Oscar-winning film director Martin Scorsese threatened to buy a gun when in a rage at a film studio, according to a new docuseries about his life. After suggested edits to his 1976 movie Taxi Driver, which starred Robert De Niro, he flew into such a fury that he began threatening to take the law into his own hands.
“Marty was very upset,” says Steven Spielberg. “We get a call at the office: ‘Steve, Steve, it’s Marty. Can you come over to the house? They want me to cut all the blood spurting, they want me to cut the guy who loses his hand.’”
“He was going crazy,” adds fellow director Brian De Palma. “I mean, the story is he wanted to kill the head of the studio.”
Scorsese himself claims that his plans were slightly less extreme, even if he did claim at the time that he had every intention of buying a weapon. “I don’t know. I was angry. I said I was going to threaten them, or maybe just shoot or something. I had no idea,” he says.
Instead, the director’s actual plan involved a different sort of crime. “What I wanted to do – and not with a gun – I would go in, find out where the rough cut is and break the windows and take it back,” he explains.
“They’re going to destroy the film anyway, so let me destroy it. I’ll destroy it. But before destroying it, I’m going to steal it.
“Spielberg said: ‘Marty stop that! Marty, you can’t do it!’ And the more they said no, the more I said I was going to do it.”
The scenes come from an Apple TV+ documentary series, Mr Scorsese, which looks at the director’s life and work drawing on access to his private archives. It features interviews with family, friends and colleagues including De Niro, Daniel Day-Lewis, Sharon Stone, Margot Robbie and Mick Jagger.
It was not the first time that the director uttered violent threats during the production of Taxi Driver. He also infamously appeared in the movie as a passenger who planned to murder his wife after discovering her infidelity, performing a calm monologue strewn with racist language and threats of gun-related violence.
Ultimately, a compromise to the editing crisis was struck, meaning that Taxi Driver was able to retain controversial blood-soaked scenes. In the words of Spielberg: “It saved the movie because he didn’t have to cut any of the violence. He just had to take the colour red down to a colour brown.”
