You Talking To Me

Robert DeNiro (Travis): You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Then who the hell else are you talkin’ to? You talkin’ to me? Well I’m the only one here. Who do you think you’re talking to? Oh yeah? Huh? Ok.

Fabulous acting by Robert DeNiro in the movie Taxi Driver(1976).This dialogue is named the #10th best movie quote…

Infromation for those who have seen this classic.I just copied it and pasted from IMDB

• Various studios considered producing this film; one suggested Neil Diamond for the lead role.
• Brian De Palma was also considered to direct but the producers were dragged to a private screening of Mean Streets (1973) (Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese‘s previous collaboration) before they told Scorsese he could direct, but only if he got De Niro to play the lead.
• Harvey Keitel was originally offered the part of the campaign worker, eventually played by Albert Brooks. He decided to take the role as the pimp, even though in the script he was black and only had about five lines.

• Rock Hudson was once considered for the role of Charles Palantine, but was not able to due to his commitment to the TV series, “McMillan & Wife” (1971).
• Robert De Niro worked twelve hour days for a month driving cabs as preparation for this role. He also studied mental illness.
• The scene where Travis Bickle is talking to himself in the mirror was completely ad-libbed by Robert De Niro. The screenplay details just said, “Travis looks in the mirror.” Martin Scorsese claims that he got the inspiration for the scene from Marlon Brando mouthing words in front of a mirror in Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967).
• ‘Bernard Herrmann’ wasn’t going to write the score for this film, but agreed to do it when he saw the scene where Bickle pours Schnapps on his bread.
• Harvey Keitel rehearsed with actual pimps to prepare for his role. The scene where his character and Iris dance is improvised, and is one of only two scenes in the film that don’t focus on Bickle.
• Director Martin Scorsese claims that the most important shot in the movie is when Bickle is on the phone trying to get another date with Betsy. The camera moves to the side slowly and pans down the long, empty hallway next to Bickle, as if to suggest that the phone conversation is too painful and pathetic to bear.
• Robert De Niro claimed that the final shootout scene took particularly long, because of both technical problems and the humor which arose from the tension created by the carnage in the scene.
• Jodie Foster was 14 years old in 1976, so she could not do the more explicit scenes. (Her character was 12 1/2.) Connie Foster, Jodie’s 21-year-old sister, was cast as her body double for those scenes.
• Legendary composer ‘Bernard Herrmann’ died on Christmas Eve of 1975, just hours after completing the recording sessions for this film.
• When Travis calls Betsy from a payphone to apologize for having taken her to a porno movie, he makes that call from the lobby of The Ed Sullivan Theater (1697 Broadway).
• The sex film that Travis takes Betsy to see is Kärlekens språk (1969).
• The restaurant where the cabbies gather to eat was a real-life hangout for taxi drivers called the Belmore Cafeteria at 28th St. and Park Avenue South. It has since been demolished, but the apartment building that replaced it is named the Belmore.
• The girl with whom Jodie Foster studied in order to prepare for her role as Iris also appears in the film, as Iris’ friend on the street.
• Director Martin Scorsese‘s parents (Charles Scorsese and Catherine Scorsese) appear as Iris’ parents in the newspaper article hanging on Travis’ wall at the end of the movie.
• Due to injuries sustained in an accident during the production of the 1975 movie The Farmer (1977) actor George Memmoli had to decline the bit-part of the Travis’s disturbed passenger who was ultimately played by the film’s director Martin Scorsese.
• Director Cameo: [Martin Scorsese] sitting down, behind Betsy as she walks into the Palantine campaign headquarters in slow-motion. He also appears as the irate husband in Bickle’s cab.
• In Paul Schrader‘s original screenplay, the characters of Sport, the Mafioso and the hotel clerk were all black. Martin Scorsese felt that, combined with other events in the film, this would have stacked the deck too much towards racism, and suggested that those characters be changed to white men. Schrader relented.
• Jeff Bridges was considered for the part of Travis Bickle.
• The record that Travis buys for Betsy is “The Silver Tongued Devil and I” by Kris Kristofferson. In the restaurant they quote from a song on the album, “Pilgrim Chapter 33” (“he’s a prophet…”).
• The movie’s line “You talking to me?” was voted as the #10 movie quote by the American Film Institute
• In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked this as the #52 Greatest Movie of All Time.
• The movie’s line “You talkin’ to me?” was voted as the #8 of “The 100 Greatest Movie Lines” by Premiere in 2007.
• Paul Schrader was inspired to write the script after reading the published diary of Arthur Bremer, the man who was convicted of shooting presidential hopeful George Wallace. Eerily, Bremer was 26 years old in 1976 (the year the film was released), the same age as Travis Bickle in the film.
• The producers were looking for a “Cybill Shepherd” type to play the female lead in the film. When agent Sue Mengers heard this, she reportedly called them and asked why not hire Cybill Shepherd.
• Travis’ name was an homage to the Mick Travis character in If…. (1968) and O Lucky Man! (1973), the latter of which was supposedly one of Martin Scorsese‘s favorite films at the time.
• According to Amy Taubin‘s book, the character of Iris was partially inspired by Paul Schrader‘s memory of 1950s’ Coppertone ads. One of Jodie Foster‘s first acting jobs was a Coppertone commercial.
