies. It was a collection of movie reviews written by legendary critic Pauline Kael. It turns out, the guy he was talking to was the son of another legendary film critic, and he actually knew Pauline Kael. So he was like, "Do you want to go see her?" And the next day, he did indeed take Schrader to meet Pauline, and they got along so well that he stayed with her all day and night, and even slept on her couch. And in the morning, when he was leaving, she said, "You don't really want to be a minister. You want to be a movie critic.

• 17:52Lizzie Bassett?

  And if you ever want to get into UCLA Graduate School, let me know. I will get you in." So in 1968, he graduated from seminary school and realized she was correct. He did not want to be a minister. So he called up Pauline, and she did exactly what she said she would. She got him into UCLA Film School. And it was pretty clear to everybody that Schrader had something special. He was part of the first group of fellows selected by AFI for its Center for Advanced Film Study. He got a job at the LA Free Press writing film criticism, published in the LA Times. Also a published film criticism author. He wrote a really wonderful essay on film noir that I highly recommend reading. But he realized all this time in film criticism would be wasted if he didn't try writing a screenplay himself. So he wrote his first one. It's called The Pipeliner.

• 18:36Lizzie Bassett?

  It's about a dying man who goes home to Michigan and then promptly destroys the lives of everyone around him. Now, there was a little bit of initial interest in this, but as soon as it started getting momentum, they couldn't secure financing and it fell apart. And so did Schrader's personal life. He had had an affair that caused his marriage to wife Janine Apewal to crash and burn, and the affair also ended. I believe he also lost a job during this time, and the whole thing happened over the course of only about four or five months. And this sent Schrader into a pretty manic spiral. He told film comment, quote, "I got to wandering around at night. I couldn't sleep because I was so depressed. I'd stay in bed till 4 or 5 p.m. Then I'd say, 'Well, I can get a drink now.'

• 19:17Lizzie Bassett?

  I'd get up and get a drink and take the bottle with me and start wandering the streets in my car at night. After the bars closed, I'd go to Pornography, the Pussycat Theater in LA. I'd do this all night till morning, and I did it for about three or four weeks, a very destructive syndrome, until I was saved from it by an ulcer. I had not been eating, just drinking." So he actually ended up getting hospitalized, thanks to a bleeding stomach ulcer. And he realized he had not spoken to a single person in that entire month until he got to the hospital. And as he was leaving the hospital, he said, quote, "That was when the metaphor hit me for Taxi Driver, and I realized that was the metaphor I had been looking for. The man who will take anybody, any place for money. The man who moves through the city like a rat through the sewer.

• 19:59Lizzie Bassett?

  The man who is constantly surrounded by people yet has no friends. The absolute symbol of urban loneliness. That's the thing I'd been living. That was my symbol, my metaphor. The film is about a car as the symbol of urban loneliness, a metal coffin." He pulled inspiration for Travis Bickle from a few other sources as well, including the diaries of Arthur Bremer, who shot presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972, which would be right around this time.

• 20:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 20:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Harry Chapin's song Taxi, Sarah Jane Moore's attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford, which, by the way, I didn't know about her. She is wild.

• 20:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, an unusual female shooter situation or would be assassin.

• 20:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, and she was just like a suburban mom who happened to be extremely radical. Anyway, Schrader wrote the first two drafts of Taxi Driver in less than two weeks, and then he sent it around. And there was pretty much zero interest. But in the fall of that year, 1972, Schrader met Brian De Palma, who in turn introduced him to an up and coming director named Martin Scorsese.

• 21:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Ah.

• 21:09Chris Winterbauer?

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• 22:14Lizzie Bassett?

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• 23:42Lizzie Bassett?

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• 25:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Scorsese was editing Mean Streets at the time, so it had not come out yet. But the two got along really well. And then in November of 1972, Schrader got a letter from his brother detailing an idea for a movie. They met up in LA. They wrote the script in about a month. And in February of 1973, the Yakuza screenplay sold for $300,000. So Chris, you watched this. What can you tell us about it?

• 25:28Chris Winterbauer?

  It's so Schrader-y, but it also, well, you'll get into the making of because there's another writer credited on it that I feel like you can also feel the influence of Robert Toun. You can feel Toun. It's, it feels like an uneasy marriage. But the point is, Robert Mitchum plays a man who was, it's hinted, stationed in Japan. He may have fought in World War II in the Pacific Theater, but was certainly in Japan during the occupation after World War II, which we did talk about during Seven Samurai. And he had two friends. He had a friend named Oliver and a friend named George. In event, he fell in love with a woman named Eiko. She had a daughter. It's very convoluted. Her brother returned from the Philippines five years later. The gist of the movie is that it is built around the idea of this, I believe,

• 26:10Chris Winterbauer?

  accurate Japanese idea of giri, which can mean burden or debt. Tanaka Ken, who's Eiko's brother, feels that he has an unpayable debt to Robert Mitchum's character, who feels a debt to his American friend, George Tanner, who is in a tough spot with the Yakuza. And because of these cascading debts, we end up in a situation where Robert Mitchum and Tanaka Ken are going up against the Yakuza. And it builds to a Tarantino-esque, sort of Crazy 88's, you know, style fight scene.

• 26:39Lizzie Bassett?

  I think he definitely pulled from this movie.

• 26:41Chris Winterbauer?

  You can feel where John Wick pulls from this movie. You can feel where Tarantino pulls from this movie. I ultimately think you can see everything that Schrader's interested in. The ideas of honor, a man's obligation to his fellow man, to himself, ideas of sacrifice, and what is bravery and what is cowardice. But there are things that undermine the movie, in my opinion. I think Robert Mitchum is ultimately somewhat miscast. And there's a lot of like gumshoe detective style dialogue that I feel like slows the narrative down. But it's a really interesting movie, and I highly recommend people watch it.

• 27:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, go check it out for sure. Also, I love Robert Mitchum in basically everything. But I agree, he's not the best in this. But the most important thing to know about this movie is that, you know, Chris is saying it has some of these elements that don't quite fit Schrader's style. That's due very much, I think, to the fact that this was written to be a commercial script. It was written to sell, and it did, for so much money. Now, one day while playing chess with Brian De Palma, Schrader brought up Taxi Driver and shared it with him. And De Palma passed, saying, "This is not my taste." But he did hand this script over to his neighbor, who happened to be future super producer Michael Phillips. And Michael in turn passed it along to his wife and producing partner, the very spicy Julia Phillips, who we've visited before, and also Tony Bill, their other producing partner.

• 28:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, Tony and Michael loved it, but Julia, being a sass queen, wrote in her book, "You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again," quote, "I had found nothing really attractive about Taxi Driver when I first read it, except for its sociology. Travis was a nutcase, a valid nutcase, but a nutcase. I thought Schrader was too." But Julia got outvoted, and the group agreed they would try to option the screenplay for $1,000, and they did. Meanwhile, Brian De Palma had also passed the screenplay along to Martin Scorsese, who was at a bit of a crossroads in his career at this point. Now, he had directed Boxcar Bertha in 1972 for Roger Corman. Of course, everybody comes out of Roger Corman. Then he'd done a pretty small indie movie called Who's That Knocking at My Door? Harvey Keitel is in that one as well.

• 28:43Lizzie Bassett?

  And I believe Mean Streets, as we said, was in either production or post-production at this point, but it had not come out yet. According to Bernard Dick in Columbia Pictures' Portrait of a Studio, quote, "Scorsese frequently lamented the choice confronting him. The question of commercialism is a source of worry. Must one make a choice? Must it be a matter of either setting your sights on winning an Academy Award and becoming a millionaire, or making only the movies you want to make and starving to death?" But it didn't really matter what Scorsese thought because the Phillipses didn't know who the hell he was and they didn't think he was a big enough name to attach to Taxi Driver. But he kept coming back to them because he really loved the script and Julia Phillips kept swatting him away. According to Marty, quote, "She'd just tell me, come around again when you've done something more than Boxcar Bertha."

