Delphine Valloire at Festival Lumière: Revisiting Taxi Driver
Fifty Years Later: Delphine Valloire Revisits
Taxi Driver
at Festival Lumière
From Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese to the Angel of Destruction: A Book, a Film, and an Educational Experience at Festival Lumière 2026
Narges Samadi | Film Critic & Festival Journalist
When a Conversation Makes Us Want to Revisit a Film
On Monday, October 12, during Festival Lumière 2026 in Lyon, I attended a presentation of French journalist and author Delphine Valloire’s new book, Il était une fois… Taxi Driver (Once Upon a Time… Taxi Driver). Published fifty years after Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), the book revisits the history of the film’s creation.
By the end of the session, one feeling stayed with me: I wanted to watch Taxi Driver again. Not simply to revisit a familiar film, but to pay closer attention to details that Valloire’s presentation had made me curious about.
I wanted to look more closely at the relationship between Paul Schrader’s life and the character of Travis Bickle, Scorsese’s religious upbringing, New York City’s role in shaping the film’s atmosphere, and Bernard Herrmann’s music.
But my curiosity did not end with the film itself. After the presentation, I decided to learn more about its author. Who was this writer returning to Taxi Driver half a century later? What had she written before, and what professional journey had led her to research the production histories of such well-known films?
Discovering Delphine Valloire’s professional background only deepened my interest in her book.
Delphine Valloire: From Festival Journalism to Researching Film History
Delphine Valloire is a French journalist, writer, and film critic whose career in cultural and film journalism dates back to the late 1990s.
For eight years, she covered major international film festivals, including Cannes, Venice, Berlin, and Locarno, for the Franco-German cultural broadcaster ARTE.
As someone whose own professional life involves attending and covering film festivals, I found this background particularly interesting. Festival journalism is not simply about watching films and reporting on events. It involves ongoing encounters with filmmakers, critics, cinematic movements, and different ways of seeing images. Over time, such experiences can lead a journalist beyond documenting individual events toward exploring the connections between them.
Valloire also served as editor-in-chief of the French magazine Jalouse for approximately a decade and later worked as an editor-at-large for L’Officiel. She has contributed to various cultural and film publications, including Rockyrama.
What interested me was this combination of experiences: international festival journalism, editorial leadership, and eventually researching and writing books about films that occupy an important place in cinema history.
Yet the subjects of her previous books particularly caught my attention.
In Il était une fois… Shining, Valloire explored the making of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). She then turned to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) in Il était une fois… Apocalypse Now, examining a film whose notoriously difficult production has itself become part of cinema history.
Now, in 2026, she has turned her attention to Taxi Driver.
These three choices raised a question for me: Why would a writer with such extensive experience repeatedly return to films that have already inspired countless books, interviews, and critical studies?
Valloire’s interest seems to extend beyond simply recounting historical facts. What I took from her presentation, and from considering her books together, was a fascination with how films come into being: how personal experiences, historical circumstances, artistic decisions, and sometimes unpredictable events during production shape a cinematic work.
This is my interpretation of her professional journey and published work, rather than a definitive statement about her intentions.
Learning about her background encouraged me to approach her book on Taxi Driver with greater attention. I was now encountering the work of someone who had spent years immersed in film journalism and cultural criticism and who had developed a particular interest in reconstructing the histories behind significant films.
Two Religious Backgrounds and the Making of
Taxi Driver
’s World
One central theme of Valloire’s discussion was the relationship between Paul Schrader’s and Martin Scorsese’s religious backgrounds and the moral and spiritual world of Taxi Driver.
Schrader grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in a strict Calvinist household where he was not permitted to watch films during his childhood. His eventual discovery of cinema, followed by his involvement in film criticism, became an important part of his intellectual and professional development.
Scorsese, by contrast, was raised in an Italian American Catholic family in New York. Ideas of sin, confession, suffering, punishment, and redemption have remained present throughout much of his filmmaking.
Valloire begins her book with a chapter titled “Two Choirboys,” drawing on these contrasting religious backgrounds as a starting point.
I find this choice significant because it allows Taxi Driver to be considered as something more than the story of a lonely man in New York City.
Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, sees himself surrounded by a corrupt city and gradually comes to believe that he has a duty to cleanse it.
But is Travis genuinely seeking redemption? Or does he transform religious and moral ideas into a language through which he can justify his anger and violence?
This is one of the questions that Valloire’s approach invites us to reconsider.
