Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1062452
76 DGA QUARTERLY PHOTOS: (TOP) BRIAN DAVIS; SCREENPULLS: SONY PICTURES HOME ENTERTAINMENT T ' S S TA G G E R I N G ," says Damien Chazelle from his front-row seat in a DGA screening room as Martin Scorsese's chilling urban character study Taxi Driver (1976) begins, and Bernard Herrmann's music—the maestro's last, an insistent groan of a score, part sym- phonic, part jazzy—ignites the subjectivity of lonely, troubled Travis Bickle's vision of New York. "I don't think he ever saw the finished version, but how the music and imagery feed off each other, counter each other …" Chazelle says. "First you start with the fumes of hell rising up, you get that really scary music, so they're conso- nant. But then you go to (Robert) De Niro's eyes, and they're shot like Hitchcock shot the eyes in Vertigo, there's something creepy and voyeuristic about it. The lighting's unsettling, the closeness. And then the score's romantic, beautiful, the most sweet Herrmann ever composed. It's essentially a jazz combo, this whole score, and I have a special fondness for it." Chazelle—who won the DGA's top honor for the musical La La Land and whose recent First Man chronicles the moon landing by Scorsese's Inferno I Damien Chazelle revels in Taxi Driver's nightmarish mix of music, subjective imagery and De Niro in his prime | BY ROBERT ABELE [ S C R E E N I N G R O O M ] Neil Armstrong—remembers being a New Jersey music student tak- ing the train into Manhattan, and using a mix of those memories and the New York of classic '70s films to create the city feel of his musi- cian drama Whiplash. "It seems to be a perpetual night," he says. "A grimy New York of green windows, deep blacks, rain-slicked streets, crime everywhere." Newly hired as a cabbie, Vietnam vet Travis (played by De Niro), narrates his florid thoughts as Scorsese pans across his dingy apart- ment. Chazelle sees another Hitchcock shoutout, to Rear Window. "This is a beautiful shot, where you start in one corner of the room and slowly do a circular pan, constantly picking up various objects to tell you something about the person, and then finally, like the end of a sentence, you land on the person. Graceful, economic storytelling. I get such a high on this stuff." Scorsese's initial driving montage ("All the animals come out at night," Bickle tells us) is given hypnotic purchase by Herrmann's score, and how Scorsese pushes the repetitiveness. "How pervasively it's used is part of its brilliance," says Chazelle. "It goes beyond the normal, comfortable margins of film music. It puts you in a trance-