• 29:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, which, yeah, and I think who's that knocking at my door, which I saw a long time ago, that feels like more like what Scorsese will eventually do. It deals with Catholicism and a young, and Harvey Keitel very much torn between the worlds of what his desires and beliefs are. Boxcar Bertha feels like such a weird aberrant entry into his filmography.

• 29:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, the producers also had someone else in mind. They were considering a version of Taxi Driver directed by Robert Mulligan and starring Jeff Bridges. Doesn't make any sense.

• 29:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Hey, man. Um, yeah, I don't know.

• 30:01Lizzie Bassett?

  It's, he's a little too chill.

• 30:03Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't know. Look, Jeff Bridges is a great actor. It's, it's impossible to imagine without De Niro now because it's such an iconic performance that I think it feels unfair.

• 30:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Well, Schrader was pushing back pretty hard on this. He knew it wasn't right and he even said that he thought the Phillipses kind of knew it wasn't spot on, but everyone just wanted to see the movie get made and felt like that was their best bet at that point.

• 30:23Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 30:24Lizzie Bassett?

  But then Paul Schrader saw a rough cut of Mean Streets and he's like, Julia, Michael, pals, you need to sit down and watch this. And they did. And halfway through, they realized they were a couple of dumb, dumb dummies and they must have both Scorsese and Robert De Niro for Taxi Driver. Important to remember, he had not done The Godfather Part Two at this point.

• 30:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Right.

• 30:46Lizzie Bassett?

  So they started shopping this around as a package deal. Scorsese, De Niro, Schrader, and everyone's like, who?

• 30:54Chris Winterbauer?

  A combined height of 15 feet between those three men. I'm just teasing.

• 31:00Lizzie Bassett?

  They are all relatively small. And also, all handsome.

• 31:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Very, oh, all very handsome, especially at that time, very dapper. You mentioned Godfather Part Two. What's interesting is I think the performance in that movie would not have lent itself as well to Taxi Driver as Mean Streets, right?

• 31:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 31:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Mean Streets is, his performance in Mean Streets as Johnny Boy is so much closer to a Taxi Driver archetype.

• 31:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Totally. So, everybody's like, we don't know who the fuck these people are. Like, this is not a priority for us. Honestly, the biggest name at this point might have been Schrader because of how much the Yakuza sold for.

• 31:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Sure.

• 31:33Lizzie Bassett?

  That is until the mid 70s rolled around and this package deal started to look pretty great because Scorsese released Mean Streets in 1973, which of course starred Robert De Niro. Then De Niro went and starred in The Godfather Part Two in 1974. Meanwhile, the Phillips had produced The Sting in 1973, which had won seven Oscars, including Best Picture. Julia Phillips is actually the first woman producer to win Best Picture.

• 31:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow.

• 31:59Lizzie Bassett?

  So basically, this is now an enormously incentivized package deal because of what they did over the span of like a year and a half or two years. So Columbia Pictures with David Begelman at its head, greenlit Taxi Driver. But Begelman was pretty nervous about it. I think understandably so. And the only reason it got made was that every single major player took a massive pay cut to make it happen. De Niro got $35,000 for this. Scorsese got $65,000. The producers got $45,000 and Paul Schrader got $30,000. And remember, he had just sold the Yakuza for $300,000.

• 32:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, Chris, any guesses in particular what might be making the studio a little nervous about this point? And to be clear, this would be right around the end of 1974, early 1975. What's going on in the world?

• 32:52Chris Winterbauer?

  We're just getting out of Vietnam, right?

• 32:55Lizzie Bassett?

  We are not out of Vietnam yet. The war is still very much going on. I believe it ended in 1975.

• 33:03Chris Winterbauer?

  OK, got it. I mean, we've had a string of lone shooters.

• 33:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's been, there's been a lot of assassination attempts. The Vietnam War is still going on. Taxi driver is clearly not a fan of the Vietnam War. And most movies involving a hint of war up to this point had only dealt with wars like World War II or Korea. They don't really want to deal with something that's happening while the movie is being made, basically.

• 33:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Right, we're still well before The Deer Hunter, we're well before a lot of films critical of the Vietnam War.

• 33:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Which, by the way, those all came out after it had ended. This, that was not the case with this. So Julia Phillips, for her part, also said that Begelman really hated the script. And the only way she got him on board was to promise that they would fire Scorsese and bring in Steven Spielberg to save it if they needed to.

• 33:52Chris Winterbauer?

  I love Spielberg. He is so wrong for this.

• 33:55Lizzie Bassett?

  I agree. She, she does say that he agreed to do this, that he agreed to step in and take it over if Scorsese really blew it. Which is interesting because he was friends with Scorsese, so I do wonder if he just turned around and told him, but who knows?

• 34:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Had he done Jaws yet? Because Jaws is 75, the summer of 75.

• 34:14Lizzie Bassett?

  He was probably in production on Jaws, would be my guess.

• 34:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is interesting because, you know, that's the one notoriously was a very troubled production. And there were a lot of questions as to whether or not, which direction it was going to go? And which direction Spielberg was going to go as a result.

• 34:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, maybe that's why he was like, yes, sure, any job I will have it, to give it to me. They got a budget of only $1.3 million and they set off into casting. So Scorsese had apparently originally thought of another one of his frequent collaborators to play Travis Bickle, Harvey Keitel. But the Phillips was like, no, no, no, De Niro is our lead. So Scorsese offered Keitel the role of a campaign worker, and I do wonder if this is the Albert Brooks part. I don't know that for sure.

• 34:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he's too good looking. He's too dashing.

• 34:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Except his hair in this movie.

• 35:02Chris Winterbauer?

  I know, I know. But I feel like you need Albert Brooks doing the forerunner to what he'll do in broadcast news.

• 35:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 35:08Chris Winterbauer?

  You know what I mean? So well. And Albert Brooks, by the way, who would go on to be his own, not only great director, but a great romantic leading man as well.

• 35:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I love Albert Brooks.

• 35:16Chris Winterbauer?

  He's amazing.

• 35:16Lizzie Bassett?

  And he can be very sinister, too. So Keitel came back, though, after reading the script and was like, no, no, no, I would like to play the pimp, please. And they were like, oh, did you, um, Harvey, the pimp is a black person in the script.

• 35:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh.

• 35:32Lizzie Bassett?

  And he was like, I don't care. It's like, it should be me. And Scorsese and Schrader were really not totally sure about it. The studio, however, was like, yes, fantastic. Please change the race of the pimp character in this. They were very concerned about all the violence at the end of the movie being enacted exclusively against black people.

• 35:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Sure.

• 35:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, a valid point. And if that were the direction the movie had gone, they were not super on board for that. It's not for a particularly honorable reason. They were very concerned about potential rioting in the theaters and didn't want any legal liability affiliated with that. Quentin Tarantino famously derided this decision to change sports race because Travis murdering a bunch of black people, Tarantino thought was kind of the point. Like, oh, he's racist. That's what this is.

• 36:15Chris Winterbauer?

  That is true. I mean, it is. That's consistent with the character Schrader's crafted.

• 36:19Lizzie Bassett?

