Martin Scorsese didn’t intend to play a vile man who reveals his creepy secrets to Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver.
The Big Picture The late-night drives are like so many others as an insomniac man steers his cab past the scum on two feet, wandering out on the New York City streets. This seems like a nasty reality and feels like a bad dream in Taxi Driver, an early film from director Martin Scorsese. The music from Bernard Hermann stirs up the misery and danger to Travis Bickle , the titular driver who is repulsed at the “scum,” unable to see what he’s becoming.
During a graveyard shift, Travis meets the “Passenger Watching Silhouette,” the name given to Martin Scorsese’s cameo. The Passenger is a quick-talker with a short temper, when Travis slows down at the location he was directed to, the Passenger urgently demands to not stop the rolling fare meter. He doesn’t care how much he will have to pay, he just wants the cab to come to a stop and pull over near an apartment building.
The Passenger mentions how lethal a .44 magnum pistol can be in his grotesque fantasy of using it on his wife and her lover, inspiring Bickle when he goes to buy a weapon for his personal revenge fantasy. The interaction is a significant moment in Taxi Driver, one of many times the movie throws the audience off balance. This approach to do the unexpected just so happened to Scorsese, himself, when he reluctantly stepped in for the cameo.
Scorsese talked about acting with De Niro in a Hollywood Reporter oral history on Taxi Driver: "I did one take, and he said to me, 'When you say ‘Turn off the meter,' make me turn it off. Just make me turn it off. I’m not going to turn it off until you convince me that you want me to turn off that meter. So, I learned a lot. He sort of acted with the back of his head, but he encouraged me by not responding to me.
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