50 Years After Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro Reveals the Legacy He Never Saw Coming Ahead of a Tribeca Festival Reunion With Scorsese

Robert De Niro is looking back at Taxi Driver as it turns 50, and even he sounds a little stunned by what that movie became. Ahead of a Tribeca Festival reunion with Martin Scorsese, he basically says: no one making it thought they were stamping out a cultural monument. Which, fair. You usually only find that out decades later when people won’t stop quoting you in mirrors.

De Niro on legacy: you can’t plan this stuff

In a new chat tied to next month’s Tribeca Festival — which he co-founded with Jane Rosenthal — De Niro (he’s 82) talked about how you just don’t know what will stick when you’re in the middle of making it.

"You never can think that you’re doing something that’s going to have an impact."

He added that the success of a movie is largely out of an actor ’s hands, and he never signs on assuming a project is destined to become a capital-C Classic.

Why the film still hits (and keeps getting revisited)

Taxi Driver landed in 1976 and burrowed into the culture: loneliness, violence, the lure and rot of fame, the darker corners of New York — it’s all in there. De Niro’s Travis Bickle, a profoundly isolated Vietnam War vet deteriorating in plain sight, became a defining character for both him and Scorsese. The line everyone still quotes — "You talkin' to me?" — is back in circulation again because, yes, the movie is turning 50 this year.

Tribeca is turning the anniversary into an event

The festival is giving Taxi Driver a special screening, and De Niro and Scorsese will sit down together to talk through making it and why it hasn’t faded. It’s exactly the kind of film-history deep dive that tends to become the hot ticket at Tribeca.

• Special 50th anniversary screening of Taxi Driver
• Onstage conversation with Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese about the film’s making and legacy

The messy part people forget: it wasn’t loved at first

Now it’s a fixture on greatest-ever lists, but the rollout was bumpy. At Cannes in 1976, the movie sparked real backlash — there were boos and even walkouts during the climax. Jodie Foster was just 13 when she made it, and she has said that the uproar over the violence blew up around them. And yet, the Cannes jury still handed it the Palme d’Or that year. That combo of outrage and top prize is very film-history-nerd catnip.

Over time, the very things that rattled people — the graphic brutality, the discomfort, the unflinching look at a mind cracking — became the reasons critics and filmmakers point to it as a landmark. It’s the collaboration you think of first when you say De Niro and Scorsese in the same breath.

Half a century later

The Tribeca reunion is a neat reminder that some legacies get built slowly: controversy turns into conversation, and conversation turns into canon. Taxi Driver didn’t just survive that process — it shaped it, and it’s still pushing new audiences (and new directors ) to wrestle with the same hard questions.