Martin Scorsese still remembers the reason he felt confident casting Jodie Foster in his iconic 1976 film Taxi Driver when she was just 12 years old.
The Independent was in attendance as the legendary director, 83, reunited with Foster — along with star Robert De Niro and screenwriter Paul Schrader — during a panel Friday at Tribeca Film Festival to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the classic film.
In a conversation about how each of the Hollywood heavyweights found their way to the acclaimed drama, Scorsese said he knew that he could trust Foster with the movie’s heavy adult material when he saw her mature attitude toward playing a child sex worker in the film.
The filmmaker said that at a meeting before production on the project started, Foster showed up at his Manhattan office in her school uniform and discussed the logistics of their upcoming shoot in a matter-of-fact way that impressed him.
“She had an authority,” Scorsese recalled.
Foster, who worked as a child actor from the age of three, said that she might have seemed unusually professional for her age because after years of starring in Disney movies and commercials, she had already become used to being on set.
“I probably remember more than everybody because I was just watching and listening,” Foster, 63, said about her time on the set.
The actor has said in previous interviews that she felt that De Niro and Scorsese were “scared” of her while filming because of the movie’s adult material. She spoke again Friday about how the actor and director duo often fell into fits of giggles when they were trying to plan scenes that were particularly uncomfortable, including one part in the film where her character had to unzip De Niro’s character’s pants.
However, the Silence of the Lambs star then recalled at the panel that at her preteen age, she had been starstruck by Scorsese and her other colleagues on the film because she grew up loving cinema and was familiar with their work — which was also part of the reason why she was interested in the role in the first place.
“It felt important, but also whimsical,” Foster said.
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“I was just lucky to be there…I saw Mean Streets [when] I was a kid,” she added, referring to Scorsese’s 1973 crime drama starring De Niro. “That was it, I just wanted to be a part of this.”
While filming the movie, Foster learned how to improvise by spending time with De Niro, which she said went on to inspire her career by encouraging her to pursue acting as an art form instead of “just saying the words.”
Speaking about that same learning moment in an interview last year, Foster said at the Marrakech Film Festival: “I remember how excited I was, I remember being kind of sweaty and excited and giggly and coming back up into the hotel room to meet my mom and saying, ‘I’ve had this epiphany.’ And I think from there, everything changed.”
Foster and De Niro were both nominated for Academy Awards for their performances in the movie.
