Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert by Roger Ebert

He goes from a goddess to a child goddess. The twelveand-a-half-year-old prostitute he's trying to rescue-she's unapproachable, too, for him.
    SCORSESE: She has the candles burning in her bedroom, she's like a saint to him. He can't imagine these pimps treating her the way they do. Before he goes to avenge her, it's almost like he cleanses himself, like in The Virgin Spring when Max von Sydow scourges himself with the branches before he goes out to avenge his daughter's death.
    SCHRADER: We actually had that shot in the movie, and we took it out. Travis whips himself with a towel before he goes out with his guns. We took it out because it looked a little forced and unnatural.
    ScoRSESE: But the Catholic thing? I suppose there are a lot of Catholic references in the film, even if they're only my own personal references. Like the moment when he burns the flowers before he goes out to kill. And when he's buying the guns and the dealer lays them out one at a time on the velvet, like arranging the altar during Mass.
    Schrader left for another interview, and Scorsese and I continued our conversation in his hotel room, which was furnished with two reminders of home: a large box of cookies from Cafe Roma in Little Italy ("My mother sent them, she knew I'd be homesick") and a stack of the latest issues of film magazines. Scorsese got married recently to a freelance writer named Julia Cameron, from Libertyville, and he was planning to have dinner with his new in-laws that night. He thought he'd bring along the cookies.

    EBERT: You talked about living off your next film.
    SCORSESE: It'll be called New York, New York. it takes place in the 1940s and 1950s, it's about the big bands. Liza Minnelli plays a singer and De Niro will be her husband. It's not a musical; it's a film with music. I got that definition from Billy Wilder, who said you can't call it a musical unless the people sing in situations where you don't expect them to. It'll be about their marriage breaking up, about their problems in relating to one another ...
    EBERT: Will it take a feminist position? A lot of people embraced Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore as feminist.
    ScoRSESE: Well, it'll be about the problems of a career marriage. I don't know if it's feminist. Actually, not Alice, but Taxi Driver-this is my feminist film. Who says a feminist movie has to be about women? Alice was never intended as a feminist tract. At the end, she's making the same mistakes. The first shot of her in Kris Kristofferson's house shows her washing the dishes. A big close-up.
    EBERT: And Taxi Driver, where the hero can't relate to women at all, is ...
    ScoRSESE: Feminist. Because it takes macho to its logical conclusion. The better man is the man who can kill you. This one shows that kind of thinking, shows the kinds of problems some men have, bouncing back and forth between the goddesses and whores. The whole movie is based, visually, on one shot where the guy is being turned down on the telephone by the girl, and the camera actually pans away from him. It's too painful to see that rejection.
    EBERT: The film is dedicated to Bernard Herrmann, the great movie composer. He died just after he finished the score.
    ScoRSESE: God, that was terrible. Immediately after. He was so happy, he was back in Hollywood, he had a full orchestra, people were getting down on their knees to him. He was doing some jazz passages, and he insisted on finishing that day. I told him we should do it next week, because he looked tired, "No," he said, "let's do it now." That was on December 23. The next morning, the day of Christmas Eve, he was found dead. That Sunday, Julia and I flew to Chicago to get married ...

    EBERT: I wanted to ask about the violent scenes, the scenes where Travis freaks out and starts shooting.
    SCORSESE: We shot those in slow motion. In forty-eight frames to the second, which is twice the ordinary twenty-four frames-and, of course, if you shoot it twice as fast and project it at the regular