Fans of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver can rest assured that the director will not remake his 1976 film in Cuba, under the condition that no shot last longer than 10 frames. Nor will he remake it as an animated movie, do a version where he himself plays Travis Bickle, or provide voice-over narration for a version to be directed by Lars Von Trier.
These reassurances come courtesy of Paul Schrader, the film's screenwriter and a frequent Scorsese collaborator, who was responding to a rumor that Scorsese and Von Trier might actually do one or all of those things. The rumor began in 2011, when it was reported that the two directors would be teaming up for an update of Von Trier's 2003 documentary, The Five Obstructions. In that film, Von Trier challenged fellow Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth to remake his 1967 short The Perfect Human five different times, each time overcoming a different challenge devised by Von Trier to make the process really, really difficult. It remains unclear which of Scorcese's films will be remade for the new iteration of The Five Obstructions, but Schrader has assured the public that it won't be Taxi Driver.
"It was a terrible idea. Marty and Lars were talking about it in Cannes and somebody in Lars' camp stupidly talked about it, but in Marty's mind, it never was something that should be done. We really have fought over the years to keep people's hands off Taxi Driver, to keep it from being a video game and to keep it from having a sequel."
This news also puts to rest any hopes for a Taxi Driver video game that lets players chauffeur deranged cuckolds around New York City from a first-person perspective.