Robert De Niro has shared the backstory behind one of the most unforgettable moments in Martin Scorsese’s 1976 masterpiece, Taxi Driver, revealing that the iconic scene was partially improvised. “Some of the best stuff, not always, is when it’s improvised.”
In the film, De Niro’s portrayal of disturbed cabbie Travis Bickle birthed one of the most memorable scenes in cinema history: standing in front of a mirror, Bickle talks to himself and points a gun at his reflection as he imagines facing off with a foe.
“You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Then who the hell else are you talkin’ to?” De Niro, as Bickle, famously demands of his invisible adversary. “You talkin’ to me? Well, I’m the only one here. Who the f*ck do you think you’re talking to?”
“The producer [of the film] … said on some show that Marty had said it was all improvised,” the actor shared. “We had something [on the page], I forget exactly but Marty remembers a lot better than I do.”
“It seemed right,” De Niro added, reflecting on the moment. “It was done spontaneously. You don’t know what’s going to [happen]. That’s the fun of working, especially with someone like Marty Scorsese. It’s nice to be able to go here and there, go off, following the scene or the thrust of the story, but you can go here and there. You never know when that stuff is usable.”
What most people don’t know is that the interiors of Travis’s apartment and Iris’s room hallways were actually shot in the very same building, 586 Columbus Avenue. The building was condemned and it has long since been demolished.
De Niro’s performance in Taxi Driver earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. In 2003, Bickle was ranked as the 30th greatest movie villain in movie history by the American Film Institute in their “AFI 100 Years…100 Heroes & Villains” list.
0 comments:
Post a Comment