12-Year-Old Jodie Foster Promoted Taxi Driver Alone At Cannes When A Rumor Spooked Martin Scorsese

Columbia Pictures

You will never see a better child performance than the one Jodie Foster gives in Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver." She was only 12 years old at the time of the shoot, but she is wholly convincing as the streetwise sex worker Iris. Her scenes with the great Robert De Niro, who plays the mentally unstable Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle, are deeply unsettling on numerous levels, but they're also strangely exhilarating because Foster is every bit her brilliant scene partner's equal. Her Iris is tough, a survivor, but she can't completely mask the character's sadness and fear. She's using up her future at a frightening pace, and Bickle is that last person who should be interceding on her behalf.

Michael and Julia Phillips produced "Taxi Driver" for Columbia Pictures, which was incredibly nervous about the film for what appeared to be legitimate reasons. Paul Schrader's screenplay was disturbing to begin with, but Scorsese's envisioning of it was more graphically violent than the studio had expected. When the film was screened at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival, the scandalized audience booed the bloody climax. This caused Columbia to worry that "Taxi Driver" would receive an X rating from the MPAA, which would've been a commercial kiss of death, given that most exhibitors refused to book X-rated movies.

This looked to be a disaster in the making, so Scorsese, De Niro, and Harvey Keitel (who played Iris' pimp Sport), after having done one press conference at the festival, dipped out of any further interviews. This left Foster to address journalists all by her lonesome. Fortunately, 50 years later, she found the whole situation amusing.

Columbia Pictures

Speaking at the 2025 Marrakech Film Festival (via Variety), Foster remembered how nobody wanted her at Cannes in the first place "because they didn't want to spend money on me." This was rude and, frankly, counterproductive to the film's marketing because Foster's performance was as buzzy as De Niro's. Also, she was attending a French school in Los Angeles at the time! Foster's mother found Columbia's position absurd. "My mom said, 'No, it's really important. She speaks French. This is Cannes!'" Foster called. "And so we paid for our own flights."

Once there, Foster found herself caught up in the hubbub over the movie's reception and the X-rating rumors. Reflecting on this, Foster laughed while recalling how Scorsese, Keitel, and De Niro "were really paranoid" about the situation. (I will not speculate as to which substance might've exacerbated that paranoia.) "We all did the press conference together, but then after the press conference, they all got too scared, and they wouldn't leave their rooms at the Hotel du Cap," Foster explained. "So, I ended up doing all the interviews in French for the entire team of 'Taxi Driver!'"

If you've seen Rebecca Miller's "Mr. Scorsese" documentary, you know the filmmaker went to war against Columbia over "Taxi Driver" (to the point where he considered getting a gun and stealing the rough cut so as to preserve his vision). Ultimately, by desaturating the colors in the movie's climactic shootout, he secured an R rating. The movie went on to be nominated for four Academy Awards, and is now considered one of the greatest films of the 1970s. And all of the aforementioned artists, save for Keitel, have since won at least one Oscar. Let's do something about that, Academy.