Thomas Butt is a senior writer at Collider who focuses on classic movies.
The Big Picture Despite its cultural ubiquity and status as a canonized classic, Taxi Driver remains an eerie, perverse, and sinister portrait of a disillusioned man on the brink of self-destruction. It speaks to Martin Scorsese's prowess as a director that he elevated something this bleak and unsettling into the mainstream.
Not only is Steven Spielberg a contemporary of Scorsese, but they are close friends who have been through the thick of it together, and in no instance was Spielberg's support needed more than during the post-production of Taxi Driver. Hosting a Q&A for the Director's Guild of America in 2016, Scorsese and Spielberg sat down for a riveting conversation about filmmaking and their equally legendary careers.
"Marty could work himself up on those days," Spielberg told the DGA audience, as he described Scorsese frantically counting all the shots that needed to be cut to satisfy Columbia's demands. Spielberg facetiously recalled that Scorsese was so apoplectic that he was "plotting murder" against executives at the studio. Amid his hostility and indignance, Scorsese conceived of an ingenious trick to tone down the gruesome effect of the scene: desaturated blood.
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