Robert De Niro Improvised ‘You Talkin’ To Me?’ in ‘Taxi Driver’

January 26, 2024 @ 1:14 PM

On “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” Martin Scorsese reviewed the reality that Robert De Niro included the renowned “Are you talkin’ to me?” minute in the supervisor’s traditional movie “Taxi Driver” (1976 ).

Colbert asked the “Killers of the Flower Moon” Oscar candidate whether the reports held true that that scene may not have actually existed if it weren’t for De Niro.

“We were behind schedule. We were in such trouble. And they were banging on the door and I had to go to the door, open the door and say, ‘This is good. This is good. Give me five — two more minutes. Two more minutes and one more take, one more take,’” Scorsese informed Colbert. “And he was improvising it, and I was on his feet because there were no video assistants at the time.”

Scorsese advised De Niro a couple of even more times after he ad-libbed the line. Colbert validated that, if the movie had actually been fired on time, that scene would not have actually made it right into the last cut.

“I was saying, ‘Do it again, do it again.’ And he was doing the thing with the moves and the gun,” the supervisor proceeded. “And that’s actually, Columbus Avenue, we shot that on 88th Street. Some of the buildings now are gone. It was a condemned building, but they were mad. That wasn’t in the script either, it came from him.”

Colbert accentuated the reality that an additional of the movie’s scenes was fired in the Ed Sullivan Movie Theater where “The Late Show” currently movies.

When Colbert asked precisely where he fired the scene, Scorsese claimed, “In the corridor, the entryway to the office complex. What that was was that I was thinking of what the design of the movie must be and it was beginning to seep in, and the very first shot I considered was when he puts that call to Betsy and she will not return his telephone calls and she does not approve the blossoms, and he’s attempting to speak with her.

“I felt I needed a location where I had the phone booth on one side and I could just, because it was so painful, I decided that the camera should just track away and go to an empty hallway because of the emotional impact of it,” Scorsese proceeded. “Then he would hang up but he’d enter the frame and leave. And this was the place for us. It was the very first shot I thought of and that was the entire style of the film, came from that shot.”

Enjoy Scorsese discuss the improvised line in the video clip over.