” being his third successive film to premiere at Venice after “First Reformed” and “The Card Counter.”
“I said at the time to someone, ‘Wouldn’t it be neat if you could have a scene where Cybill Shepherd and Jodie Foster went out for coffee together?,’ says Schrader, who wrote “Taxi Driver” featuring those two actors. “Afterwards I’m thinking, well, maybe I can have that scene now, where he is involved with a woman old enough to be his mother and another woman young enough to be his daughter. And, the stress points that puts on the triangle are quite fascinating.
“I first fell in love with cinema through Ingmar Bergman, so that was the kind of hero I gravitated toward,” says Schrader. “The original thing about ‘Taxi Driver’ wasn’t that the hero was original — it was that his presence in American movies was original. He walked out on the street fully formed, because he had been fully formed in the years past in fiction.”
Casting Maya was a bit trickier. “It’s a very difficult role because she has to be young enough to be not fully formed but old enough to be tough. And you don’t want it to be so young that it looks like cradle snatching,” says Schrader. “However, you want it to be young so that it is not quite proper — this is a kind of Lolita situation. This girl is young enough to be his daughter and he had to let his own daughter go — so that’s a little creepy right there.