Jodie Foster reminisced about her time playing 12-year-old prostitute Iris in “Taxi Driver” alongside Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Paul Schrader during the film’s 50th anniversary reunion at the Tribeca Festival. One memory that remains “seared in [her] memory” is arriving on set and finding Scorsese and De Niro unable to stop giggling as they tried to explain how to unzip De Niro’s pants for a provocative scene.
“Marty was trying to explain to me how I was supposed to pull down [De Niro’s] fly. They couldn’t stop giggling, and Bob’s like, ‘I’m gonna tell her.’ He would try to tell me what to do, and then he would start giggling,” Foster recalled Friday night at the OKX Theater in lower Manhattan. “They couldn’t give me a note because they were just so nervous that I was so young.”
As the laughter continued, Foster took matters into her own hands. “And I was like, ‘Well, you just want me to- okay, fine! First I pull down the fly, then I do this and I walk over there. What’s the big deal?'”
Half a century later, Foster’s confidence and command of a room remain intact. One of the night’s biggest laughs came when she politely (and directly) called out Schrader for beginning to answer a question without using his microphone. “He might be sitting on it!” Scorsese quipped. (Sure enough, he was). This self-assurance is what impressed Scorsese the moment they met in his office before production began on the 1974 comedy “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” Foster was just 11 years old and still wearing her school uniform, but she made it clear that she already had eight years of acting experience under her belt.
