Are you talking to him?
Robert De Niro never dreamed that his 1976 film Taxi Driver would be hailed as a classic.
The 82-year-old actor explained this exclusively to Page Six in a recent interview with fellow Tribeca Festival co-founder Jane Rosenthal to promote next month’s event.
The Oscar winner added that he would “never look at it that way,” noting that success is “out of your control.”
In this neo-noir drama directed by Martin Scorsese, De Niro plays an unstable taxi driver named Travis Bickle, whose mental health deteriorates over the course of the film.
De Niro played the iconic role alongside Jodie Foster, Cybill Shepherd, Harvey Keitel, Peter Boyle, and Albert Brooks.
The project was controversial at the time for its graphic violence and casting of 12-year-old Foster as a child sex worker, and later for its role in John Hinckley Jr.’s assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan.
Nevertheless, the film is considered one of the greatest films of all time and was designated as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically” significant by the Library of Congress in 1994 when it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
The film, which turns 50 this year, will be screened at a festival in June, when De Niro and Scorsese, 83, will meet again to talk about the project.
Their seating is just one of many special talks and screenings at this year’s 25th Tribeca Festival.
There will also be interviews with Madonna, Sean Penn and Josh Safdie, as well as special commemorative screenings of The Cable Guy and Bridget Jones’s Diary.
“There’s a lot of great stuff,” Rosenthal said. “There’s a lot of music, from Earth, Wind and Fire and Madonna to Noga Erez, Sara Bareilles and Peter Frampton.
“There’s a lot to see,” the 69-year-old continued, stressing that the festival is now “a welcome festival for all New Yorkers who have a ticket.”
The annual event, which runs from June 3 to June 14, was founded in 2002 to help revitalize Lower Manhattan after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.
