Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1062452
like mindset, drawing from a limited set of motifs. You're not in con- trol as the viewer. You're in the cab. It's a great example of how music can put you in a character's head in a way even imagery can't." Travis's narration also allows for a free association with the im- agery, Chazelle says. "I think it operates very similar to the French New Wave. The stolen shots on the street, the jazziness. But Scorsese makes it his own. He takes what was black-and-white or romantic and Parisian, and makes it New York and grimy and scary, but some- times romantic." Scorsese punctuates the drudgery of cab driving with syncopated back-and-forth shots of the taxi meter and tra c lights, and Chazelle calls it "editing as music. Now you could turn it on silent and get a sense of rhythm and musicality." Tra c lights also dictate the mov- ie's color scheme, he says. "That red, those great greens, and the kind of mustard yellow, piss-vomit color, he leans into those the whole movie. And the way [cinematographer Michael Chapman] shoots it, with the marquees and through the windows at nighttime, you fall in love with it, it's seductive." When Travis joins fellow cabbies at a brightly lit diner, the chatter reminds Chazelle of how John Cassavetes informed Scorsese's early work. "The faces are real, there's total naturalism, an improvisatory feeling." But Orson Welles' Citizen Kane was another Scorsese infl u- ence, and as soon as Travis pops bicarbonate into his water, we're again in Travis's head as he stares at the fi zz. "Then you get a mo- ment like this, where it's sound design, subjective, expressionistic, which would be completely out of place in Cassavetes. That tension between Cassavetes and Welles is beautiful." Inside the campaign office of presidential aspirant Sen. Palan- tine, however, where Cybill Shepherd's and Albert Brooks' char- acters work, Scorsese lets go of subjectivity for the small pleasures of Brooks being conversationally witty. "It's funny being reminded there's a world outside of Travis' headspace." Chazelle pauses. "And that world is an Albert Brooks comedy." Shepherd's Betsy is Travis' obsession, and on their awkward date he takes her to one of his porno theater haunts, which repulses her. During Travis' subsequent apology to her on a hallway phone, the camera self-consciously moves away from him, and Chazelle sees in this quietly audacious shot another link to La Nouvelle Vague's play- ful experimentation. He notes, "This is stu Scorsese borrowed and made his own, so you forget how radical the early Scorsese movies were, those moments where you're aware of the camera as indepen- dent of a person. Hollywood learned how to coopt those New Wave tricks, and the ones that maintained were the ones that could still get subsumed into a normal continuity, where it didn't really jar conven- tion. It'd be cool if some of those were brought back or engaged with more. It's like this whole kit of unused colors is still there." At a diner, Travis' wary, fearful staring at black people—a fellow cabbie, nearby diners, a strolling pimp outside tracked by the camera