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While Martin Scorsese, Robert de Niro and Paul Schrader made one of the most iconic films in cinema history, the cast that was first chosen by the producers was quite different. Robert Mulligan was the first choice as the director for Taxi Driver and Jeff Bridges was the one that was supposed to incarnate Travis Bickle. However, it was the screenwriter, Paul Schrader that had the last word, and chose the cast that we all know. He was not keen on trusting anyone with the script as this film reflects on his life when he first arrived in Los Angeles. Taxi Driver reflects his own ordeal from a dark time in his life.

Martin Scorsese only made three films at the time, Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967), Boxcar Bertha (1972) and Mean Streets (1973). But Schrader was quite impressed by his latest film, which also starred De Niro, and believed they were the perfect duo to cast for his work. Intrigued with the script, Martin Scorsese and Robert de Niro accepted to be part of the filming quite quickly, even though they had to take a huge salary cut. The actor would have only been paid 35 000$, which is four or five times less than what he was usually offered for most films, in order to get into the mind of the taxi driver and Vietnam war veteran.

Influences
According to Scorsese, it was Brian De Palma who introduced him to Schrader. In Scorsese on Scorsese, the director talks about how much of the film arose from his feeling that movies are like dreams or drug-induced reveries. He admits attempting to incubate within the viewer the feeling of being in a limbo state somewhere between sleeping and waking. He calls Travis an "avenging angel" floating through the streets of a New York City intended to represent all cities everywhere. Scorsese calls attention to improvisation in the film, such as in the scene between De Niro and Cybill Shepherd in the coffee shop. The director also cites Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man and Jack Hazan's A Bigger Splash as inspirations for his camerawork in the movie.

In writing the script, Schrader was inspired by the diaries of Arthur Bremer (who shot presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972), by Jean- Paul Sartre's existential novel Nausea and John Ford's film The Searchers. The writer also used himself as inspiration; in a 1981 interview with Tom Snyder on the "Tomorrow" show, Schrader related his experience living in New York City while battling chronic insomnia, which led him to frequent pornographic bookstores and theaters because they remained open all night. Following a divorce and a breakup with a live-in girlfriend, he spent a few weeks living in his car. After visiting a hospital for a stomach ulcer, Schrader wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver in "under a fortnight", recalling that "When I was talking to the nurse, I realised I hadn't spoken to anyone in weeks ... that was when the metaphor of the taxi occurred to me. That is what I was: this person in an iron box, a coffin, floating round the city, but seemingly alone". Schrader decided to make Bickle a Vietnam vet because the national trauma of the war seemed to blend perfectly with Bickle's paranoid psychosis, making his experiences after the war more intense and threatening.

Symbolism
In Scorsese on Scorsese, the director mentions the religious symbolism in the story, comparing Bickle to a saint who wants to cleanse or purge both his mind and his body of weakness. Bickle attempts to kill himself near the end of the movie as a tribute to the samurai's "death with honor" principle.

When Travis meets Betsy to join him for coffee and pie, she is reminded of a line in Kris Kristofferson's song "The Pilgrim, Chapter 33": "He's a prophet and a pusher, partly truth, partly fiction—a walking contradiction." On their date, Bickle takes her to see a Swedish "sex education" film, which is in fact the American sexploitation film Sexual Freedom in Denmark with added Swedish sound.

Shot during a New York City summer heat wave and sanitation strike in 1975, Taxi Driver came into conflict with the MPAA for its violence (Scorsese de-saturated the color in the final shoot-out, and the film got an R rating). To achieve the atmospheric scenes in Bickle's taxi, the sound men would get in the trunk and Scorsese and his cinematographer, Michael Chapman, would ensconce themselves on the back seat floor and use available light to shoot. Chapman admitted the filming style was greatly influenced by Nouvelle Vague filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard and his cinematographer Raoul Coutard due to the fact the crew did not have the time nor the money to do "traditional things."

When Bickle decides to assassinate Senator Palantine, he cuts his hair into a Mohawk. This detail was suggested by actor Victor Magnotta, a friend of Scorsese's who had a small role as a Secret Service agent and who had served in Vietnam. Scorsese later noted: "He told us that, in Saigon, if you saw a guy with his head shaved - like a little Mohawk - that usually meant that those people were ready to go into a certain Special Forces situation. You didn't even go near them. They were ready to kill."

De Niro's Preparation for the Role
While preparing for his role as Bickle, De Niro was filming Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 in Italy. According to Boyle, he would "finish shooting on a Friday in Rome ... get on a plane ... [and] fly to New York." De Niro obtained a taxi driver's license, and when on break would pick up a taxi and drive around New York for a couple of weeks, before returning to Rome to resume filming 1900. De Niro apparently lost 35 pounds and listened repeatedly to a taped reading of the diaries of Arthur Bremer. When he had time off from shooting 1900, De Niro visited an army base in Northern Italy and tape-recorded soldiers from the Midwestern United States, whose accents he thought might be appropriate for Travis's character.

Pre-Production
Scorsese brought in the film title designer Dan Perri to design the title sequence for Taxi Driver. Perri had been Scorsese's original choice to design the titles for Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore in 1974, but Warner Bros would not allow him to hire an unknown designer. By the time Taxi Driver was going into production, Perri had established his reputation with his work on The Exorcist, and Scorsese was now able to hire him. Perri created the opening titles for Taxi Driver using second unit footage which he colour-treated through a process of film copying and slit-scan, resulting in a highly stylised graphic sequence that evoked the "underbelly" of New York City through lurid colours, glowing neon signs distorted nocturnal images and deep black levels. Perri went on to design opening titles for a number of major films after this including Star Wars (1977) and Raging Bull (1980).

New York Bankruptcy
Shooting took place on New York City's West Side, at a time when the city was on the brink of bankruptcy. According to producer Michael Phillips, "the whole West Side was bombed out. There really were row after row of condemned buildings and that's what we used to build our sets, were condemned buildings. Now it's fashionable real estate...But New York and Times Square was shuddering and disgusting. It's just exciting to see the city bounce back and become the great place it is today from where it was then. We didn't know we were documenting what looked like the dying gasp of New York."

Taking place in an actual apartment, the tracking shot over the murder scene at the end took three months of preparation just because the production team had to cut through the ceiling in order to get it right.