  It is. I mean, and that is how it was written. I believe that was Schrader's intention. But the way Tarantino said this was like, oh, they shouldn't have given into the studio. Schrader says it's not that black and white. He told a rabbit's foot, quote, "I was involved in that decision. It wasn't in the script. It was just taken for granted that pimps in New York are all black." And Melnick, who ran it at Columbia, said, quote, "We're gonna have an incident in the theater if you do this. If at the end Travis just goes and starts killing all the black people and only black people, something's going to happen. It only takes one incident in a theater to kill a film." So it sounds like he agreed that this was not worth any potential risk at the time and didn't feel like it was a huge character issue to change it. So Keitel got the part. Now, Albert Brooks, who had come up as a stand-up comedian and had just wrapped directing a few short films

• 37:02Lizzie Bassett?

  for the first season of SNL, was cast as Tom. This is his first big feature role. He's so good. And according to Brooks, there was quite a lot of improvisation during rehearsal, but not on the set. He basically said they would rehearse and improvise for hours and then Scorsese and Schrader would be there watching it. Then he would write it into the script so that when the cameras rolled, they knew what they were working with. And that does seem to be the case across basically everyone in this movie, which I think is pretty cool.

• 37:28Chris Winterbauer?

  And it makes perfect sense because they have a low budget, so they don't want to burn film.

• 37:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 37:32Chris Winterbauer?

  So just do the rehearsals. You have your actors for cheap. It's a good way of going about it.

• 37:37Lizzie Bassett?

  It's smart. So Cybill Shepherd was cast as Betsy and she was coming off pretty hot of The Last Picture Show and The Heartbreak Kid. She's actually one of the biggest stars in this movie at the time, but she took some convincing. When she first read the script, she threw it across the room because she was pissed that her character had basically no lines. She eventually came around to it, but it sounds like this was not a particularly pleasant experience for her. According to Julia Phillips, quote, "Marty's misogyny was apparent from his casting of Cybill Shepherd as Betsy. We had interviewed just about every blonde on both coasts and still he kept looking, looking, looking. I liked Farrah Fawcett, her fine bones, her Aquiline profile, her big teeth, her thin body. Marty picked Cybill for her big ass, a retro Italian gesture I always felt.

• 38:22Lizzie Bassett?

  In the end, he had to give her line readings and De Niro hated her." To which I say, fuck you, Julia. If Cybill Shepherd has a big ass, come on. And also like, I think that's a totally unfair representation of Martin Scorsese and why he would cast her.

• 38:37Chris Winterbauer?

  I just don't think they shoot her that way.

• 38:39Lizzie Bassett?

  They don't.

• 38:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Look, Cybill Shepherd's very beautiful. I don't mean to take away from that, but I think she does have a girl next door quality to her that I think is so important.

• 38:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. She looks accessible in a way that Farrah Fawcett does not.

• 38:53Chris Winterbauer?

  No. Bickle's not going to walk in there with Farrah Fawcett, I think, in the same way. Neither is Albert Brooks gonna flirt with her at the office.

• 39:00Lizzie Bassett?

  No. Like, Cybill Shepherd's gorgeous, but she totally looks like the most beautiful woman in the real world, you know, that you could, hey, maybe I have a shot.

• 39:10Chris Winterbauer?

  By the way, you don't, but maybe.

• 39:11Lizzie Bassett?

  You definitely don't. She, she did have a pretty bad time by all accounts. It does seem like Martin Scorsese had a hard time with her.

• 39:18Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, may not have been the right fit on set. I'm just saying, I totally understand. I do think she's a great choice visually and otherwise.

• 39:25Lizzie Bassett?

  I do too. But it seems like out of everyone, she just didn't really get this process. And they were very openly frustrated with her, which sucks. Like, De Niro, I think, was really frustrated with her. Martin Scorsese just gave a Lot of line readings, so not a particularly pleasant experience for her. But I do just want to call out that gorgeous Diane von Furstenberg rap dress that she wears was her own dress that she brought to set. So justice for civil. And then finally, there was Iris. Now, I'd always thought they must have auditioned tons of kids for this role. That does not seem to be the case at all. Jodie Foster had already worked with Martin Scorsese on Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. And it kind of sounds like he just called up her mom directly and was like, hey, do you want to make another one? Do you want to come back?

• 40:08Lizzie Bassett?

  And in fact, Jodie Foster herself points out, at the time that the cast was being put together, she had made more movies than basically anyone else there. And this is true. Again, go back and listen to our out of frame episode for a little bit more background on Jodie Foster. But she was a very established child actor at this point, especially thanks to some live action Disney films. So they knew they wanted her. Her mom was on board. She trusted Martin Scorsese. They had all met together about it and they all agreed, this is a good fit. Let's do it. But the Board of Education was not. They refused to sign a work permit for the then 12 year old Jodie Foster to portray a sex worker in the film. Now, Jodie went on Conan's podcast this year and pointed out that compared to what we see nowadays,

• 40:52Lizzie Bassett?

  the sex scenes aren't even really that suggestive, which I guess is true, but she's 12 and the context is so upsetting. So I do understand what they were concerned about with this. Absolutely. She said that at the time, quote, "The Board of Education started having issues with the idea of young kids doing more adult roles. They were concerned that somehow, you know, playing these characters, that we would be confused about ourselves and who we were." I think it's a valid concern. I do too. I have very mixed feelings about the casting of her in this movie. I think she is incredible in it. I think what Scorsese is doing is he is forcing you to look at an actual 12 year old next to grown men. And there is something to be said for that because this, so, so often in movies,

• 41:36Lizzie Bassett?

  when you are dealing with someone who is underage, having a sexual relationship with an older person, they will often cast someone who is not actually underage or who looks quite a bit older than they are, which almost makes it feel acceptable on some level. And I think he is very explicitly saying, no, I'm casting a 12 year old because I want you to see what that actually looks like. There is a movie, I believe it was made for HBO. It's called The Tale. It stars Laura Dern. If you haven't seen this, it is worth watching. It shows the memories of this woman who's kind of realizing that she was groomed by this person who she thought was her boyfriend, but she was, you know, 13, 14 years old. And in most of the flashbacks, they show an actress who, like I'm saying, looks a bit more developed, looks older, doesn't seem as strange.

• 42:21Lizzie Bassett?

  And then what happens is she sees a picture of herself at that age and she looks like a little girl. And you start to see the flashbacks again with a different actress who looks much younger. And it is very effective. So that's all I'll say about that. I agree that this is concerning material for a 12-year-old, but I do understand what he's trying to do.

• 42:41Lizzie Bassett?

  So in order to secure that work permit, Jodie Foster had to undergo a four-hour-long interview with a psychiatrist. At the end of the interview, the doctor ruled that she was mentally equipped to handle the part and what was being asked of her. And also, it should be noted, they agreed right away that anything verging too much on a sexual encounter in the movie would not be Jodie Foster. It would be her older sister Connie, who was 18 at the time and basically the same size. You can kind of tell, but they do it very well. I don't know if you caught a couple of moments, Chris, where they do swap in Connie. I didn't notice. It's very subtle. So there's a couple. When you see her try and drop her shirt and you see the back of her shoulders, that is Connie, that's not Jodie Foster. Also, I believe when she's dancing with Harvey Keitel, it's Jodie Foster for like the first two-thirds of that.

• 43:25Lizzie Bassett?

  And then there's one moment where he turns away from the camera and you can't see her for like, literally, one second. I think they swap her there because then she turns around and he kisses her and he's not kissing Jodie Foster.

• 43:38Lizzie Bassett?

  So even though the content was disturbing, it sounds like Foster was decently well-protected on the set. She told The New York Times in 1976, "There was a welfare worker on the set every day. She saw the daily rushes of all my scenes and made sure I wasn't on the set when Robert De Niro said a dirty word." That's so funny that that's what you're worried about. Actually, I think the only thing that could have had a bad effect on me was the blood in the shooting scene. It was really neat, though. It was red sugary stuff and they used styrofoam for bones and a pump to make the blood gush out of the man's arm after he shot it off. So she was fine. But when it came to preparing for her role as Iris, Jodie Foster had a pretty good teacher, Robert De Niro. He took her under his wing during this production and would take her out to coffee shops to run lines and improvise with her. And she's 12 years old, so she like doesn't

• 44:21Lizzie Bassett?

  really get it. She said she thought he was pretty weird, which I can't imagine being a 12-year-old and going out to lunch with Robert De Niro. There would be nothing weirder.