At the same time, we must distinguish between the character’s worldview and the film’s perspective. Scorsese does not necessarily endorse Travis’s beliefs about himself. Much of the film’s complexity lies precisely in the distance between Travis’s imagined mission and the reality of his actions.
Paul Schrader: From Personal Crisis to the Creation of Travis Bickle
I was particularly interested in Valloire’s account of Paul Schrader’s circumstances while writing the screenplay.
In the early 1970s, Schrader experienced a period of emotional crisis, loneliness, and instability. Accounts of his temporarily living in his car and spending nights in Los Angeles movie theatres have become part of the widely documented history of the screenplay’s creation.
Valloire examines these experiences in relation to the emergence of Travis Bickle.
For me, however, the essential question is where the writer’s personal experience ends and the cinematic character begins.
Travis cannot simply be understood as a reflection of Schrader’s life. Through De Niro’s performance, Scorsese’s mise-en-scène, camera movement, editing, sound, and music, the character develops an identity of his own.
The screenplay is the starting point, not the final stage in creating a character.
One value of studying film production history is that it reveals how an individual experience can become a cinematic work through collaboration among different artists.
New York, 1975: A City That Helps Shape a Character
A chapter of Valloire’s book, titled “Sodom and Gomorrah: New York 1975,” is devoted to the city and the historical circumstances surrounding the production.
The New York of Taxi Driver is far more than a backdrop. Its nighttime streets, neon lights, rain, steam rising from street vents, and constant flow of cars all shape Travis’s psychological world.
He observes the city through the windows of his taxi, which allow him to watch others while maintaining his separation from them.
Travis moves through the city, yet he cannot form any lasting human connection with it. He observes his surroundings, judges them, and gradually comes to regard them as his enemy.
From this perspective, Valloire’s attention to New York in the 1970s and the challenges of filming there offers a way to explore the relationship between the real city and the one Scorsese constructs on screen.
The two, of course, are not identical. The cinematic city is filtered through the character’s perspective and the filmmaker’s formal choices, becoming a world of its own.
A Mirror, an Actor, and a Line That Entered Cinema History
One of the memorable parts of the presentation concerned the famous mirror scene, in which Travis Bickle stands with a gun, looks at his reflection, and asks:
“You talkin’ to me?”
Valloire discussed the difference between the scene as initially described in the screenplay and the version that appears in the finished film.
The screenplay called for Travis to play with his gun in front of a mirror, but the character’s dialogue emerged through De Niro’s improvisation.
The discussion also touched on Schrader’s description of the childlike behaviour of someone pretending to wield an imaginary gun in front of a mirror.
These details interested me because they allow us to look beyond the scene’s famous dialogue.
Standing before the mirror, Travis is not merely rehearsing threats. He is constructing an image of himself, a powerful identity meant to replace the isolated, powerless man he has been.
The mirror becomes a private stage on which Travis is simultaneously the performer, the spectator, and the target of his own threats.
In moments like this, production history can open a path toward formal and character analysis. Behind-the-scenes information cannot replace cinematic analysis, but it can raise questions that encourage us to look at the images again.
The Angel of Destruction: A Religious Reading of Travis Bickle
The title of the book’s sixth chapter, “The Angel of Destruction,” suggests a particular interpretive direction.
Travis Bickle sees the world around him as contaminated and believes he must cleanse it. Yet his desire for violence does not emerge from a clear or reliable moral system. Instead, it is bound up with isolation, frustration, a desire to be seen, and an inability to connect with others.
One of the film’s disturbing dimensions is the way society can ultimately reinterpret his violence as heroism.
Has Travis truly changed? Does rescuing Iris represent his redemption? Or does the film suggest that society can celebrate the outcome of an action without properly understanding the motives behind it?
The religious reading introduced in Valloire’s presentation creates an opportunity to revisit these questions.
Another chapter, devoted to Iris and Betsy, uses the title “The Madonna and the Whore,” referring to the duality through which Travis perceives women.
For him, Betsy is an idealized and ultimately unattainable figure, while Iris is a young girl he decides to rescue. Yet these images reveal less about the women themselves than about the limits of Travis’s perception.
I believe such interpretations become particularly valuable when they help us recognize the distance between a character’s perspective and the film’s critical treatment of that perspective.
Bernard Herrmann and the Music of a Troubled World
Valloire devotes a separate chapter to Bernard Herrmann, the composer of Taxi Driver.
The score plays a defining role in shaping the film’s atmosphere. The melancholy, sometimes romantic saxophone melodies coexist with darker, threatening orchestral passages.
This contrast creates a complex relationship between the city and Travis’s inner world.
