Quentin Tarantino Compares His Next Film THE MOVIE CRITIC to TAXI DRIVER
Quentin Tarantino is currently preparing to shoot his final film project The Movie Critic, and he’s been keeping the main details of the story to himself. But, he has been offering little nuggets of information to keep interest peaked.
One of the most recent nuggets he shared was during an interview with the French publication Liberation, where he compared his movie to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. He explained how describing The Movie Critic's main character as "Travis Bickle if he were a film critic," referencing the cabbie character that Robert De Niro played in the movie.
In Taxi Driver, Travis is a mentally unstable Vietnam veteran who suffers from insomnia. He ends up taking a job as a New York City cabbie, and as he drives though the nights, he grows increasingly detached from reality as he dreams of cleaning up the city. When Travis meets pretty campaign worker Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), he becomes obsessed with the idea of saving the world, first plotting to assassinate a presidential candidate, then directing his attentions toward rescuing 12-year-old prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster).
When previously talking about Taxi Driver, Tarantino said: "One of the things about Taxi Driver [is] that it is just so magnificent. I actually do feel that it may be the greatest first-person character study ever committed to film. I mean, I really actually can't even think of a second, or a third or a fourth that can even come into contention with it.
He added: "Scorsese, at this time of his career, had a connection to cinema and no matter how dark the material was, there was such an exuberance to filmmaking that I don't know if anyone will ever quite have the run of films that he had in the '70s leading into the '80s."
So, it makes sense that he the movie had a heavy influence on his next project. When previously talking about the main character in The Movie Critic, Tarantino revealed he was inspired by a real movie critic that wrote for a dirty magazine.
The Movie Critic takes place in California in 1977 “and is based on a guy who really lived, but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag.” He went on to explain: “He wrote about mainstream movies and he was the second-string critic. I think he was a very good critic. He was as cynical as hell. His reviews were a cross between early Howard Stern and what Travis Bickle [Robert DeNiro’s character in Taxi Driver] might be if he were a film critic.”
He added: “Think about Travis’s diary entries. But the porno rag critic was very, very funny. He was very rude, you know. He cursed. He used racial slurs. But his shit was really funny. He was as rude as hell. He wrote like he was 55 but he was only in his early to mid-30s. He died in his late thirties. It wasn’t clear for a while but now I’ve done some more research and I think it was it was complications due to alcoholism.”
This is going to be an interesting film, and since this will be Tarantino’s last movie, I really hope that he knocks it out of the park.