Kevin Jackson: Do you think that the film caught so many people's imaginations because of its strong sense of pent-up anger?
Paul Schrader: Yes. Godard once said that all great movies are successful for the wrong reasons, and there were a lot of wrong reasons why Taxi Driver was successful. The sheer violence of it really brought out the Times Square crowd.
But I have no real quarrel with that. I think that films can be extremely violent provided they understand the root causes of the violence. I think The Wild Bunch is a great film because it understands how deeply sick it is, and lets you know how sick it is; so it not only exploits your vicarious need for violence, but undermines it at the same time. I think films that analyse violence in that way are entirely justified.
KJ: But the violence in Travis is not held up for analysis in a sociological or psychological way, is it? The film seems to have distinct spiritual ambitions.
PS: Yes. Travis's is not a societally imposed loneliness or rage; it's an existential kind of rage. The book I reread just before sitting down to write the script was Sartre's Nausea, and if anything is the model for Taxi Driver, that would be it.
KJ: And there are references to Bresson as well - the line about thinking he has stomach cancer …
PS: And the scene where he makes the gun slide, which is sort of an allusion to Pickpocket. Originally Marty shot that scene so that it lasted ten minutes or more, dwelling on the sensuous mechanics of the process.
I think that what makes the film so vivid is what has made all my collaborations with Scorsese interesting, which is that we both have essentially the same moral background - a kind of closed-society Christian morality, though mine is rural and Protestant and his is urban and Catholic; mine is North European and his is South European. We can basically agree on everything in life, but we don't express it in the same way. I once described the film as the story of a Protestant kid from the snow country who wandered into a cathedral in the middle of New York City. That conflict of sensibilities is what makes it vibrate.
KJ: Presumably there was something about Travis's character that reflected an aspect of your own - the loneliness, the rage, the wish for a kind of purgation?
PS: At the time I wrote it I was very enamoured of guns, I was very suicidal, I was drinking heavily, I was obsessed with pornography in the way a lonely person is, and all those elements are upfront in the script. Obviously some aspects are heightened – the racism of the character, the sexism. Like every kind of underdog, Travis takes out his anger on the guy below him rather than the guy above. When they edited the film for TV I didn't so much mind having to lose the violence, but they had to remove huge sections of narration because of the virulent anti-black and anti-women characterizations. He appeared a very silly kind of guy because there was no edge to his anger; you just wanted to slap him in the face and say, 'Come on, come on.'
In fact, in the draft of the script that I sold, at the end all the people he kills are black. Marty and the Phillipses and everyone said, no, we just can't do this, it's an incitement to riot; but it was true to the character.
KJ: It's curious that he should be so racist, given that your first impulse towards fiction came about because of witnessing racial bullying.
PS: Well, that's really what art is about, you know. I think one is stung into progressive, positive behaviour by an awareness of the great lure of negative thought; it's the awareness of prejudice inside you that spurs you on to rid yourself and others of it. One of the things you should do in art is lift up the rock and look at those things inside you.
