When Robert De Niro Actually Drove a New York City Cab to Prepare for ‘Taxi Driver’

Robert De Niro won an Academy Award in April 1975 for The Godfather Part II. Within a few months, he was picking up strangers on the West Side of Manhattan in a yellow cab. Almost none of them looked up, and that was the point.To play Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, De Niro went out and got a real New York City hack license—the same paperwork any working cabbie needed—and started taking real fares. De Niro’s Extensive PrepRobert De Niro in the poster for ‘Taxi Driver’ | Silver Screen Collection/GettyImagesThe part most retellings skip is when he did it. He wasn’t between jobs. He was in Italy shooting Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900, and the commute was ridiculous: wrap on a Friday in Rome, fly to New York, drive a cab through the weekend, fly back, and report to Bertolucci on Monday. Taxi Driver itself filmed from mid-June to mid-August 1975, according to the AFI Catalog, in a city grinding through a heat wave, a sanitation strike, and a brush with bankruptcy.Scorsese rode along on several of those nights. What struck him wasn’t the driving: it was the invisibility. “He got a strange feeling when he was hacking,” the director told Roger Ebert over lunch in Chicago in March 1976. “He was totally anonymous. People would say anything, do anything in the backseat – it was like he didn’t exist.”The Part of the Story You Probably Haven’t HeardWhich brings us to the story you’ve probably heard: a passenger spots the name on the license and says something withering about an Oscar winner stuck driving a cab. It’s real, and Scorsese told it to Ebert first; but the version in circulation has misplaced its best line. The passenger himself was a former actor. “Well, that’s acting,” he said. “One year, the Oscar – the next, you’re driving a cab!” De Niro explained he was only doing research. “Yeah, Bobby,” the man replied. “I know. I been there, too.”De Niro, for his part, is tired of the story. On The Rich Eisen Show, he pegged the stint at roughly two weeks, said exactly one passenger ever half-recognized him in the rearview mirror, and waved off the polished version: “That’s a good story, but that’s not the way I remember.”There’s a better one anyway. Writer Mark Carducci, covering the production for Millimeter, rode in De Niro’s cab months before cameras rolled, never realizing who was up front. He had exact fare and left no tip.