• 44:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, but he's not even really Robert De Niro at that point. You know what I mean? What, he's 30 years old? Or, you know, it's, it's just, yeah.

• 44:38Lizzie Bassett?

  So that was until they got on set and she started to understand the character that he had helped her build during all of these rehearsals and pre-production. She said, "He really made me understand what it was to create a character, something I didn't know at 12 years old. And it changed, it definitely changed my life." And it's a good thing that De Niro had kind of already stepped into this role because Martin Scorsese, once they got into production, did have some issues directing the very young Jodie Foster in some of those adult scenes. She told Graham Norton, quote, "They were very uncomfortable about my character. Nobody knew how to direct me. Scorsese would say something like, unzip his fly and just start laughing and not know what to do. So he would hand it over to Robert De Niro and then Robert would tell me what to do." And he was even more Robert De Niro then, even quieter and more strange.

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• 46:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Now, while he was helping prep and direct Jodie Foster, De Niro was working an absolutely punishing schedule. He was actually filming Bertolucci's 1900 in Italy during prep for Taxi Driver. And I believe he would finish shooting in Rome on a Friday, get on a plane to New York, drive an actual cab around the city for the weekend before flying back to Rome on Monday. And he did get a real cab license and was functioning as a taxi driver. "I don't want you driving me around if you've just gotten off a plane from Italy."

• 46:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Crazy.

• 46:39Lizzie Bassett?

  And so this was terrifying for several reasons, not least of which being how the fuck was he awake on this schedule? But also, New York City in 1975 was, pretty much just as Travis diagnoses it, a shit show. Or rather, an open sewer full of filth and scum. And he was technically correct about that open sewer part, because in 1975, Chris, New York City saw a sanitation worker strike. In early July, in 90-degree heat, sanitation workers staged an unofficial strike. It lasted for three days. Trash piled up at the rate of 28,000 tons a day. So it smelled like hot trash all over the city. And in June of 1975,

• 47:23Lizzie Bassett?

  New York City had also reached the absolute zenith of a credit issue. It had cut off access to the money market. It was unable to borrow any money. It needed to pay back its bills. It was basically on the brink of bankruptcy. They couldn't pay teachers. They couldn't pay police officers. There were issues paying sanitation workers. The city didn't have the money for anything. It was literally on the brink of collapse. So it was a pretty rough time to be in New York City. Meanwhile, Scorsese and Schrader were busy finding the real people to serve as inspiration for the film. Scorsese took Peter Boyle and the rest of the cabbies to the Belmore Cafeteria, which was a legendary cab driver hangout cafe. And they would just sit around and listen to the real cabbies

• 48:06Lizzie Bassett?

  and then bring that dialogue back to Schrader and Scorsese, who again, would then go write it into the script.

• 48:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And you can know a lot of the like, you know, "And then she's putting her panties on." We're driving across the, you know, it feels like the jocular workroom, breakroom talk that you might hear, you know, from cab drivers at the time.

• 48:26Lizzie Bassett?

  A hundred percent. But while Scorsese was focused on the cabbies, Paul Schrader was focused on the sex workers, specifically sport, because of course, they've changed the race of this character. And so he went out looking for, these are his words, not mine, the great white pimp, uh, who he never found, by the way, but he would go around asking everyone being like, hi, is there a white pimp nearby, perhaps that you could direct me to? And everyone was like, I don't know, maybe over there. Like, what are you doing?

• 48:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Paul Schrader is such, and one day we'll cover the canyons when he stripped down naked to shoot the final nude scene to convince Lindsay Lohan to do her nudity. He is an unusual fella. One of the most incredible presences in film history and one of the most unusual with incredible highs and incredible lows in his career.

• 49:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Well, after a long search, he ended up at a bar that a lot of sex workers hung out in, and that's where he found a 15 year old girl named Garth Avery. He couldn't believe how close Garth was to the character of Iris that he'd written on the page. So he figured, I have to talk to this girl more. I have to have Marty talk to this girl. But he was like, I'm never going to find her again if she leaves right now. And so he said, listen, I'll give you 200 bucks if you will come back to my suite at the St. Regis. You sleep in the bed. I'm going to sleep in the couch. I just want you to meet someone in the morning. And she said, yes. That night, he slipped a note under Martin Scorsese's door that read, Marty, I've met Iris. We're going to have breakfast at eight o'clock in the morning.

• 50:03Lizzie Bassett?

  You should come down and meet her. And according to Schrader, the next morning at breakfast, he said, quote, so it's the next morning, I'm having breakfast with Garth and Marty comes down and meets her. Virtually all the stuff Jodi does in the movie, we saw at that breakfast. She had a bag full of different colored sunglasses. And during the conversation, she'd just take one out, put it down, take another one out, put it down. She'd roll up a piece of bread, put butter on it, cover it with sugar, sugar, sugar, roll it up and eat it like this. All kinds of junky mannerisms. As soon as Scorsese saw that, he knew what to say to Jodi. It was all there. And I think this is something that this movie does incredibly well. There is almost like a documentary style quality to elements of it. And it really does seem like that's because they went out there and they spoke to these people

• 50:48Lizzie Bassett?

  and they just transcribed what they said. So like Iris, Garth had grown up in an upper middle-class family. She had gone to a good school. She got a great education. She had family who cared about her, siblings who frequently tried to bring her home and get her clean, but sadly, they never succeeded. Now, Jodie Foster did eventually meet Garth. It seems Scorsese and Schrader thought this would be some sort of like besties bonding meet cute, but the reality is they were introducing a 12-year-old to a sex worker and unfortunately, also a drug addict. And they basically just said hi to each other and that was it. It was really awkward. But the inspiration for Foster's costume was heavily pulled from Garth and Foster was really not happy about that. She was a self-described tomboy.

• 51:32Lizzie Bassett?

  She hated the platform heels, the short shorts, the shirt, everything. By the way, Garth does appear in the movie. She is actually the girl who's walking next to Jodie Foster when Travis is trying to get her to get in the car. They tried to give her a bigger part with more scenes, but unfortunately, she just couldn't show up. She was an alcoholic who struggled with drug addiction as well and they had to just let that be it. Very sadly, she would die less than 20 years later in 1994 of complications from HIV. Now, cameras rolled in June of 1975 and apartments for Travis and Iris were actually built inside a real building that was scheduled to be torn down. According to Scorsese, quote, "It was a horrible, horrible place. It was really miserable.

• 52:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Had a lot of character, but it was a miserable place. Even the night shooting there was very disturbing." And according to Michael Phillips, there was another problem. He said, quote, "It was very arduous. It was a tight schedule. We were over from the beginning and there was a lot of pressure from the studio." Which I think is interesting because this was so cheap. Like, I don't really know why they were breathing down their necks the way that they were.

• 52:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I don't know. Maybe there's pressure on other projects. You know what I'm saying? And they, and they, it's, it's trickling downhill.

• 52:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, Phillips was the one who ended up kind of handling most of that pressure. According to Scorsese, quote, "Michael Phillips absorbed a great deal of that. For example, I shot De Niro in this porno theater on 8th Avenue. And there's a reverse in which you see the pornography on the screen. I was going to put a drop of oil on the negative to obscure the image, but in order to do that, I had to get the image first. They saw the film at the studio before I could obscure it, and up comes the pornography. They were furious, yelled at Michael, no matter what I did, it irritated everyone."

• 53:12Chris Winterbauer?

  It is obscured in the version I saw.

• 53:15Lizzie Bassett?

