Taxi Driver is a love-hate letter to New York in the era of 1970s urban decay and Checker cabs. Robert De Niro plays the alienated Vietnam vet Travis Bickle, who drives a taxi for a living. Scriptwriter Paul Schrader based the character on the case of Arthur Bremer, who had tried to assassinate presidential candidate George Wallace.

Despite De Niro's recent Oscar win for The Godfather II, Hollywood made clear its antipathy to Taxi Driver at an early stage – the budget was hard to raise at just $1.3m.

In the famous mirror scene, Travis Bickle is enraged by the spectacle of Jodie Foster as a child prostitute, and decides to arm himself with a small arsenal of handguns and ride to her rescue. He is stripped to the waist, practising his moves, and the mixture of jump-cuts, reverse angles and 180-degree swish pans makes it hard to differentiate the man from his mirror image.

And the reason Bickle keeps repeating the line "Are you talkin' to me"? If the camera had panned down you would have seen Scorsese himself lying on the floor, mere inches from the actor, wearing headphones, mouthing to De Niro "say it again" out of earshot – worried that the street noise from bustling New York was ruining the take.

Roger Clarke