• While it may be true that the scene where Robert De Niro stands before the mirror and asks his reflection, “You talkin’ to me? Well, I don’t see anyone else here” was improvised, the exchange is a quotation from Shane (1953) where Alan Ladd and Ben Johnson square up to one another just before their barroom brawl.
• Travis Bickle’s famous “You talkin’ to me?” scene may have been inspired by De Niro’s training under Stella Adler, who (as an exercise) had her students practice different interpretations of a similar phrase. The legendary acting teacher was surprised to see one of her former students use “You talkin’ to me?” as a psychotic mantra. Martin Scorsese was encouraging De Niro just below the camera while shooting the scene, which lead to the rest of the “dialogue” Bickle has with his mirror.
• The story was partially autobiographical for Paul Schrader, who suffered a nervous breakdown while living in Los Angeles. He was fired from the AFI, basically friendless, in the midst of a divorce and was rejected by a girlfriend. Squating in his ex-girlfriend’s apartment while she was away for a couple of months, Schrader literally didn’t talk to anyone for many weeks, went to porno theaters and developed an obsession with guns. He also shared with Bickle the sense of isolation from being a mid-Westerner in an urban center. Schrader decided to switch the action to New York City only because taxi drivers are far more common there. Schrader’s script clicked with both Scorsese and De Niro when they read it.
• When Travis is talking to a Secret Service agent, he gives his address as 154 Hopper Avenue, Fair Lawn, New Jersey. There is a Hopper Avenue in Fair Lawn, but there is no 154 Hopper Avenue.
• After Brian De Palma, who was originally attached to the project, was let go, producer Michael Phillips gave him a gross point as a parting gift, to assuage Phillips’ guilt.
• Tony Bill, the producing partner of Julia Phillips and her husband Michael Phillips, wanted to make his directorial debut with this movie after Brian De Palma was cashiered. He was convinced to wait to direct a film more suitable for his sensibilities.
• Around the time Tony Bill was considering directing the movie, the Paul Schrader script was sent to Al Pacino, but he declined the role. Julia Phillips never knew whether Pacino declined the role because he didn’t like the script or because he didn’t want to work with Bill.
• When Martin Scorsese agreed to direct, he brought Robert De Niro on board with him, much to the delight of Julia Phillips. Much less delightful was that De Niro was committed to making Bernardo Bertolucci‘s Novecento (1976) and when he left for Italy, Scorecese committed to Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974).
• After seeing “every blonde in town”, producer Julia Phillips still preferred Farrah Fawcett over Cybill Shepherd for the role of Betsy.
• Cybill Shepherd turned down the chance to appear in Nickelodeon (1976) in order to accept the role of Betsy.
• Producer Julia Phillips tells in her auto-biography that Cybill Shepherd had a hard time remembering her lines during the coffee-and-pie scene with Robert De Niro. She writes that De Niro in particular was getting fed up with her and that Phillips and editor Marcia Lucas laughed over all the unusable footage they had to work with in the editing room.
• ‘Paul Schrader’ wrote the script for “Taxi Driver” in five days. As he was writing, he kept a loaded gun on his desk for motivation and inspiration.
• This was the last Columbia feature to use the classic Torch Lady logo in her classic appearance.
• When Travis is watching television alone and he kicks over the television, he is watching a scene from the Young and the Restless, which debuted in 1973. The scene is a conversation between Brock Reynolds and Jill Foster (not June as the closed captions state) about Brock’s love for Jill and Jill’s love for Brock’s stepfather (Phillip). Truly trivial is that even though Brock and Jill married, they later found out the marriage was invalid because they were in reality half-siblings.
• The cab Travis drove was Checker. They stopped production after 1982 and the last one in New York City was retired in 1999.
• In the coffee and pie scene, Travis orders apple pie with melted cheese. When serial killer Ed Gein was arrested, he asked the police for a slice of apple pie with melted cheese in exchange for a full confession.
• Premiere voted this movie as one of “The 25 Most Dangerous Movies”.
• Uncredited Tom Scott delivered the dominant, haunting alto saxophone solos over the Bernard Herrmann score.
• The apartment building where Iris lived was 226 East 13th Street, as seen on an exterior shot, as well as in the Then-and-Now Special Feature on the 2 disc DVD. As a sad coda to the movie, in 1988, as reported by the NY Times, two young girls were killed when the stoop outside this address collapsed, crushing them both.
• Martin Scorsese at one point said he discussed the role of Travis Bickle with Dustin Hoffman, but is unclear in what capacity Hoffman was considered since Scorsese was always supposed to direct as a package-deal with Robert De Niro.
• Robert De Niro‘s on-and-off girlfriend in the 70s, Diahnne Abbott, appears as the concession girl in the porno theater near the beginning of the film.
• Paul Schrader guessed that the thought of isolated anti-hero being a taxi driver may have been instilled by the Harry Chapin song “Taxi”, which was a big hit at the time.
• When Paul Schrader was first writing the script, he believed that he was just writing about “loneliness”, but as the process went on he realized he was writing about “the pathology of loneliness”. His theory being that, for some reason, some “young men” (such as Schrader himself) subconsciously push others away to maintain their isolation, even though the main source of their torment is this very isolation.