Martin Scorsese’s desperate ‘Taxi Driver’ plan: “I’m going to steal it”
In a sneak-peek clip from the upcoming docuseries ‘Mr. Scorsese’, the iconic film director looks back on a major stand-off with Columbia Pictures.
In a teaser trailer for a new Apple TV+ documentary on Martin Scorsese, the legendary film director looks back on his dramatic standoff with Columbia Pictures before the release of his 1976 classic Taxi Driver.
Nominated for four Oscars, including Best Picture, Taxi Driver starred Robert de Niro as a mentally-unstable veteran who becomes a violent vigilante on the 1970s streets of a decaying New York.
Taxi Driver earned the Palme d’Or as the stand-out movie at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival, and is ranked at No. 52 on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest American movies of all time.
However, as Scorsese and long-time friend Steven Spielberg recall in interviews for the upcoming docuseries Mr. Scorsese, the violence depicted in Taxi Driver - particularly in a shootout late in the movie - caused major friction between director and studio.
“I would go in, find out where the rough cut is”
In the sneak-peek clip released this week by Apple TV+, Spielberg recounts a phone call with a furious Scorsese, who told the Jaws director: “[Columbia] want me to cut all the blood spurting. They want me to cut the guy who loses the hand…”
To prevent Columbia from releasing an edited version that he wasn’t on board with, Scorsese tells Apple TV+ that he hatched a plan to steal the rough cut of Taxi Driver from the studio. What’s more, he says, it even crossed his mind to wield a gun on his mission to retrieve the reel.
“I was going to get one,” Scorsese says, before hastening to clarify: “But I wasn’t going to get it... Really?”
He goes on: “I was angry […] 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. So let me destroy it. I’ll destroy it. But before destroying it, I’m going to steal it.”
“Saved the movie”
Finally, however, Scorsese found a solution that didn’t require firearms or theft. To avoid having to edit out Taxi Driver’s violent scenes, he agreed with Columbia to alter the appearance of the on-screen gore: “What if we took that whole sequence and toned the color down? And make it feel more like a tabloid. And make it grainy.”
“It saved the movie because he didn’t have to cut any of the violence," Spielberg says. “He just had to take the color red down to a kind of brown.”
Scorsese also discussed his confrontation with Universal in 2016, in an interview for The Hollywood Reporter as part of an oral history of Taxi Driver, published to mark the 40th anniversary of the movie’s release.
“There was no way the studio was going to release an X”
“The film was shown to the [ratings board at the] MPAA [Motion Picture Association of America] and it was given an X rating,” Scorsese recalled. “There was no way the studio was going to release an X, understandably.
“We were told we were going into a meeting and the studio was going to discuss with us how to proceed. We sat down, took out a pen, and the studio exec turned to us and said, ‘Cut it for an R or we cut it.’ Then we were dismissed.”
He went on: “I was obsessed with this idea of desaturation that [cinematographer] Oswald Morris used in John Huston’s Moby Dick and I always wanted to do it. So I asked, ‘What if we drained some of the color out and replicated the process of Moby Dick?’ That was accepted by the studio, and so the entire shootout at the end goes to a grainier look.”
Mr. Scorsese - watch Apple TV+’s teaser trailer:
When is Mr. Scorsese released on Apple TV+?
A five-part documentary, Mr. Scorsese is due to premiere on the subscription streaming service on October 17, 2025.
According to Apple, the series will be “a documentary event of a man through the lens of his work, exploring the many facets of a visionary who redefined filmmaking, including his extraordinary career and unique personal history.”
How much is Apple TV+?
In the U.S., a monthly subscription to Apple TV+ costs $9.99, although new users get a seven-day free trial.
You can get three free months of Apple TV+ by buying an Apple device, while the platform is also included in the Apple One bundle of services, with price plans starting at $19.95 a month. Apple TV+ is also available for free as part of an Apple Music student subscription.
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