  No, he does it. He does exactly what he said he was going to do. It's just that they saw it before he had done that. So it's these things of like, I don't know. I think maybe it's the material and that they were just like extremely worried. And so anything was kind of setting them off. I'm not sure. And again, New York in the summer of 1975 was about as unpleasant as it gets. According to Steve Clifford, who I believe was a New York resident, everybody thought New York City was going to hell. Nothing seemed to work. The subways were, you know, 120 degrees in the summer. There was crime, there was dirt, there was just dirt everywhere. And Scorsese had brought on Michael Chapman to handle cinematography. He was East Coast based and pretty cheap, and those were basically his qualifications. And I think he does an incredible job in this movie.

• 53:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 53:58Lizzie Bassett?

  But according to Chapman, quote, "Much of the way the movie looks was dictated by the fact that we didn't have a lot of time and didn't have a lot of money and therefore couldn't do traditional things." Now, this includes things like they couldn't light the streets with big lights. They didn't have the money for it. So they had to just work with the lights that were already there. And they really did not have a lot of money. Here is how he explained they captured the scenes in the car with De Niro. Quote, "We were in a real cab in real New York. We weren't even towing the cab behind any sort of generator truck. It was just Bobby driving the cab through the streets. Marty and I would squat in the back with the camera operator shooting over Bobby's shoulder. We had a little 110 battery pack in the trunk. We stuck the sound man in there, poor guy, and we'd just drive off into the streets."

• 54:41Chris Winterbauer?

  True guerrilla style filmmaking.

• 54:42Lizzie Bassett?

  And it looks great. And meanwhile, the studio was always lurking. The second week of filming was plagued with constant rainstorms. So naturally, the studio execs were like, hey, why don't you move some of these urban scenes inside and drop this whole New York City backdrop type thing? And what do you think Martin Scorsese had to say about that?

• 55:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Go fuck yourself.

• 55:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, basically, basically. He was really upset. He reportedly exploded and shut down the entire production at lunch. And later that night, he's like, I will walk off. I will walk off the set and I will never come back if they keep meddling. And so Columbia was like, fine, do whatever you want. Just stay under budget. We don't care. By late August to early September, it was the end of a relatively short shoot, even though they were five or six days over the 40 day shoot and they had gone a bit over budget at that point. But there was a problem. Chris, what's the most iconic line in this movie?

• 55:34Chris Winterbauer?

  You talking to me?

• 55:35Lizzie Bassett?

  You talking to me?

• 55:36Chris Winterbauer?

  You talking to me?

• 55:37Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right. That's the one. Well, they didn't have it. And not like they didn't have the right take or the right performance. It was not written. The script just said Travis pulls his gun out and talks to himself. So.

• 55:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 55:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. In order to squeeze this scene in, Scorsese locked himself and De Niro in the room with no camera operator, no AD, and he sort of like tucked himself like a little garden gnome in at Robert De Niro's feet and was directing him from down there how to improvise into the mirror. This went on for over an hour and a half and his AD was literally banging down the door being like, you have to move on. And I love this. Martin Scorsese cracked the door and goes, this is good. This is good. Give me five. Give two more minutes. One more take. One more take.

• 56:17Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, it works really well. And that, that whole montage is, yeah, it's one of the moments where he does use editing to undercut Bickle in some very interesting ways, right? You have like Bickle's, I love how Bickle resets his own monologue a couple of times. It's very funny.

• 56:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. Now allegedly, this line may have come from Bruce Springsteen.

• 56:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay.

• 56:39Lizzie Bassett?

  I had a hard time completely confirming this, but some sources say that either De Niro or Scorsese attended a Bruce Springsteen concert at the Bottom Line in New York City. And at one point, the crowd was calling out Bruce's name, Bruce. So he turned around and said, are you talking to me? Are you talking to me? And apparently that stuck with them. His manager does say he did say that at this concert and that he's pretty sure that they were there. So who knows? Some really cool production and costume design details I want to mention as it pertains Travis's past in Vietnam. Scorsese was very meticulous about this. He hired a former special forces officer with a background in psychology to consult with him on how Travis would move, how he would talk, how he would avoid eye contact. Like, they are very specific about

• 57:23Lizzie Bassett?

  this. The mohawk he has by the end was suggested by a friend of Scorsese's and an actor who had served in Vietnam. And he told Scorsese, quote, "In Saigon, if you saw a guy with his head shaved like a little mohawk, that usually meant those people were ready to go into a certain special forces situation. You didn't even go near them. They were ready to kill." And according to Bernard Dix's Columbia Pictures portrait of a studio, both Scorsese and Schrader worked really hard to make sure the audience understood that Travis's past was traumatic, that he did not snap out of nowhere. Couple of key details. There is a super large scar on Travis's back. He complains of insomnia. He worries about cancer in his stomach. Those are very common worries, particularly of veterans of Vietnam.

• 58:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, with Agent Orange.

• 58:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 58:08Chris Winterbauer?

  He's popping amphetamines, you know, throughout the movie.

• 58:11Lizzie Bassett?

  He battles fatigue, often expressing as sleeplessness. He's popping amphetamines. He's smoking unfiltered Camel cigarettes, which I guess could be easily carried into combat zones because they didn't have any filter residue. Also, the shoe polish, the knife that he straps to his leg. Apparently, that's something that only special forces use in Vietnam. So there are so many context clues as to what the deal is. But I would like to end our production section by talking about my favorite scene and performance in the whole movie. It's not Robert De Niro. It's not Jodie Foster. Who do you think it is, Chris?

• 58:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, you kind of teased it for me before the episode, so I can't claim credit, but I'm gonna say it's Martin Scorsese playing really maybe the most vile character in the whole movie.

• 58:54Lizzie Bassett?

  It is!

• 58:55Chris Winterbauer?

  It's horrifying scene. Yeah, it's really dark.

• 58:58Lizzie Bassett?

  It is! I love this scene. I love it. It's a horror movie, and he's so scary. He's so good.

• 59:07Chris Winterbauer?

  So the scene is Scorsese is playing a character who's a passenger in De Niro's cab. And he just tells him to keep the meter running and to wait outside of a window. And he's points and there's a silhouette of a woman. It's and again, it's set up in a way where you think, is this De Niro's fantasy of what he's seeing in the window? Right? Because it's like a silhouette profile of a woman.

• 59:28Lizzie Bassett?

  It's very Austin Powers. Yes.

• 59:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Right. Yeah. Her breast is revealed in some way and Scorsese reveals to De Niro very casually. This is his wife and she's having an affair and she's having an affair with a black man. He does not use that word and he's gonna kill her. And he's gonna shoot her in the face with a 44 Magnum. You should see what a 44 Magnum can do to a woman's face. And then he goes on to say, you should see what it can do to her vagina. And he, the casualness with which he expresses this makes it feel like a foregone conclusion that it's going to happen, which is so terrifying. It's actually more terrifying than the bickle posturing in his apartment.

• 1:00:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:00:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Because it doesn't feel like Scorsese's character is posturing at all.

• 1:00:12Lizzie Bassett?

  No, it feels like he's gonna do it. Yeah, it's terrible.

• 1:00:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, this is happening, buddy. It's happening tomorrow.

• 1:00:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. I love this scene even more, knowing that the role was not supposed to be played by Martin Scorsese. He was a last minute swap for actor George Mammoli, who very unfortunately got pretty severely injured on another movie set. I'm pretty sure it was a back injury and they didn't have time to replace him. So Scorsese decided to step in and everyone, including Scorsese, was pretty nervous about it. Also, Paul Schrader was nervous because he was worried that if Scorsese didn't turn in a good performance and he didn't like it, that he would end up cutting it, which was in fact Scorsese's plan if he had sucked. But Schrader was concerned because that would remove a pivotal scene from the film. Also, I don't know if you just Googled a picture of George Mammoli, but.

• 1:00:57Chris Winterbauer?

