It was ridiculous from the start, but admit it: Your inner optimist couldn't help but hope that the brief Berlin power summit between Martin Scorsese and Lars von Trier had in fact yielded a pact to remake Scorsese's 1976 classic Taxi Driver. Not because the original needed it, obviously, but because of the whole rumored science of the thing: Scorsese reapproaching Paul Schrader's screenplay in sanitized New York, "God'd lonely man" Travis Bickle reimagined for the Internet Age, even Robert De Niro reprising his title role... Short of a 65-year-old Bickle muttering "You talkin' to me?" into a full-length mirror high above Tribeca, the spectacular WTF-ness of the entire enterprise would make Werner Herzog's own riff on Bad Lieutenant look like a student film. Alas -- and probably thankfully -- it's B.S.
Basically it goes like this: A Danish film magazine recently floated remake rumors to von Trier's producer Peter Aalbaek, who declined to confirm them, adding only that an official statement would be announced "shortly." Then Scorsese was quoted as saying during the Shutter Island press conference in Berlin: "Bob De Niro and I are talking about something that has to do with that world. There's no doubt about that. We're working on something like that. But it's from the vantage point of older men looking back. None of this running around stuff." This isn't news, though; the pair had originally wanted to make the aging-hit man drama The Winter of Frankie Machine together back in 2007, on which Michael Mann replaced Scorsese before the project stalled indefinitely.
Then, after Scorsese and von Trier came face-to-face in Berlin (where von Trier is pre-selling his dystopic sci-fi film Melancholia), some creative media minds decided that this was the beginning of another great von Trierian experiment like the one in 2003's The Five Obstructions. In that film, von Trier challenged fellow director Jorgen Leth to remake his short film The Perfect Human five different, increasingly challenging ways. This time around, however, it would be Scorsese and De Niro reviving one of their greatest collaborations under von Trier's eye.
Right. By the time the rumor hit Variety, the wheels had pretty much come off the gossip machine. Aalbeck, perhaps feeling guilty for his earlier demurral or simply having tired of another wildly successful von Trier prank, issued a more direct denial today: "I have seen it [the story] in the Danish film magazine and what is written there is not true," he told another interviewer. Well obviously -- like Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro are going to submit themselves and Taxi Driver to the aesthetic experiments of a man whose most recent film is best known for a close-up of a do-it-yourself clitoridectomy and blood-ejaculating penis? Then again, after Shutter Island and Everybody's Fine these guys might be able to use all the outside guidance they can get.
Stiil -- no. Not happening. Sorry.
ยท Taxi for von Trier? [Screen Daily]