Martin Scorsese Reveals ‘Taxi Driver’ Producers Were “Banging On The Door,” Urging Him To Cut During Robert De Niro’s Most Iconic Scene

By Radhamely De Leon
Published Jan. 26, 2024, 3:30 p.m. ET

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Martin Scorsese recently revealed one of Robert De Niro‘s most iconic moments in film almost didn’t happen.

During a recent appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, the late night host asked Scorsese if it was true that Taxi Driver producers were urging him to stop filming while De Niro was improvising what would become one of the most famous lines of his career.

“Yeah. We were behind schedule. We were in such trouble,” Scorsese told Stephen Colbert with a laugh. “And they were banging on the door, and I had to open the door and say: ‘This is good. This is good! Wait, give me five, two ― two more minutes. … One more take, one more take!’ And he was improvising it.”

Scorsese recalled filming De Niro from the ground, urging him to continue improvising until he got the line. He said, “And I was like, ‘Do it again, do it again,’ and he was doing the thing with the moves and the gun. They were mad.”

Colbert asked, “So if you had stayed on schedule, there would have been no ‘You talkin’ to me?’”

TAXI DRIVER, Robert De Niro, 1976
Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection

“That’s right,” Scorsese replied. “And it wasn’t in the script either, it came from him.”

The famed director has previously spoken about the trouble they faced getting the 1976 film to theaters. The film received an X rating due to its violent nature, which the studio was not pleased with.

“It was received very, very, very badly by the studio,” Scorsese said during a talk at the BFI London Film Festival in 2023.

He added, “They wouldn’t even listen to me and practically threw me out of the room with a statement saying cut it from an X, cut it for an R or we cut it.”

He credited Taxi Driver producers Julia Phillips and Michael Phillips with talking the studios into releasing the film. Though, he added, “I remember Jerry Brown, his father talked about it to the censor board, they were concerned about Jodie Foster in it… I had to trim some of the violence at the end, not all of it.”

Foster, who was 12 at the time of filming, played a sex worker opposite De Niro.

Scroll up to watch Scorsese recount that iconic moment.