Long rumored, but most likely never to happen, Robert De Niro is still keeping the door open for the possibility of a sequel to Martin Scorsese’s classic “Taxi Driver.”
Speaking with MTV News recently, Robert De Niro indicated that an attempt seems to have been made by the original film’s creators to get a second film up and running. “I have talked to Paul Schrader and Marty (Scorsese)…, ” De Niro said. “We had a thing and we tried to figure it out; Paul was trying to come up with something… and it just didn’t seem to work.”
In February, it was reported the possibility of a Lars Von Trier collaboration with Scorsese and De Niro on a “Taxi Driver” remake similar to Von Trier’s collaboration with director Jorgan Leth in 2003’s “The Five Obstructions.” The rumor was later denied by Von Trier’s business partner Peter Aalbaek Jensen and Scorsese and De Niro have both been silent on the possibility of any “Taxi Driver” remakes or sequels until now.
De Niro sounded less than hopeful in addressing the idea and certainly didn’t add any fuel to the fire or rumor, but he didn’t dismiss the notion entirely: “You never know — something could come up… I thought it would be interesting to find a way to bring [Travis Bickle] back all these years later — maybe with something ironic about where he’d end up, as he did in the first one.”
“All these years later, maybe we could… It’s still possible,” he says. But honestly? Probably never gonna happen. Martin Scorsese has about four features and a nearly a half-a-dozen documentaries on his plate right now, including a potential two-part film of “The Irishman” with De Niro himself. Forever moving forward, we can’t imagine Scorsese being too excited about returning to the well of “Taxi Driver,” but never say never. –Nathan Sizemore
As long as he's in Peter Boyle's role giving advice to a new awkward alienated taxi driver, I'm kinda in.
I was waiting for De Niro to mention how they'd talked about doing a sequel to a movie where the main character dies at the end, and then I remembered that Travis doesn't necessarily die at the end.
In some ways, "Bringing Out the Dead" seems like a thematic sequel to "Taxi Driver". Still, I'd be down for an actual sequel, even though there are a number of other projects I'd rather see Scorsese do (though as long as he finally gets to do "The Silence", everything else is just icing on the cake in my mind). But anything Scorsese does is worth watching. And yeah, a Scorsese-De Niro reteaming would be pretty awesome, whether it's a two-part "Irishman", this, "The Neighborhood", or anything else.
But yeah. Based on this article, this really isn't news. It's like, "We talked about this idea one time, but it didn't really turn out very well, and nothing came of it, and we haven't talked in a couple decades." Still, fun to speculate.