De Niro Says He Never Saw Taxi Driver's Classic Status Coming

The actor admits he had no inkling the 1976 Martin Scorsese film would endure as one of cinema's defining works, as Tribeca prepares a 50th-anniversary screening.

Robert De Niro told Page Six he had no idea Taxi Driver would become a classic when he made it.
The 1976 film is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
Tribeca Festival will screen the film as part of the milestone commemoration.
De Niro starred as Travis Bickle, the role widely considered one of his career-defining performances.

Fifty years is a long time to be wrong about something. Robert De Niro, speaking ahead of a Tribeca Festival screening celebrating the half-century mark of Taxi Driver, admitted he had no idea the picture would land the way it did. No premonition, no sense on set that they were threading a needle that would hold for generations.

The 1976 Martin Scorsese film — shot on the rain-slicked streets of mid-seventies New York, back when Times Square was a place you left quickly and the city felt like it was daring you to stay — has spent five decades accumulating the kind of cultural weight that tends to surprise the people who made it. Travis Bickle. The mirror. “You talkin’ to me?” A line that has been quoted in every register from genuine menace to a kid doing an impression at a birthday party.

De Niro's comments, reported by Page Six on May 24, carry the particular charm of retrospective modesty — the working actor who showed up, did the job, and left the mythology to everyone else. Whether that reads as genuine surprise or practiced deflection is a matter for the audience.

The Tribeca screening has not yet had a date confirmed, but the festival runs through early June. The film is being shown in its fiftieth year, on the same island where it was made.