Martin Scorsese threatened to get a gun to protect ‘Taxi Driver' from studio cuts

Fox News

9 hours ago

Though it's been nearly 40 years since Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" hit theaters, the Oscar Award-winning director still recalls the extreme measures he considered taking in order to convince the studio to greenlight the 1976 film in its entirety.
In a preview clip for Apple TV+'s documentary "Mr. Scorsese," the 82-year-old director, along with Steven Spielberg, recalled the studio's (Columbia Pictures) concern about the movie's bloody content.
"Marty was very upset," Spielberg, 78, said at the beginning of the clip. "I get a call at the office, and he said, 'Steve, Steve, this is Marty. Can you come over to the house?'"
"They wanted me to cut all the blood spurting," Scorsese reveals. "They wanted me to cut the guy who loses the hand..."
"You got a gun?" an interviewer asks him behind the scenes.
"I was going to get one," he admits.
"So you said you were going to get a gun?" the interviewer asks. "And you said you were going to do what with the gun?"
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"I don't know. I was angry. I said I was going to threaten them... I'll maybe just shoot or something. I had no idea. I mean, I was just threatening. What I wanted to do, and not with a gun, I would go in, find out where the rough cut is, and break the windows and take it away. They were going to destroy the film anyway, you know. So let me destroy it. I'll destroy it. But before destroying it, I'm going to steal it."
"Spielberg said, 'Marty, stop that. Marty you can't do that.' I said... The more they said no, the more I said I was going to do it," he continues.
Spielberg said someone, possibly Scorsese, "mollified" the Motion Picture Association of America.
"What if we take that whole sequence and tone the color down and make it feel more like a tabloid," Scorsese said.
"He saved the movie because he didn't have to cut any of the violence, he just had to take the color red down to a kind of brown," Spielberg explained.
A representative for Scorsese did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
The film, which starred Jodie Foster and Robert De Niro, received four nominations at the 49th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor (De Niro) and Best Supporting Actress (Foster).
In 2024, Foster — who has been acting since she was 3 years old — opened up about her experience filming the thriller.
"I first worked with Martin Scorsese when I was about 10 on 'Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore,'" she said in an interview with W magazine. "By the time I was 12, I'd made a lot more films than De Niro or Scorsese."
"They were definitely scared of me. 'What do we do with this 12-year-old?' I was in my hot pants and corkies, or whatever those platform shoes were called."
Foster played a child prostitute in the 1976 drama. De Niro was 31 during filming, and he'd been acting for around a decade. Scorsese had directed seven full-length films and a number of shorts at the time.