Robert De Niro has been professionally acting for over 60 years, but it was in the mid-1970s that he started becoming the household name we know him as today. After impressing in 1973’s Mean Streets and 1974’s The Godfather Part II, the latter of which netted him an Academy Award, 1976 brought Taxi Driver, where he played the Oscar-nominated role of Travis Bickle. De Niro starred opposite an adolescent Jodie Foster in his second collaboration with director Martin Scorsese, but I just learned that the she thought the elder actor was “really uninteresting” when they were working together.
Foster herself revealed this while speaking at the Marrakech Film Festival (via Variety) after receiving a tribute award. After sharing how Robert De Niro “took me under his wing” during Taxi Driver and ran lines with her at coffee shops. However, because he was taking a Method approach with playing Travis, the mentally unhinged Vietnam War veteran (or is he?)-turned-cab driver, Foster actually found him to be boring during this time, saying:
We’d run the lines and run the lines a second and third time. And I’m sure maybe some of you have been here when Robert De Niro was here. One of our greatest American actors, so proud to have worked with him — not the most interesting person on earth. And at that time, he was very much in character, the way he was in those days. So he was really uninteresting and I remember having these lunches with him and being like, ‘What is happening? When can I go home?’ And he wouldn’t really be able to talk to me, so I would talk to the waiters and the people in the restaurants.
Remember, Jodie Foster was just 12 years old during Taxi Driver’s summer 1975 shoot, so it’s understandable why she would have felt that way about Robert De Niro during this period. Even though she was clued in on him going Method at the time rather than being informed about it after the fact, like she said, Travis Bickle isn’t exactly the most interesting person to hang out with. She wasn’t getting to know the real De Niro, so I probably would have been bored too during those lunches.
Fortunately for Jodie Foster, who starred as child prostitute Iris in Taxi Driver (one of the best ‘70s movies), eventually the two reached a “breakthrough” once Robert De Niro have her a better understanding of his acting preparation process. She continued:
He finally walked me through improvisation by the time we had our third lunch together, and it opened my eyes to what acting could be. And I realized at 12, ‘Oh, it’s my fault because I haven’t brought enough to the table.’ I’ve just been saying lines and waiting for my next line and acting naturally, but building a character is something different. And I remember how excited I was, I remember being kind of sweaty and excited and giggly and coming back up into the hotel room to meet my mom and saying, ‘I’ve had this epiphany.’ And I think from there, everything changed.
I’m glad things turned around between the two actors, otherwise the rest of Taxi Driver’s principal photography would have been pretty awkward between Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster. I’d like to think that the latter reaching that “epiphany” helped her score her own Oscar nomination for performing Iris. Alas, it was Beatrice Straight who Best Supporting Actress for Network at the 49th Academy Awards ceremony, while De Niro lost out to Peter Finch in the Best Actor category from the same Sidney Lumet-directed movie.
If you’re inclined to stream Taxi Driver after reading about this portion of Jodie Foster’s filming experience, that can be done with an HBO Max subscription. That’s also where you can watch Foster’s turn as Liz Danvers in the most recent season of True Detective, while Robert De Niro will next be seen reprising Jack Byrrnes in Focker-In-Law when it opens November 25 on the 2026 movies schedule.
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