After his Oscar winning portrayal of young Vito Corleone in The Godfather II Robert De Niro took on the role of crazed taxi driver Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese’s 1976 psycho-crime drama Taxi Driver. It was nominated for four Oscar awards and became a cult classic. Pictured here is De Niro’s cab driver license. In order to get into character for the film, he obtained his own hack license and would pick-up and drive customers in New York City.
His character, Travis, is a Dostoyevskiian anti-hero, an archetypal alienated man, a semi-literate Vietnam veteran who lives in a dingy apartment, watches a lot of television and because he can’t sleep at night, takes a job as a down-town cabbie. “Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere,” says Travis at one point. “In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There’s no escape. I’m God’s lonely man.” He lives the urban nightmare that degenerates into a killing spree after a series of rejections.
The film’s most famous line is ‘You talkin’ to me?’ which Travis says to himself while practicing drawing a gun in the mirror. At a recent event, De Niro declared: “Every day for 40 f—— years at least one of you has come up to me and said – what do you think – ‘You talkin’ to me?’”
His character, Travis, is a Dostoyevskiian anti-hero, an archetypal alienated man, a semi-literate Vietnam veteran who lives in a dingy apartment, watches a lot of television and because he can’t sleep at night, takes a job as a down-town cabbie. “Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere,” says Travis at one point. “In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There’s no escape. I’m God’s lonely man.” He lives the urban nightmare that degenerates into a killing spree after a series of rejections.
The film’s most famous line is ‘You talkin’ to me?’ which Travis says to himself while practicing drawing a gun in the mirror. At a recent event, De Niro declared: “Every day for 40 f—— years at least one of you has come up to me and said – what do you think – ‘You talkin’ to me?’”