De Niro: A Life (28 page)

Cameron’s may have been the most dramatic visit, but she wasn’t the only reporter welcomed to the set of
Taxi Driver.
The studio had arranged for a steady stream of writers to observe the production on various days, even during some of the most complex and sensitive sequences of the film, including the bloody climax. In those pre-Internet days, they all published stories on what they had seen—while the film was still in production—and most of them revealed the entire plot in their articles. Between the crowds, the reporters, the schedule, the heat, and the subject matter, Scorsese was almost completely overwhelmed, right from the outset, in fact. “
The second week,” he confessed, “I wanted to stop. I loved it so much, I wanted to kill it.” Julia Phillips, who was working on
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
in Los Angeles, had her own ideas about what was happening as gleaned from the rushes she screened: “ ‘Taxi Driver’ is
a cokey movie. Big pressure, short schedule, and short money, New York in the summer. Night shooting. I have only visited the set once and they are all doing blow. I don’t see it. I just know it.” It was, in short, mayhem.

But in the center of it all, De Niro was remarkably silent, still, and inward-gazing, his ability to focus amid mayhem striking onlookers as a combination of diva-like affect and supernatural concentration. “
When the camera isn’t turning,” observed Rex Reed, “he turns into Greta Garbo, shunning all communication.” “Bobby chooses to stay in his trailer,” Scorsese told Arthur Bell, “and that’s it. I don’t even bother him.” And Shepherd remembered, “
He stayed in character for the whole movie, so that disastrous date where Travis takes Betsy to see a porn film really did make me feel uncomfortable and turned off. When I turned him down in real life, it matched my character.” Like
his unwillingness to submit to interviews and the chameleonic variety of his roles, his monomaniacal immersion in his character during production was becoming the stuff of legend.

Indeed, during the shoot his agent, Harry Ufland, visited the set while De Niro, dedicating a little time to the selection of wardrobe for his next film, was decked out in a fashionable suit from the 1930s. As simple as it was, the transformation was so complete that, said Scorsese, “
Harry didn’t recognize him. For twenty minutes, Bob wasn’t Travis anymore.” Another visitor, Michael Moriarty, his
Bang the Drum Slowly
co-star, was about to approach De Niro during the setup of a luncheonette scene and then, getting a glimpse of his fellow actor, begged off. “
No, don’t bother,” he told a production assistant who was about to announce his presence. “I don’t know that guy at all. I knew Bruce Pearson. I don’t know Travis Bickle or Robert De Niro.”

De Niro went places nobody could imagine. His script was filled with reminders to keep himself on edge, to float through scenes in a dissociative haze, to stay still and stare blankly while churning inside, to strain toward an affect of formality and propriety while undergoing internal chaos, to cower meekly from the outside world when it rejects him and to smile coldly when he means to do harm. Gradually he was building toward what Schrader’s script referred to as “the release of all that cumulative pressure … a reality unto itself … the psychopath’s Second Coming.”

What was perhaps the key moment in this descent, one that would live on for decades and haunt De Niro, sometimes amusingly and sometimes not, wasn’t specifically scripted. After arming himself with a variety of handguns and knives, Bickle stood in his crummy apartment (which, like Iris’s room, was constructed in an abandoned building at Columbus Avenue and West 88th Street) and addressed a mirror menacingly. Imagining himself in a conversation with someone mistreating him, he practiced drawing his weapons and turning the tables on his adversary. And he said it in words that he improvised on the spot:

“It was the last week of shooting,” Scorsese remembered. “I asked Bobby to talk to himself, and he improvised. I was sitting at his feet with my headphones on. Because the noises from the street were drowning his voice, I asked him to repeat it: ‘Again! Again!’ Gradually he found a rhythm.”

The famous words were, apparently, stolen from Bruce Springsteen, who was about to burst into superstardom with his forthcoming album
Born to Run
, the release of which was preceded by a series of shows at the Bottom Line nightclub in Greenwich Village that De Niro had attended. Ever the master showman, Springsteen would do a bit in which he pretended not to realize that the audience’s hoots of “Bruuuuuuuce” were for him. “You talkin’ to me?” he would ask in mock humility. De Niro held on to that phrase and turned it into one of the most famous lines in all of American movies. “
He just got into this wonderful paranoid monologue,” Scorsese recalled. “He did this riff, like a jazz musician. He would just go.” It was glorious. Even Schrader had to admit that it was a genius bit of improv: “
To me, it’s the best thing in the movie. And I didn’t write it.”

Technically, Scorsese did wondrous things, using his camera with piercing intelligence and taste to create an atmosphere that he likened to “a seeping virus.” He shot many of De Niro’s close-ups, especially those of his eyes, at forty-eight frames per second, twice the normal speed, conveying a hypersensitive effect to “draw out and exaggerate his reactions. What an actor, to look so great against a technique like that! I shot all those shots myself, to see for myself what kind of reaction we were getting.” As a director, he was already becoming famous for an athletic ability to move the camera, but there were no handheld
or freewheeling shots in the film: “I felt that it should be all tied down. Dollied or tied down, because the character is rigid.” And, in a stroke of genius that kept the film from getting an X rating from the MPAA, he desaturated the blood in the scenes of gore to give them the timbre of what he liked to call “
Daily News
violence”—a lurid, otherworldly feeling. “It’s sort of like tuning in a color TV where you get black-and-white at first,” he said. “It’s more what I wanted in the sense that it’s more like a black-and-white daily tabloid newspaper.… I was going to do the whole picture that way but I couldn’t afford it.”