  I just did.

• 1:00:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, so he's huge.

• 1:01:00Chris Winterbauer?

  He's a big man.

• 1:01:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:01:01Chris Winterbauer?

  And I think it works less, it works better because he has a Joe Pesci, Goodfellas energy where he's just like, holy shit, this guy could just go off on anyone at any point in time.

• 1:01:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:10Chris Winterbauer?

  And there's no indicator as opposed to this larger bully type, right? Which is also what makes Scorsese's cameo in Mean Streets so effective as Shorty. And, okay, skip 15, 30 seconds if you haven't seen Mean Streets. But at the end, he's the one who shoots Keitel and Amy Robinson's character and, and De Niro in the neck. De Niro keeps getting shot in the neck. And it's so unexpected and he's again, so casual about it. He's so casual about the violence.

• 1:01:37Lizzie Bassett?

  I'll say this for Martin Scorsese, he is a small man. And anytime he has appeared on screen, he doesn't hide that. Like, it's very much used to his advantage. And I think that him being this kind of small squirrely guy in the back of the cab, it ends up working so much better, like you said. And I think it also kind of plays into the male fantasy world that this movie is living in. And, you know, he is like one of the most manosphere characters in the whole thing.

• 1:02:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, in a terrible way. And I think Scorsese is very aware of this, but you could lean into this idea that there's a whole character backstory that becomes apparent with this idea of, oh, maybe he feels like he's been overlooked in some way because of his height.

• 1:02:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:02:22Chris Winterbauer?

  This is even more emasculating, right? Because he's a smaller man. And so it allows for us to project a really terrifying history onto this character in a scene that lasts 90 seconds.

• 1:02:33Lizzie Bassett?

  It lasts longer than that. It's a pretty impressively long monologue, but yes.

• 1:02:37Chris Winterbauer?

  But my point being, we never see him before or after.

• 1:02:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, fortunately, the film's resident acting coach was there for Scorsese, and that is Robert De Niro. And he, I think, could tell that Scorsese was nervous. And he just said, listen, I'm not going to turn my meter off until you make me turn my meter off. And that really clicked for Martin Scorsese, and it ends up being a wonderful scene. And by the way, I should say, the end of Taxi Driver is obviously very much open to interpretation. We're not going to discuss it much here because we actually did discuss it in depth with Hannah and Sarudy from Red Handed on Friday's episode that went into the case of Jodie Foster and John Hinckley Jr. So if you want to hear what we think about the end of Taxi Driver, go back and listen to that episode. One day after they wrapped production,

• 1:03:24Lizzie Bassett?

  President Gerald Ford denied a federal bailout to the city of New York, prompting a very famous New York Daily News headline that read, quote, Ford to City, Drop Dead.

• 1:03:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Quite a time to be in New York City.

• 1:03:45Lizzie Bassett?

  All right, let's talk about post-production. So Taxi Driver was edited by Tom Rolf, Melvin Shapiro, Scorsese himself, and who, Chris?

• 1:03:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Marcia Lucas.

• 1:03:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Marcia Lucas, yes. I couldn't confirm this 100%. I believe she may have been kind of supervising the edit, because there were several other editors working on it. But she had cut Scorsese's first studio feature, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, and they would continue working together after this as well.

• 1:04:09Chris Winterbauer?

  She was, in a way, more integrated into this group of directors than Lucas himself was, in some senses, at this point in time.

• 1:04:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, and my understanding about that is that she, someone basically said to her, like, "You need to cut somebody else's movie that's not your husband, because if you don't do that, everyone's just gonna think that you're getting these jobs because George Lucas is your husband." And to George Lucas's credit, he apparently was like, "That's probably true. Like, you should go work for someone else." And she did. But since this was Bernard Herman's final film, I want to spend a little bit of time talking about the score, which I think is incredible. The score, to me, is maybe the most important part of making this a fantasy.

• 1:04:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 1:04:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Because it doesn't quite, I think it intentionally doesn't quite match the tone of the movie in a way that makes it all just feel a little wrong.

• 1:04:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, it really sells the idea that Travis Bickle thinks of himself as the lead in like, a film noir, like a Philip Marlowe or a Dashiell Hammett story, like The Long Goodbye or something like that.

• 1:05:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:05:11Chris Winterbauer?

  It's that smooth, jazzy.

• 1:05:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Raymond Chandler, yeah.

• 1:05:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Raymond Chandler. "I knew the dame was trouble the minute she walked in." And it's like, "Sir, you just barged into her office."

• 1:05:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 1:05:21Chris Winterbauer?

  And so it's really, it's so good.

• 1:05:24Lizzie Bassett?

  And she is not interested in going to a porn theater with you.

• 1:05:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, no, yeah, she's initially a little interested, which I think is smart, because he's very handsome. Again, it's just very smartly constructed. But yes, I think the score is so, it's jarring in all the best ways. I think it's very smart.

• 1:05:41Lizzie Bassett?

  It is. So Scorsese approached Herman personally, and Herman was like, "No, thank you. I don't know anything about taxis. I don't do movies about cabs. I don't get it."

• 1:05:51Chris Winterbauer?

  That's the extent of it. "Never been in a taxi. I don't even know what this cab is."

• 1:05:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Never been in a cab. I don't get it. And then Scorsese was like, just, just five minutes, five minutes. One more take, one more take. I got it. This is good. This is good. But he read the script and that did change his mind completely. Little bit, very briefly about Bernard Herrmann, if you're not familiar. He was not from a musical family at all. And somehow he managed to win a songwriting competition at 12 years old and then went off to study at Juilliard. Following that up with a gig as the composer and conductor for CBS Radio. By the time he was 22 years old, this is of course where he met Orson Welles. The two collaborated on the War of the Worlds broadcast. And then he made his feature debut with Citizen Kane. It's just crazy. Then he ends up teaming up with Hitchcock on many films, including North by Northwest and Psycho. And he had just worked with Brian De Palma on Obsession.

• 1:06:40Lizzie Bassett?

  And it was De Palma who suggested Herman to Scorsese. So Taxi Driver owes quite a bit of favors to Brian De Palma. But on December 23rd, 1975, Herman completed the score for Taxi Driver and turned it in. And one day later, at 64 years old, Bernard Herrmann died of congestive heart failure in his sleep.

• 1:06:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Wow, I did not know that. That's.

• 1:07:01Lizzie Bassett?

  One day.

• 1:07:02Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, it's terribly sad because 64 is still very young. But I am glad we got one more Bernard Herrmann score. And also, was it, sorry to backtrack, wasn't Obsession also written by Schrader?

• 1:07:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, Obsession was written by Paul Schrader. Now with a final score and cut in hand, Taxi Driver was screened for a small group of friends who I think loved it. And then they screened it for the execs at Columbia Pictures and they did not love it. They had one pretty major concern right away. Chris, any guesses as to which quadrant of the audience they thought might not like this movie that much?

• 1:07:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, my guess is it's a full half of the audience, two quadrants, right? It's, it's women in any, in any age bracket.

• 1:07:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Women, ding ding ding ding ding. The ladies are not gonna love it, which I think is an interesting take. I don't think this is a movie that is unappealing to women at all. I think Martin Scorsese is totally right. The fear that the Sybil Shepherd character kind of experiences is something I think women are very, very familiar with. And I think he does a good job of demonstrating that in this movie.

• 1:08:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I mean, as you guys, you, we talked about on the out of frame. If you listen to the phone calls where Jodie Foster is trying to very politely turn down John Hinckley Jr., it is carbon copy of Sybil Shepherd repeatedly turning down Travis Bickle.

• 1:08:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 1:08:21Lizzie Bassett?

  And then he had another problem that was compounding that. The film went to the MPAA and came back with an X rating.

• 1:08:28Chris Winterbauer?

