Cinema Speculation

by Quentin Tarantino

Then there’s Paul Schrader’s two-script reworking of The Searchers, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Schrader’s own Hardcore. Taxi Driver isn’t a “paraphrased remake” of The Searchers like Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? is a paraphrased remake of Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby or De Palma’s Dressed to Kill is a paraphrased remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho. But it’s about as close as you can get to a paraphrased remake and not actually being one. Robert De Niro’s taxi driving protagonist Travis Bickle is John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards. In Scorsese on Scorsese, the director explained: “I was thinking about the John Wayne character in The Searchers. He doesn’t say much. . . . He doesn’t belong anywhere, since he just fought a war he believed in and lost, but he has a great love within him that’s been stamped out. He gets carried away, so that during the long search for the young girl, he kills more buffalo than necessary because it’s less food for the Comanche. But throughout, he’s determined that they’ll find her, as he says, ‘As sure as the turning of the earth.’”