There was another bit of on-the-fly inspiration. One of Schrader’s most disturbing inventions was a scene in which a man in the back of Bickle’s taxi talks about the violence he wishes to wreak upon his unfaithful wife, a terrifying and explicit speech filled with misogyny, profanity, and hate. The part was to be played by George Memmoli, the rotund actor who debuted in
Mean Streets
in the pool room scene in which he refuses to pay a debt he owes to someone he considers “a mook.” But Memmoli had injured his back while trying to perform a stunt on another film, and Scorsese, surprising everyone, elected himself to take his place.

Scorsese had appeared in
Mean Streets
himself, of course, also in a car, also with a gun. But that character had no lines.
This
character was nervously, horrifically chatty, and Schrader was one of many on the production who wasn’t convinced that Scorsese could pull it off. “
I think the director’s or writer’s job is behind the camera,” he said, and “I think you should get a pro to do that stuff.… I knew his egotism was such that he wouldn’t admit it if he was wrong, so we could very well have a bad scene on our hands.” But Scorsese said, “
I didn’t trust anybody with it. So I just got in the back of the taxi and played the part myself.”

Fortunately, he had an acting coach in the front seat who forced him into a real performance: namely, De Niro. “I learned a lot from Bob in that scene,” he said. “I remember saying, ‘Put down the flag, put down the flag’ [referring to the taxi meter’s on/off switch]. De Niro said, ‘No,
make
me put it down.’ And Bobby wasn’t going to put down the flag until he was
convinced
that I meant it. And then I understood.
His move had to be a certain way and if he didn’t feel it, the move wasn’t going to be right.”
^*6

T
HAT TRANSACTION WAS
indicative of the synergy that blossomed between director and star in the course of making the film. From that first formal meeting at Verna Bloom and Jay Cocks’s house, De Niro and Scorsese had always felt simpatico, and that feeling had grown deeper during the making of
Mean Streets.
But during that fetid summer in which they made
Taxi Driver
, the two developed a rapport that would make their collaboration of the coming years one of the most justly celebrated in the history of cinema.

“
The real stuff between Bob and me is private,” Scorsese said. “Bob talks to me private [
sic
]. He needs a lot of time. We need a lot of time.” Even during the shoot—
especially
during the shoot—the two would habitually convene in prolonged head-to-head talks, which irked another of Scorsese’s actors sufficiently to complain about their process to the press (albeit anonymously): “
Bobby hogs Marty on the set. Marty gives Bobby anything he wants. And what Bobby wants is constant attention—constant talk about his character.” In fact, some of their interactions, perhaps the most important ones, were subverbal. “We understood each other perfectly,” Scorsese said. “We don’t need words to work together. The communication between us is like a form of sign language.”

It could seem to outsiders—meaning everyone else, even Scorsese’s wife—that they were uninterested in what the rest of the world thought or felt or had to say. “
In Martin,” sighed Julia Cameron, “Bobby has found the one person who will talk for 15 minutes on how a character would knot a tie. I’ve seen them go for 10 hours nonstop.” And Scorsese admitted that the two of them were perhaps
too
fond of chewing over minutiae: “
We have a shorthand. We have a longhand, too. We talk a great deal. Very often we talk about the same thing over and over.”

But De Niro had some reasonable explanations for their intimacy and their lengthy parleys. After the pair had made a few more films together, he said, “I like sometimes to be very personal with the director. He can say whatever he wants to other actors, but when we talk, it’s with each other and that’s it. We’ve worked so much with each other now, we trust each other. Not that we didn’t trust each other before, but I think now if there’s another person around, we can still talk. I still like to just talk to him on the side so nobody hears. Maybe it’s something I’m going to try, and I want to prepare him for it so he can cover it. It might get a reaction from the other actors, so he has to be ready for it.”

And Scorsese equally valued their intimacy. Just as sports coaches relied upon certain players who could see a game with a managerial eye even while participating in the actual run of play, Scorsese found in De Niro someone who shared his vision of what the film was supposed to be and which details did and didn’t aid them in achieving their aims. De Niro would, for instance, notice a prop or a bit of wardrobe that was out of sync with the rest and point it out to Scorsese: “It doesn’t seem right.” And the director would often agree: “Oh, absolutely, I didn’t see it.” This ability, according to Scorsese, derived from De Niro’s astounding gift for concentrating within a character, a scene, a story. “
His whole thing is concentration,” he explained. “There could be a
war
going on, you know, he could be in the middle of the DMZ, and he’ll be like this—
[in a trance]
‘Are you ready?’ ‘Huh?’ ‘Yeah, I’m ready.’ ‘I mean, go, now you go first.’ ‘No, no, after you.’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘No, I’m fine.’ Bobby. It’s incredible.” Or, as he put it later, “He
was
Travis. A piece of scenery could collapse behind him and he would react the way Travis would.”

When production wrapped in late July, they parted knowing that it wouldn’t be for long. De Niro had his next film lined up already, and he would be moving to Los Angeles to make it. And soon afterward Scorsese would join him there, to edit, score, and polish
Taxi Driver
and to begin pre-production on their next collaboration, a 1940s-style musical entitled
New York, New York
about the tormented marriage of a saxophonist, whom De Niro would play, and a big-band singer.

And De Niro had yet another project in mind. During the production of
Taxi Driver
, somebody had slipped him a copy of
Raging Bull:
My Story
, the autobiography of boxer Jake LaMotta, a middleweight from the Bronx famed for his ability to take a pounding, for his series of titanic fights with Sugar Ray Robinson, and for confessing to taking a dive to enrich mobsters he knew from his old neighborhood. De Niro had become chummy with LaMotta’s boyhood friend and co-writer, Pete Savage, who had a cameo in
Taxi Driver
as a man who gets into Bickle’s cab with a hooker. De Niro thought there might be a film in LaMotta’s story, and he encouraged Scorsese to have a look at the book.