At times, the music draws us into his loneliness and dreamlike perception of the city; at others, it exposes the danger concealed within that same world.
Including music in the book’s structure matters because it suggests that Valloire’s account extends beyond biography and production history to consider the cinematic elements that give the film its distinctive language.
From the Palme d’Or to the Film’s Social Afterlife
Taxi Driver won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976 and went on to occupy an important place in cinema history.
Yet its story extends beyond artistic recognition and critical acclaim.
The violence of its ending, debates over age classification, and public reactions also shape its history.
In the later chapters, Valloire addresses these issues and the film’s broader cultural afterlife, including the connection subsequently drawn between Taxi Driver and John Hinckley Jr.’s attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan.
It is important, however, to distinguish between an individual’s identification with a work of art and the attribution of direct responsibility for violent behaviour to that work.
This raises an enduring question: Can a film portray violence critically while some viewers interpret it entirely differently?
Taxi Driver remains one of the films whose history makes this question difficult to ignore.
A Book About a Film, or a Portrait of an Era?
After the presentation, while examining sections of the book, I also paid attention to its notes and bibliography.
References to books, interviews, newspaper articles, and film history sources show that Valloire builds her account on a range of previously published material.
For me, historical research into cinema does not necessarily depend on discovering previously unknown documents.
Sometimes its value lies in bringing together scattered sources, comparing different accounts, and identifying connections between details previously examined separately.
In Valloire’s book, the lives of Schrader and Scorsese, the history of New York, De Niro’s performance, Herrmann’s music, and the political atmosphere of 1970s America are brought together within a shared framework.
Based on the sections I have examined, this structure suggests an effort to tell the story of a film’s creation in relation to the historical period from which it emerged.
And perhaps this offers part of the answer to my original question: Why write another book about Taxi Driver fifty years after it was made?
A film’s history is not limited to its production and release. Over time, films encounter new accounts, memories, interpretations, and questions, and each generation may discover different dimensions within them.
Festival Lumière: Somewhere Between a Cinema and a University
One tradition of Festival Lumière that I found deeply admirable was its programme of book presentations and conversations with writers, critics, and film researchers.
During these sessions, I sometimes felt as though I were in an academic setting, where the purpose was not simply to watch films, but also to understand cinema history, explore the creative process, and learn from people who have spent years researching the medium.
We are not merely listening to someone explain a film. We encounter a writer or researcher who shares the journey behind their work: the questions that inspired them to write, the sources they explored, the difficulties of gathering information, and the discoveries they made along the way.
For me, this experience offered far more than a conventional book presentation. I felt as though I were attending an open seminar on film history and cinema studies, with the remarkable opportunity to hear directly from the person who had conducted the research.
Delphine Valloire’s presentation was exactly this kind of experience. Her talk not only introduced me to new information about Taxi Driver, but also deepened my curiosity about the methods of researching and writing film history.
To my mind, this tradition is one of Festival Lumière’s valuable qualities. It is a festival that does not limit cinema to screenings, but also creates opportunities for study, conversation, the exchange of experience, and the expansion of knowledge.
Fifty Years Later, Returning to
Taxi Driver
When she introduced her book in October 2026, Delphine Valloire also referenced the atmosphere of protests and social tensions surrounding its publication. This coincidence invites questions about anger, violence, and social crisis in relation to the film.
Of course, the America of the 1970s and contemporary France cannot be compared without acknowledging their different historical and political circumstances.
Nevertheless, Taxi Driver raises questions about the complicated relationship between the individual and society.
Travis is lonely, but his loneliness cannot be separated from his social environment. His anger is personal, yet its language and imagery emerge from the world he inhabits. He wants to be seen, but he cannot truly see others.
Fifty years after the film’s release, these questions continue to invite discussion and reinterpretation.
For me, the value of Delphine Valloire’s book, based on what I have encountered of it so far, lies in its invitation to return to the film.
By bringing together the personal histories of its creators, America’s social circumstances, and the film’s cinematic elements, she offers a new way to look at a familiar work.
I am grateful to Delphine Valloire for her research and illuminating presentation at Festival Lumière. I hope Il était une fois… Taxi Driver will eventually be translated into other languages, allowing film enthusiasts around the world to engage with her work.
I still look forward to watching Taxi Driver again, this time with questions I did not have before attending Valloire’s presentation.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons cinema endures: a film we watched years ago can sometimes begin all over again through a book or a conversation.
Book Details
Title: Il était une fois… Taxi Driver
Author: Delphine Valloire
Publisher: Rockyvision / Rockyrama
Publication Year: 2026
