Robert De Niro has admitted he never expected one of his Oscar-nominated films to become the lasting success it did.
After cementing his star status with his Oscar-winning performance in The Godfather Part II (1974), the legendary actor, 82, continued his rise with Martin Scorsese’s 1976 drama Taxi Driver.
The critically acclaimed crime noir — which follows De Niro’s Travis Bickle, a disturbed insomniac, as he takes a job as a New York City cab driver and embarks on an obsessive attempt to rescue 12-year-old prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster) — earned him his second acting Oscar nomination.
However, De Niro recently revealed that he originally doubted its enduring quality.
“You never can think that you’re doing something that’s going to have an impact,” he told Page Six during an interview ahead of the 25th edition of New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival, which he co-founded with producer Jane Rosenthal.
De Niro said he never approaches a project expecting it to be a hit, explaining that he “just never look[s] at it that way” and acknowledging that success is “out of your control.”
In February, Taxi Driver celebrated its 50th anniversary. Following its 1976 debut, it landed four Oscar nods, including Best Picture. Both Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader, however, were overlooked for Best Original Screenplay and Best Director, and the top prize ultimately went to John G. Avildsen’s beloved boxing drama Rocky.
Speaking to Deadline earlier this month, Schrader, a famous director himself, said he was not surprised that the movie did not win any Oscars.
“I wasn’t a bit thrown that Taxi Driver did not win,” the American Gigolo director insisted. “If you look at that category of Original Screenplay, it probably was the most original screenplay of that year, but it was just too controversial.”
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He added that, in fact, Columbia Pictures “was caught off-guard when it started doing as well as it did. They had written it off as an outlier and that’s why they didn’t market test it or put marketing behind it.”
Taxi Driver not only became a critical success but a commercial success as well, grossing $27.6 million worldwide.
“It was one of those scripts that banged around town where everybody said someone else should make it,” Schrader said, “but not us.”
Taxi Driver also helped launch Foster’s acting career. She was only 12 when she starred opposite De Niro.
Last November, Foster recalled working with De Niro on the film. Lauding him as “one of our greatest American actors, so proud to have worked with him,” at the 2025 Marrakech Film Festival, she revealed that while they were filming, he was “not the most interesting person on earth.”
“At that time, he was very much in character, the way he was in those days,” she recounted. “So he was really uninteresting and I remember having these lunches with him and being like, ‘What is happening? When can I go home?’”
The Silence of the Lambs star said their relationship eventually reached a breakthrough when he spoke to her about his method-acting process.
“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,” Foster continued. “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.”