Taxi Driver

Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver: "A sense of some place to go."

Taxi Driver, directed by Martin Scorsese, screenplay by Paul Schrader, cinematography by Michael Chapman, music by Bernard Herrmann, and edit by Tom Rolf and Melvin Shapiro.

“I think it is good if a young person wants to express themselves and take a video camera and go out. They’re going to find that they have to frame the image, and in framing the image, they’re going to find that they have to interpret what they want to say to an audience. And how do you point the audience’s eye to look where you want them to look and to get the point, the emotional, psychological point that you want to get across to them. They’re going to have to make that decision. The real making of the filmmaker is when they look through that viewfinder to tell the story, and I don’t mean just telling a story, you know, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. No, I mean a story could be rain hitting a tree, leaves. That could be your story, you know, but how?” Martin Scorsese’s “how” conveys the understanding that the art of cinema has its own language and vocabulary, and it is through the mastery of its grammar that a filmmaker truly creates a work of art.

The foundation of a great film is not so much what story you are telling but how you tell your story, how you express your film, how through your decision in details you engage and impact your audience with ideas, action, and emotions to authentically communicate your cinematic vision. Scorsese says it perfectly when he states, “As King Vidor said, ‘The cinema is the greatest means of expression ever invented, but it is an illusion more powerful than any other, and should therefore be in the hands of the magicians and the wizards who could bring it to life.’”