Magical Scorsese

I know heaping praise on the movie Taxi Driver isn't very original of me, but I'm amazed how it just gets better and better every time I see it.

I own a tape of it with an abridged "Making of Taxi Driver" featurette at the end, which I saw for the first tim tonight. I don't usually watch the "making of" stuff. I like not knowing and simply being left entertained. But tonight curiosity got the best of me, and I'm shocked how much planning and tweaking went into the making of this movie.

This is dumb, I know. I live under the illusion that artistic masterpieces -- and Taxi Driver comes about as close to this term as I know in cinema -- are borne out of happy accidents. Maybe I envision this as being the more romantic view ... that art cannot be fully controlled or contained, but merely captured, when inspiration and energy collide in a certain way.

Anyway, there's a part in the "Making of" where director Martin Scorsese talks about feeling the emotions of the characters in the movie after reading the script...

"If I could verbalize it, I wouldn't have had to make the picture ... I felt all those feelings in that story, at that time.... and so this was something I thought that was special to express."

...which reminds me that that's what I always thought made a great film, book, work of art, song, etc. truly great. Expressing the unexpressable. It's like making the impossible happen. It's like magic.

A couple other fun things...

Roger Ebert's original review of the film.

The Making of Taxi Driver, via YouTube.