15 Movies That Say More About Their Makers Than They Realise

12. Taxi Driver - Paul Schrader

The screenwriter of Scorsese's 1976 masterpiece didn't just have a bleak and morally blurry imagination; he most certainly shared Travis Bickle's problem of being "God's lonely man." A victim of a strict Calvinist upbringing, Schrader was an incredibly insecure man who was reported to have slept with a gun in his bed - sometimes held in his mouth - and left it lying around at parties in bizarre attempts to assert his masculinity, a problem that his creation Travis Bickle struggles with throughout Taxi Driver. It wouldn't be a surprise to learn that many of the thoughts that cross Travis' mind during the film originally belonged to Schrader, and though the writer never actually tried to assassinate any political candidates or performed any vigilante acts of violence, his evocation of the isolation and disillusionment being felt by so many young men coming back from Vietnam to a country that seemed to be tearing itself apart is so strongly felt that Schrader had to have an intimately personal connection to his character.