Truth behind TAXI DRIVER remake...

By Matt Holmes / June 25, 2011

Variety say Lars Von Trier has challenged (!!!) Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro to indeed remake Taxi Driver (though likely as a serious of shorts) in what appears to be a diabolical and fiendish psychological exercise from the wicked filmmaker to test how far he could push the talents and stability of his hero. Von Trier is playing that little devil on the shoulder of Scorsese. "Prove that you are the filmmaker you used to be, prove that you still have it, that you can still cut it. Prove that you are still the hungry young director who would jump straight into the deep end in the '70s. No fear of failing, etc.". It's something the he has done before to another guy - his Danish mentor Jorgen Leth seven years ago, who was challenged to remake his own 1967 short The Perfect Human over and over again with more difficult and quite frankly impossible challenging presets. Poor Leth was put through the ringer, some of challenges involving adapted his short into animation and another where no shot lasted longer than 12 frames AND answered questions posted in the original production. The whole saga is chronicled in The Five Obstructions...

Scorsese is of course too busy to take the challenge seriously. I could at a stretch imagine him maybe working a few days with De Niro and possibly making a homage short to Taxi Driver but Scorsese's got at least three feature films brewing right now, and no time to divert with a fun experiment like this. So a fun challenge to be sure but it's kind of wasted on a director who is simply too busy to do anything about it. Von Trier would have been better off challenging guys with nothing on their plates right now. Like Tarantino to remake Reservoir Dogs in one take (Alfred Hitchcock's Rope style), or even Steven Spielberg to redo Duel with today's film-making techniques. Now that would be a sight to see.