NEW YORK − Robert De Niro is talkin’ “You talkin’ to me?”
The Oscar-winning actor reunited with his “Taxi Driver” costar Jodie Foster, director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader at Tribeca Film Festival on June 5 for a 50th anniversary screening of the seminal 1976 film.
During a chat before the movie, the group discussed the origin of one of the most iconic scenes in all of cinema: When De Niro’s Travis Bickle, a disturbed taxi driver, rehearses pulling out his gun in front of a mirror and utters the famous line, “You talkin’ to me?”
It has long been established that De Niro improvised the line, and Schrader confirmed the words were not in his script, nor did he provide any suggestions on what Travis should say.
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“Bob asked me about it once, and I said, ‘Well, it’s just like a kid who’s 8 years old standing in front of a mirror with his cap gun, going, ‘Bang, bang!’ ” Schrader said. “He’s talking to himself, and I never elaborated exactly what he was saying. I figured that was up to the actor.”
But panel moderator W. Kamau Bell pointed out there are many urban legends and rumors about the origin of the line, one of which claims that De Niro got the idea to say “You talkin’ to me?” after hearing Bruce Springsteen use the phrase during a concert. Even Scorsese once told Springsteen this might be true.
De Niro, though, seemed to shoot that down. When Schrader asked the actor “whether you had heard this before, or you just came up with it,” the star confirmed, “I came up with it.”
While Scorsese didn’t remember much about where the line originated, he recalled how De Niro went into a “trance-like state” while they were shooting the scene.
The wide-ranging, half-hour discussion at Tribeca also included reflections on why the film’s story of an isolated, angry man descending into madness still resonates, five decades on.
Scorsese said it comes down to the “universal” story of feeling lonely and “not being able to connect,” which De Niro noted is relevant “today with the internet, and especially after the pandemic.”
Foster, who was 12 when she starred in the movie as a child prostitute, opened up about the way “Taxi Driver” made her fall in love with acting. In particular, it was De Niro introducing her to the concept of improvisation that made it lock into place.
Robert De Niro speaks during the jury welcome lunch during Tribeca Festival on June 3, 2026, in New York City.
“It was like a lightbulb went off in my head,” she said. “I remember getting all happy, and I came home, came up the elevator, came to the hotel, and I knocked on the door, and I said to my mom, ‘Oh, my God, I think I might want to be an actor. This is amazing! I thought acting was just saying words people wrote. I had no idea that there was anything more to it.”
Even at that age, Foster had already been acting for almost a decade, so Scorsese remembered her as being authoritative and in control on set.
Despite the disturbing subject matter of the film, Foster also described the set as being filled with a surprising amount of laughter.
“It felt important, but also whimsical,” she said, adding that Scorsese thought the blood and violence in the movie “was very funny.”
“When the guy’s face gets blown off, and there was piano wire and you see like five or six guys that were standing on either side pulling the pieces off at the right time so that all the blood could spurt, you just thought that was hilarious!” she said, drawing laughs from the crowd as she addressed the director.
While “Taxi Driver” has been heavily analyzed for its symbolism over the years, Scorsese did playfully point out one aesthetic choice had a much more basic purpose than has been claimed.
“New York in the summer has got great steam,” the filmmaker said. “The steam comes up, and the cab came through. And somebody said, ‘Oh, it’s supposed to be the hell metaphor.’ I wasn’t making a metaphor. It’s the cab coming through the steam!”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster talk ‘Taxi Driver’ at Tribeca Festival
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