![Taxi Driver: Written In Two Weeks By A Man In Cris](https://cdn.slatesource.com/9/3/4/9346e035-b2f8-4cfd-84a9-07eafde6d651.webp)

# Taxi Driver: Written In Two Weeks By A Man In Cris

- [Made in Slatesource](https://slatesource.com/@steph/taxi-driver-written-in-two-weeks-by-a-man-in-cris)
- By [Steph](https://slatesource.com/@steph)
- Created on Oct 1, 2026

![](https://cdn.slatesource.com/9/3/4/9346e035-b2f8-4cfd-84a9-07eafde6d651.webp)

## Taxi Driver (1976)

Schrader wrote it while living in his car, Herrmann finished the score and died, and Cannes gave it the Palme d'Or.

Runtime

114 minutes

Director

Martin Scorsese

Budget

$1.9 million

Box office

$28.6 million worldwide

Cinematography

Michael Chapman

> You talkin' to me?

## A Narrator Who Cannot Be Trusted

Travis Bickle drives nights because he cannot sleep, keeps a diary in a voice that sounds like moral clarity and is actually a man losing the thread, and decides that the city needs cleaning. The film's method is to stay inside that head without endorsing it. Scorsese shoots New York through a windscreen in wet neon, holds on steam rising from grates, and cuts away from Travis at the exact moments when a normal film would explain him: there is a shot where the camera drifts off him during a phone call because his humiliation is not ours to watch. Bernard Herrmann delivered the score, saxophone over military snare, on the last day of his life. The final scene is deliberately ambiguous about whether anything has been resolved at all.

journey·6 Reels

# Watching Taxi Driver

Emotional weight

/

Reel

Nights

Insomniac

"A cab, a diary, a chest exercise routine and a man narrating his own decency in a voice that is slightly off."

Herrmann had scored Citizen Kane and Vertigo, initially refused this, then accepted and recorded it on 23 December 1975. He died the following morning and the film is dedicated to him.

The final gunfight was desaturated in the lab to secure an R rating rather than an X, which is why the reds go brown, and Scorsese has said he prefers it that way.

[Taxi Driver on IMDb: full cast and crew](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075314/?utm_source=slatesource)