idea ·Taxi Driver (1976)

Bresson's hands, Travis's guns

The gun-handling sequences copy the pickpocketing in Bresson's Pickpocket. The debt is Schrader's; Scorsese admits he finds Bresson hard to watch.

editing
camerawork
acting
atomic
influence

Paul was also very influenced by Robert Bresson's Pickpocket. I admire his films greatly, but I find them difficult to watch. In Pickpocket there's a wonderful sequence of the pickpockets removing wallets with their hands, a lot of movement in and out, and it's the same with Travis, alone in the room practising with his guns.

— Scorsese on Scorsese (1989), sos 66

Two things filed here.

The formal debt. Bresson cuts hands to objects and objects to hands, without faces, until the activity becomes ritual and the man disappears into it. The gun sequences in Taxi Driver — the mirror do the same thing: the sleeve rig, the drawer, the loading. See Editing.

The attribution. Schrader wrote his thesis on Bresson (Transcendental Style in Film, sos 53). Scorsese, by his own admission, admires Bresson without enjoying him. So the film carries a major influence that arrived through the screenplay rather than the direction — a useful correction to auteurist reflex, and worth holding next to the fact that the film's most famous line came from the actor (De Niro wrote in the margins). Taxi Driver has at least three authors and they disagree (Schrader and Scorsese disagree about the ending).

Scorsese's other named sources for the film are Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (The Wrong Man taught the camera to be paranoid), Francesco Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano for how to do black-and-white in colour, Jack Hazan's A Bigger Splash for head-on framing, Ford's The Searchers for the hero, and Irving Lerner's Murder by Contract (1958) for the inside of a killer's head (sos 60, sos 66).

Go on, then

idea The Wrong Man taught the camera to be paranoid Scorsese names one Hitchcock film as the source of Taxi Driver's camera moves — and it is the documentary-flat one, not the famous ones.
scene Taxi Driver — the mirror "You talkin' to me?" — the most quoted line in the film is not in the film's script. De Niro wrote it standing up, in a derelict building, over traffic noise.
scene Taxi Driver — the shoot-out Three men dead in a stairwell, a camera that floats out through the ceiling, and an audience that cheered. Scorsese wanted a catharsis; he got applause, and it frightened him.
film Taxi Driver (1976) A returned soldier drives nights through a city he wants to wash away. Scorsese's first acknowledged masterpiece — and the wiki's best case of point of view doing the work of an argument.
idea De Niro wrote in the margins De Niro's annotated shooting script rewrote Travis's dialogue, and the changes reached Schrader's final draft. The film's most quoted line has no screenwriter.
idea Chapman pushed the night stock Taxi Driver's wet neon look came from over-developing night-rated Technicolor stock — a 1970s laboratory habit, not a lighting package.