Cutting through Ceilings, Desaturating Blood

Martin Scorsese went all out in directing the visual style of Taxi Driver. At one point, he and the crew took three weeks just to prepare the long tracking shot that traces the path of Travis' massacre after he's finished. They had to cut into the ceiling and carve a path in it in order to hold the camera high enough to shoot from above.

We think this is a pretty good example of Scorsese's meticulous, driven style—he's a man who's willing to do anything to get the shot.

Michael Chapman, the cinematographer, also deserves a lot of credit. To shoot the cab scenes, he and Scorsese would sit in the back seat of the taxi with the camera, while the sound guy hid inside the trunk (which must have been uncomfortable).

Scorsese and Chapman use some pretty claustrophobic camera work to zero in on Travis' world and get his perspective. This, with the addition of the voiceover, makes the movie feels like we're really inside Travis' head—the cinematography dishing out his vision in frightening detail and reality.

Chapman and Scorsese went on to make other great movies together, like Raging Bull (which Paul Schrader also co-wrote) and the classic concert movie about The Band's last concert, The Last Waltz.

Here's another example of Scorsese's innovative means of creating his movie… when the movie was finally finished it ran into a huge stumbling block. Because of the violent sequence at the end, which originally involved a lot of brightly-colored blood, the MPAA threatened to slap the movie with an X-rating—which would kill any possibility for a wide release, although the X-rating didn't become synonymous with (Travis' favorite) porno movies until the 1980's.

Cleverly, Scorsese decided to de-saturate the color in the massacre sequence so the blood would look less bloody, getting the MPAA to lower the rating down to an R. Scorsese said he actually considered the de-saturation an improvement over the more brightly colored blood, and the original not-de-saturated version doesn't exist anymore.