Jodie Foster Once Shared That She Originally Didn’t Want to Do ‘Taxi Driver’
Actor Jodie Foster made a huge name for herself after starring in the Martin Scorsese flick Taxi Driver. But Foster once confided that it was a role she had to initially be talked into.
Jodie Foster once shared that many didn’t want her to do ‘Taxi Driver’
Foster was already becoming an established actor before her now iconic role in Taxi Driver. She had many acting credits under her belt, including movies like Tom Sawyer and television shows like Gunsmoke.
Her role in Taxi Driver, however, was a strong departure from the usual work Foster did at the time. And given that a very young Foster would be playing a prostitute, the potential role concerned quite a few. It didn’t help that Foster had Disney films like Freaky Friday lined up for her afterwards.
“Well, I did Taxi Driver before I did Freaky Friday, but, yeah, there were lots of people that told my mother – because I wasn’t that involved in my career at that point – ‘What are you doing? She shouldn’t do that movie,’” Foster once recalled to Games Radar. “But my mom is a big film fan and we were always seeing European movies, whether it was Jean-Luc Godard or Fellini. She was a big fan of Martin Scorsese and she wanted me to be in films where I was taken seriously and that were about important topics. That was a great choice on her part.”
Jodie Foster almost turned down ‘Taxi Driver’
It turns out that Foster also had initial doubts about doing the project. Still in her pre-teens, Foster figured her Taxi Driver character suited someone older.
“When I first read the script I thought, ‘Wow, they’ve got to be kidding!’ It was a great part for a 21‐year‐old, but I couldn’t believe they were offering it to me. I was the Disney kid. I thought, ‘What would my friends say?’ I could just hear their little snickerings. So I didn’t want to do it,” she once said in an interview with The New York Times.
But in the end, Foster’s mother ended up changing her mind. According to the publication, Foster’s mother was also her manager, and was a fan of the script. She also wanted her daughter to work with Martin Scorsese and Taxi Driver star Robert De Niro.
Foster’s mother made the right call for her daughter. The film not only changed Foster’s career trajectory, but working with De Niro gave her a new appreciation for acting.
“Up until then, people would only ask me to act natural. I thought that’s what actors did: read the lines and act natural. That just didn’t seem like a very intelligent job, you know? I felt like, ‘I’m not gonna do that when I get older because it’s not very interesting,’” she said. “And through De Niro working with me and trying to do improvs and have me understand the process of creating a character, it was like smelling salts. I woke up and was like, ‘Oh wow, this is way more satisfying than I thought!’ It’s up to the actor to bring that stimulation to a part and I didn’t realise that before Taxi Driver.”
Jodie Foster is still very proud of ‘Taxi Driver’ decades later
Foster looked back on her Taxi Driver days in a yahoo interview not too long ago. The Silence of the Lambs star confided that she continues to be grateful for being a part of the film.
“I think the movie’s a really important movie. I’m really proud of it. Those girls existed, those girls exist, and female sexual slavery is something that we need to discuss — the complexity of it,” Foster said. “So yeah, I felt pretty good about it. Sometimes I can’t believe that I was so young. When I look back and see the movie, it was surprising that I was only 12 years old. But yeah, I’m proud of it.”
