Paul Schrader on creating Taxi Driver: 'I might become him'

If Travis Bickle were real and alive today, he would not be a taxi driver but more likely be sitting in his parents’ basement, exploring the dark, misogynistic depths of the internet. “We call them incels now,” reflects Paul Schrader, who wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver, released 50 years ago on Sunday.

The film, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel and Cybill Shepherd, follows Bickle, a lonely, mentally unstable Vietnam war veteran working as a New York cab driver who, disturbed by the crime, corruption and moral decay he sees around him, develops a dangerous saviour complex.

Raised in Grand Rapids by a Calvinist family, Schrader did not see a movie until he was 17, later becoming a film critic and a protege of Pauline Kael. At 26 he hit a rough patch and wrote Taxi Driver as a form of self-therapy. “I lost my job, left my wife, left the girl I left my wife for, didn’t have a place to live, was drinking considerably, was living in my car and had a gun in the car.

paul schrader, taxi driver, travis bickle, martin scorsese, jodie foster, harvey keitel, cybill shepherd, incels, screenplay, grand rapids