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UNITED STATES · 1976
Taxi Driver
Synopsis
Suffering from insomnia, disturbed loner Travis Bickle takes a job as a New York City cabbie, haunting the streets nightly, growing increasingly detached from reality as he dreams of cleaning up the filthy city.
Cinematic DNA
When I saw Taxi Driver when I was 16, I was blown away by it. I had never seen a movie with such an impressive portrayal of an alienated character, or of an urban environment at night.
I had seen two films that made a big impact on me: Robert Bresson's Pickpocket and Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï. They both featured these alienated, ascetic, almost monastically solitary antiheroes. I thought, I can make a modern American version of that story, where the guy is driving a taxi.
— Paul Schrader · The Guardian, 'Paul Schrader on Taxi Driver' interview
This Film Influenced
→ Drive (2011)
Films with Similar Themes
urban decay · mental illness · isolation · vigilantism · moral corruption
