Martin Scorsese reflects on his volatile reaction to a film studio threatening to cut the ending to his 1976 film, Taxi Driver, in an eye-opening new Apple TV+ documentary.
The Oscar-winning director is the subject of a five-part series from Rebecca Miller, titled Mr Scorsese, which includes brand new revelations about one of the world’s most revered living filmmakers.
“It was coming out of the more renegade period that he was part of,”Miller told The Sunday Times of Scorsese’s outburst. “It really was like the Wild West, film-makers really got up to anarchic things.”
She continued: “He’s definitely not proud of his behaviour. I could see his own embarrassment, which I found endearing, actually. But it’s not a job for him, being a director. It’s not a coat you can take off. It’s him. So if his film was being threatened, he was being threatened.”
The row over Taxi Driver was sparked when Stanley Jaffe, the head of Columbia, told Scorsese that he needed to re-cut the violent ending because the Motion Picture Association of America was threatening to give it an X rating.
If he refused, Jaffe apparently said, the studio would cut the film starring Robert De Niro themselves.
“That’s when I lost it,” Scorsese says in the film, recalling how he assembled his friends, Steven Spielberg and screenwriter John Milius. The pair arrived at his apartment to find him claiming he wanted to get a gun and threaten Jaffe with it, or break into the studio and steal the print of the film.
In the documentary, Spielberg recounted a distressed call from Scorsese, who was “very upset” about being asked to reduce the film’s graphic content.
“’Steve, Steve, it’s Marty, Steve. Can you come over to the house?’” he recalled of Scorsese’s phone call. “’They want me to cut all the blood spurting, they want me to cut all the blood spurting, they want me to cut the guy who loses his hand’.”
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While Scorsese denied having a gun at the time, he admitted to threatening to acquire one. “I was going to get one,” Scorsese said. “But I wasn’t going to get it, really?” The Oscar winner added: “I was angry and said I’m going to threaten them or maybe just shoot or something, I had no idea, I mean I was 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’re 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.”
Scorsese noted that Spielberg and others intervened, telling him: “‘Marty, stop that, Marty, you can’t do that’.” Ultimately, Scorsese resolved the issue by “toning the colour down” of the sequence in question, a solution Spielberg credits with having “saved the movie” by avoiding any cuts to the violence.
“He would never have killed anyone,” Miller told The Sunday Times. Scorsese told her that he found the violence he felt “scary” while also reflecting on the nights he spent doing cocaine with musician Robbie Robertson: “The problem is that you enjoy the sin. When I was bad I enjoyed a lot of it.”
Despite the controversy it sparked for its graphic violence in the film’s ending, and for its casting of 12-year-old Jodie Foster as a child prostitute, Taxi Driver was a critical and commercial hit.
The documentary series, which features additional interviews with Scorsese’s friends and collaborators including De Niro, Daniel Day-Lewis and Leonard DiCaprio, is scheduled for release on Apple TV+ on 17 October.
