Jodie Foster was 12 years old when she arrived on the set of Taxi Driver and found two of cinema's most celebrated talents completely unable to keep a straight face.
At a 50th anniversary reunion for the film, held Friday night at the OKX Theater in lower Manhattan during the Tribeca Festival, Foster described what happened when director Martin Scorsese and star Robert De Niro tried to explain a scene in which her character, a young prostitute named Iris, would unzip De Niro's fly. The memory, she said, remains "seared in [her] memory."
According to Variety, the exchange became something of a comedy of errors. "Marty was trying to explain to me how I was supposed to pull down [De Niro's] fly. They couldn't stop giggling, and Bob's like, 'I'm gonna tell her.' He would try to tell me what to do, and then he would start giggling," Foster recalled. "They couldn't give me a note because they were just so nervous that I was so young."
Foster eventually took the matter into her own hands. "And I was like, 'Well, you just want me to- okay, fine! First I pull down the fly, then I do this and I walk over there. What's the big deal?'"
That self-possession was no accident. Scorsese had first encountered Foster a year before Taxi Driver, when she came to his office during pre-production on the 1974 comedy Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. She was 11, still in her school uniform, and wasted no time making clear she already had eight years of acting experience.
Scorsese recalled the meeting at the reunion, mimicking her manner directly. "You just sat down [and said], 'Yeah, I can do that. Okay, I got it. No problem,'" he recalled. "'What are you doing next?'" he asked, to which she said, "'Oh, I'm doing this other thing over at Disney.'" Foster reportedly scrunched her shoulders and giggled beside him as he told the story. "She had an authority — I'm not kidding — an authority," Scorsese concluded. "She was really quite supportive, if you could put it that way, because it was a hard shoot."
Foster's comfort with the work went well beyond that one scene. During a January cover story interview with Variety, she had described working with male directors as something she always found "kind of simple," with a philosophy she summed up plainly: "You tell me what you want; I do it."
Her path into serious cinema, she said at the reunion, began with her mother, who took her to see European, French New Wave and Japanese films. But the moment that truly locked in her ambitions was watching De Niro's slow-motion entrance into Tony's bar in Mean Streets, set to the Rolling Stones' "Jumpin' Jack Flash."
"The truth is, I saw 'Mean Streets' when I was a kid … and that was it," Foster said, smiling toward De Niro. "I just wanted to be a part of this. Anything that you would have offered me, I would have done."
The reunion panel also included screenwriter Paul Schrader. One of the evening's lighter moments came when Schrader began answering a question without his microphone. Foster called him out directly. Scorsese quipped, "He might be sitting on it!" He was.
