Martin Scorsese has dark memories of shooting his seminal movie Taxi Driver in 1970s New York – because it was “hell” filming on the sleazy city streets.
The veteran director was determined to include as much gritty realism as possible in his 1976 story of a cab driver driven to insanity by the mean streets of Manhattan.
But his quest to include authentic location scenes in the movie left him with bad memories of the shoot – because filming with Robert De Niro in the run-down areas depressed him.
Scorsese tells writer Richard Schickel for his book, Conversations with Scorsese, “I’m telling you, 42nd Street, Eighth Avenue, that was hell, shooting in those places. That was like biblical in-my-mind Hell and damnation and Jeremiah… In Taxi Driver I didn’t enjoy shooting in those X-rated areas. The sense of wallowing in it was, for me, always filled with tension and extraordinary depression. And the film is very, very depressing.”
FFT Webmaster
The FFT Webmaster use displays whenever an article has multiple authors. It also pops up on articles from old versions of Film Festival Today. The original author byline might be missing! In that case, if you are the author of such an article and see this bio instead of your own, please send us an email. Some of our contributors that might be missing bylines are: Brad Balfour, Laura Blum, and Sandy Mandelberger, among others.