  That's what I thought. I didn't know that, but that's what I assumed the studio's concern might be.

• 1:08:32Lizzie Bassett?

  It's one of them. Yeah. So they had a little sit down with the studio. And according to Julia Phillips, the gist of the studio's message was change the picture to an R or we'll change it for you. And she said, I knew they were never going to do that, but Martin Scorsese did not. So Michael Phillips starts going back and forth with the MPAA. He's making tiny little edits. He's doing little trims and cuts here and there to try and get them to bring the rating down, but it just doesn't work. They were specifically concerned about the violence at the end. They really wanted Scorsese to just cut that. Maybe you don't have to blow that man's hand off. Have you ever thought about that? What if we don't show that? Less blowing off hands, more romance, you know?

• 1:09:07Chris Winterbauer?

  More romance?

• 1:09:09Lizzie Bassett?

  For the ladies, I'm guessing.

• 1:09:12Chris Winterbauer?

  More dates with Sybil Shepherd. Where else can he take her?

• 1:09:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, that's right. Less hands blown off, more romance.

• 1:09:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Didn't Midnight Cowboy win the Oscar for? It was the first X rated film, I think, to win.

• 1:09:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:09:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Best picture in like 69 or 70. So.

• 1:09:28Lizzie Bassett?

  I think that's 60s. Yeah.

• 1:09:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I think it's within a few years of that. So it is interesting that there's still such hesitation right around that. And I understand, but it is just interesting.

• 1:09:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, the fact that Midnight Cowboy is an X rating is kind of bizarre, having watched it again. It's like.

• 1:09:42Chris Winterbauer?

  I think the X rating is, the rating system has changed drastically over the years. It's, you can't compare them apples to apples anymore.

• 1:09:48Lizzie Bassett?

  True. So Scorsese called up old buddy, old pal, Steven Spielberg. I wonder if Steven was like, yes, yes, how can I help? And but according to Spielberg and Scorsese themselves, uh, Scorsese was like, Steven, I'm going to buy a gun. I'm going to buy a gun. I'm a threat in the studio. And Spielberg was like, don't, don't do that. Maybe don't, just don't, don't do that. It's not a good idea. Marty's like, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it because they're gonna ruin the movie.

• 1:10:14Chris Winterbauer?

  You ever seen what happens to a studio when you shoot it in the face with a 44 Magnum?

• 1:10:18Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm gonna do it. And Spielberg really had to talk him down off that ledge. But apparently what he really wanted to do was break into the area where they were keeping the rough cut and steal it back. So that he could have it and destroy it himself. Scorsese really walked so Tony K could run, but. Fortunately, they got him to calm down, at which point Scorsese came up with the solve, which was to desaturate the color in that final sequence. So it looks more like a tabloid than anything else. Make it grainy, make it dark, more brown and make the blood look less like blood. That was apparently the technique pioneered by cinematographer Oswald Morris on 1956's Moby Dick. And miraculously, it worked. The MPAA was like, hmm, it's not

• 1:11:00Lizzie Bassett?

  so red like blood. Find R rating. They weren't concerned about, you know, the discussion of rape and murder, but the blood. Anyway, on February 8th, 1976, Taxi Driver premiered in New York City and everyone was on the edge of their seat because no one knew how this movie was going to do. And it kind of sounds like on the studio side, they were like, this is a stinker. But much to everyone's surprise, it did absolutely gangbusters. There were lines around the block to see this. But it seems like people either really loved it or really hated it. According to Joseph Gelmis, a journalist with Newsday, quote, "It is polarizing moviegoers into frenzied rage or raves. Taxi Driver broke the house record on the first day. The reviews were strong to mixed, but there was vociferous

• 1:11:43Lizzie Bassett?

  outrage, too, like the comment from one furious moviegoer who said, for the first time, I felt that freedom of speech had gone too far," which I love that review. Next, it was invited to screen at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was loudly booed. In fact, once Martin Scorsese heard that Tennessee Williams, then the head of the jury, hated Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese was like, fuck this. And he flew back to the US to finish New York, New York. But old Tennessee must not have hated it that much because it ended up winning the Palm Door and was booed again. In the end, Taxi Driver was nominated for four Oscars, Best Actor and Supporting Actress for De Niro and Foster, Best Original Score for Bernard Herrmann, and Best Picture, which it lost to...

• 1:12:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Seventy-seven? It's not Rocky, is it? Oh, it is Rocky. Okay.

• 1:12:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, it lost to Rocky.

• 1:12:36Chris Winterbauer?

  And Rocky won screenplay as well, is that right?

• 1:12:38Lizzie Bassett?

  So Rocky was nominated, but did not win. It was Rocky, Network, the front, Cousin, Cousine, and Seven Beauties.

• 1:12:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Man, that's a good year. Seven Beauties, that was the first woman ever nominated for Best Director, I believe. And Network's an amazing movie.

• 1:12:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Network's amazing. I get it. Although I would maybe give it to Taxi Driver, but I wasn't even nominated. All right, in 2026, Jodie Foster told NPR that she believed her role in Taxi Driver may have helped protect her from sexual predators in the film industry. She said, quote, "What I came to believe is that I had a certain amount of power by the time I was like 12. So by the time I had my first Oscar nomination, I was part of a different category of people that had power and I was too dangerous to touch. I could have ruined people's careers, or I could have called Uncle, so I wasn't on the block." And I understand some people read that quote and they weren't really thrilled by it. I understand what she's saying. I think she's saying she had a bit of a blind spot to it, perhaps, because she, at such an early age, had enough weight to throw around that it just didn't come her way.

• 1:13:40Lizzie Bassett?

  She's not negating it at all.

• 1:13:42Chris Winterbauer?

  No, I think it's the opposite. And she's saying, this very much happens, and it's awful, and Hollywood is, can be a heinous place for children, and Hollywood has a history of abusing children, which is terrible.

• 1:13:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:13:54Chris Winterbauer?

  And I think her point is, I was insulated from that because I was so successful that I was not in a position to necessarily be taken advantage of in the same way unfortunately producers felt like they could of other children. And again, yeah, so I don't view her as negating it. I think she's actually saying, this is horrible, and I just got lucky in this one way.

• 1:14:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Now, reviews were mixed. People were particularly disturbed by the graphic violence, and some thought glorification of violence, although I do not agree. But Paul Schrader's old friend Pauline Kael had this to say. "The film doesn't operate on the level of moral judgment of what Travis does. Rather, by drawing us into his vortex, it makes us understand the psychic discharge of the quiet boys who go berserk." She's such a good writer. I highly, highly recommend reading her film criticism. It's amazing. Scorsese's biggest frustration was that people did seem to think Travis had snapped out of nowhere. He was very frustrated by this because he had been an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam for years at this point. He had participated in short films,

• 1:15:00Lizzie Bassett?

  he had produced movies, he had helped other people produce movies that were extremely critical of it. At a time when I think we take this for granted because we think, oh, everybody was protesting the war in Vietnam. No, they weren't, nor were they making content about it, and he really was. In a 1976 interview with Greg Kilday, Scorsese explained, quote, "We knew all the background, the scars on his back, the way he lights the shoe polish to get rid of impurities, special forces in Vietnam, it's all there. Some people can't get it completely, some people do. You can't make a movie for everybody and spell it out for everybody."

• 1:15:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, Marty, you made a movie for me. I loved it.

• 1:15:36Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, the subtlety cuts both ways is just the unfortunate truth.

• 1:15:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep. Well, Chris, that ends our coverage of Taxi Driver. A fun little romp through 1975 New York City. What went right?

• 1:15:49Chris Winterbauer?

