12-year-old Jodie Foster was promoted to solo taxi driver in Cannes when a rumor scared Martin Scorsese

You’ll never see a better child performance than Jodie Foster in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.” She was only 12 at the time of filming, but she is utterly convincing as Iris, a street sex worker. His scenes with the great Robert De Niro, who plays mentally unstable Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle, are deeply disturbing on many levels, but they are also strangely exhilarating because Foster is every bit the equal of his brilliant scene partner. Her Iris is tough, a survivor, but she can’t completely mask the character’s sadness and fear. She’s using up her future at a frightening rate, and Bickle is the last person who should intercede on her behalf.

Michael and Julia Phillips produced “Taxi Driver” for Columbia Pictures, which was incredibly nervous about the film for what seemed like legitimate reasons. Paul Schrader’s script was initially disturbing, but Scorsese’s vision was more graphically violent than the studio had intended. When the film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976, scandalized audiences booed the bloody denouement. This led Columbia to fear that “Taxi Driver” would receive an

This seemed like a disaster waiting to happen, so Scorsese, De Niro and Harvey Keitel (who played Iris Sport’s pimp), after doing a press conference at the festival, withdrew from any further interviews. That left Foster to speak to reporters alone. Fortunately, 50 years later, she found the situation amusing.

Speaking at the 2025 Marrakech Film Festival (via Variety), Foster recalled that no one wanted her at Cannes in the first place “because they didn’t want to spend money on me.” It was rude and, frankly, counterproductive to the film’s marketing, as Foster’s performance was as lively as De Niro’s. Plus, she was attending a French school in Los Angeles at the time! Foster’s mother found Columbia’s position absurd. “My mom said, ‘No, it’s really important. She speaks French. It’s Cannes!'” Foster called. “And so we paid for our own flights.”

Once there, Foster found herself caught up in the hubbub surrounding the film’s reception and X-rated rumors. Reflecting on this, Foster laughed as she recalled how Scorsese, Keitel and De Niro “were really paranoid” about the situation. (I won’t speculate on what substance might have exacerbated this paranoia.) “We all did the press conference together, but after the press conference they all got too scared and they didn’t want to leave their rooms at the Hotel du Cap,” Foster explained. “As a result, I ended up doing all the interviews in French for the entire ‘Taxi Driver!’ team. »

If you’ve seen Rebecca Miller’s documentary “Mr. Scorsese,” you know that the filmmaker went to war with Columbia over “Taxi Driver” (to the point that he considered getting a gun and stealing the rough cut to preserve his vision). Ultimately, by desaturating the colors during the film’s climactic shootout, it earned an R rating. The film was subsequently nominated for four Academy Awards and is today considered one of the greatest films of the 1970s. And all of the aforementioned performers except Keitel have since won at least one Oscar. Let’s do something about this, Academy.