  I will give mine to Paul Schrader because Scorsese is, again, I was going through his filmography and I was, I was just, I was trying to think of who's the most influential filmmaker of the last like 50, 50 years, let's say, 60, let's go back to 66. And, you know, you could make the argument for Kubrick, you can make the argument for Spielberg, and I'm just going to stick with American directors right, for right now. But I was going through Scorsese's filmography and I feel like the difference is that Scorsese seems to have this consistent focus on the duality of men, right, caught between two worlds in so many

• 1:16:32Chris Winterbauer?

  ways, right? Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, The Departed, Wolf of Wall Street, Killers of the Flower Moon. But what I love is that this Schrader is so focused on the tormented man, I think in many ways. And you look at First Reform, The Card Counter, Last Sentation, and I think it's such a wonderful marriage between the two of them because I think Schrader has such a distinctively- Angry but targeted voice. And when it can be further sharpened by a great director, it's such a powerful combination. I actually think Schrader can be a great director. First Reformed is an incredibly directed movie, but I think that he and Scorsese are a particularly

• 1:17:12Chris Winterbauer?

  potent duo. And I just think the screenplay is remarkable. So I'll give mine to Schrader.

• 1:17:20Lizzie Bassett?

  I can't argue with that. I spent a lot of this episode praising Martin Scorsese, which is, I think, very deserved. What he does in this movie is absolutely incredible. But I would like to give my what went right to Robert De Niro. Because the dedication that he had to this role, it sounds like the dedication that he had to other actors, Cybill Shepherd excluded, but the way that he treated Jodie Foster, I very much appreciate what I've heard her say about that, because it just seems like he really respected her. And he didn't treat her like a kid. He treated her like an equal. And, you know, he tried as best he could to make her comfortable and to also, like, I think, prepare her

• 1:18:03Lizzie Bassett?

  to be a really great actor. And their scenes together in this are excellent because of that. And I also just think that it would be so easy to come in and play this character and just overplay it massively. That would be the big temptation with this. And he doesn't do it.

• 1:18:22Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree.

• 1:18:22Lizzie Bassett?

  He's so understated. He's like a shark. Like, the stillness he has in this is so scary, because it's unpredictable.

• 1:18:31Chris Winterbauer?

  And he never reveals to the audience, like, hey, I get it.

• 1:18:35Lizzie Bassett?

  He doesn't tell you anything.

• 1:18:37Chris Winterbauer?

  A less secure actor would almost want to signal, like, I know this guy's weird too. Right? You know what I'm saying? And De Niro, he never gives an inch.

• 1:18:46Lizzie Bassett?

  No, there's, there's nothing self-conscious about this performance. And I just don't think anybody else could have done this. It is so good.

• 1:18:53Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree.

• 1:18:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Harvey Keitel is also so good.

• 1:18:56Chris Winterbauer?

  He's really good.

• 1:18:57Lizzie Bassett?

  I hate his little pinky nail. I hate it so much. It's so gross. But yeah, I'll give it to Robert De Niro. He's just wonderful. And, you know, just a bunch of handsome short kings in this movie. And he is one of them.

• 1:19:10Chris Winterbauer?

  The Short Kings will cover the King of Comedy.

• 1:19:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, and Godfather Part Two as well. And of course, he is just unbelievable in that.

• 1:19:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, Lizzie, thanks for opening up the world of Martin Scorsese, our first Scorsese film. And we have many, many more to cover.

• 1:19:23Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm excited to cover more. Obviously, I knew I liked his movies, but I didn't know I liked him as much as I do. And I, I really do.

• 1:19:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And he's done so much for film restoration and, and also the promotion of foreign films and independent cinema.

• 1:19:39Lizzie Bassett?

  He's a big part of the reason Lawrence of Arabia got restored. I love him. I love him.

• 1:19:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Tomorrow, the article will drop about something problematic about.

• 1:19:47Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:19:47Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm just kidding. No, they won't.

• 1:19:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Please don't.

• 1:19:49Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, Lizzie. Well, thank you so much for driving us around New York in the back of your cab. And if people are enjoying this podcast, can you tell them the easy ways that they can support it?

• 1:20:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course. If you like this show, you can tell a friend or family member. You can leave us a rating or review on whatever podcatcher you're listening on. You could share us on your Instagram stories. Also, follow us on Instagram at WhatWentWrongPod. You can subscribe in either Apple or Spotify. And if you do that, you will get one bonus episode every month. Usually they're movie reviews. Sometimes there's something a little different. We have some different things coming your way in the coming months. That's at least one bonus episode. Oftentimes, it's more. If you would like to take it a step further, for $5, only $5 to ride this ride. If you can join our Patreon for the small, flat fee of $5 a month, you get access to the bonus episodes and an ad-free feed as well as polls,

• 1:20:46Lizzie Bassett?

  some little interactive things, some notes from Chris, and sometimes me, but mostly Chris, and much, much more. And if you really want to take it to the next level, for $50 a month, you can get a shout out. I'm not gonna do any kind of impressions, so I don't know what I could do, just like one of these. Adrian Peng, Korea, Angeline Renee Cook, Beatrix Earhart, Ben Schindelman, Blaze Ambrose, Brian Donahue, Brittany Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith, C. Grace B., Chris Liel, Chris Zucka, David Friskelanti, Darren and Dale Conkling,

• 1:21:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Don Scheible, M. Zodiac, Evan Downey, Felicia G., Film It Yourself, Frankenstein, Galen and Miguel, The Broken Glass Kids, The Cast and Crew of Win a Trip to Brown Town, Grace Potter, Half Greyhound, James McAvoy, Jason Frankel, J.J. Rapido, Jory Hillpiper, Jose A. Milano, Salto del Giorgio, Karina Kanaba, Kate Ellington, Kathleen Olson, Amy Elgashlager McCoy, Lazy Freddie, Lena LJ, Lydia Howes, Mark Bertha, Mariposas Humans, Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath, Nate the Ninth,

• 1:22:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Rosemary Southward, Roja, Sadie, Just Sadie, Scott Oshida, Somon Chinani, Steve Winterbauer, Suzanne Johnson, The Provost Family, The O's Sound Like O's, and Tom Kristin. Thank you all so, so much.

• 1:22:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Thank you, Lizzie. Next week, Lizzie's running it back. We're changing up our release schedule here because I wanted to cover something for May the 4th, which does fall on a Monday. May the 4th be with you.

• 1:22:46Lizzie Bassett?

  And I did not.

• 1:22:48Chris Winterbauer?

  And Lizzie didn't. Lizzie wanted to dive into Anne Hathaway month.

• 1:22:51Lizzie Bassett?

  That's right.

• 1:22:52Chris Winterbauer?

  And so, next week, Lizzie is coming at you with The Devil Wears Prada.

• 1:22:56Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm so excited.

• 1:22:57Chris Winterbauer?

  I am excited too. It's not only a really good movie, but it's a really interesting movie as like a mid-aughts movie.

• 1:23:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:23:04Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a really interesting movie in the career trajectory of Anne Hathaway.

• 1:23:07Lizzie Bassett?

  And Meryl Streep.

• 1:23:08Chris Winterbauer?

  And Meryl Streep. It obviously David Frankel's career as a director in so many ways. Emily Blunt. Oh, yeah. Maybe not unexpectedly, but maybe unexpectedly, becoming arguably the most successful of the three for at least a period over the last few years. And so, and Stanley Tucci, we all love Stanley Tucci. We love the Tucci. Can't wait. Love the Tucci. All right, guys, go watch The Devil Wears Prada. We'll be back with you next week with that movie and a lot more Anne Hathaway after that as well. We're very excited. So thanks again for listening and we'll talk to you soon. Bye.

• 1:23:44Speaker 04

  To support What Went Wrong and gain access to bonus episodes, subscribe on Patreon, Apple, or Spotify for $5 a month. Patreon subscriptions also come with an ad-free RSS feed. You can also visit our website, whatwentwrongpod.com for more info. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Laura Woods and edited by H. Clum.