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The 1976 thriller Taxi Driver is among filmmaker Martin Scorsese's most successful and most iconic movies. An eternal darling of film critics and cinephiles alike, the film garnered four Academy Awards nominations.

It also marked the beginning of a collaboration with actor Robert De Niro and writer Paul Schrader. Martin Scorsese called storyboarding the most important filmmaking process and produced his own storyboards by hand for Taxi Driver. We'll look at those drawings and the stories behind the images.

Martin Scorsese's storyboards for Taxi Driver

The Collector's Edition of Taxi Driver includes a four-minute interview with Scorsese in which he talks about the beauty and functionality of his self-made storyboards and how they helped him, his cinematographer, Michael Chapman, and the entire crew go about shooting the film.

According to Scorsese, writer Paul Schrader put the words of the script onto the page in such a way that they created instant reactions in the director. His process of visualizing a scene was then to sketch out the images as pencil drawings, sometimes elaborate drawings, but most often as stick figures. It didn't matter if a drawing ended up in the movie or not; what was important for the process of visualizing a scene was the interpretation of those pictures.

Drawing dates back to childhood for Martin Scorsese, and he describes it as a way of visualizing that is joyful and wonderful, making him want to transfer that pleasure to film. His storyboards were a solid base with which he could approach the crew and tell people what he wanted. At the same time, the Taxi Driver sketches were basic enough that they left enough room for input from everyone else.

Lastly, they were essential to his low budget filmmaking, an economic way of getting certain shots. When evaluating a day's progress during production, comparing the storyboards to the shotlist helped Scorsese decide whether he should combine shots, push them or cut them.

Pencil drawing Taxi Driver storyboards

Paul Schrader's Taxi Driver script came to Martin Scorsese via filmmaker Brian De Palma, who passed on it but thought Scorsese might like it. Indeed Scorsese had a "visceral, almost mystical" reaction to it, the tone, and Travis Bickle's struggle. Robert De Niro joined the project when Paul Schrader and Scorsese watched Mean Streets together, the director's first collaboration with the actor, and decided that De Niro was the perfect fit for Travis.

""These storyboards are not the only means of communication for what I imagine, but they are the point where I begin.""

While planning the film, Martin Scorsese developed the screenplay by relying on a simple process of storyboarding by hand with pencil, which was enough to convey his intentions. 'Between Film and Art' was an exhibition focusing on filmmakers who created their own storyboards, such as Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, and Scorsese himself. In that context, he told Phaidon: "These storyboards are not the only means of communication for what I imagine, but they are the point where I begin."

"Storyboards express what I want to communicate," continues Scorsese, but they're not only about visualization, but also about order, progress, and moving through the script: "They show how I would imagine a scene and how it should move to the next."

There's only one downside to using something as light and nuanced as pencil for sketching storyboards: "The pencil line leaves little impression on the paper, so if the storyboard is photocopied, it loses something. I refer back to my original drawings in order for me to conjure up the idea I had when I saw the pencil line made."

Thanks to Far Out Magazine, you can also see hand-drawn storyboards from the filmmaker's masterpiece.

Scorsese talking Taxi Driver influences

Another movie Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader watched together to prepare for the making of Taxi Driver was the 1956 docudrama, The Wrong Man, by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Henry Fonda. The director explained in an interview that while the story is very different, he was interested in The Wrong Man's camera movements to achieve the same sense of "guilt and paranoia."

If you look at Robert Bresson's Pickpocket from 1959, you'll notice similarities between the character study of the pickpocket character and the cab driver, Travis. Both confess in voiceover narration, keep a diary and are prone to voyeurism. Their personal problems as well as social situations influence the actions they take, and both films explore their reasoning in an existential way without passing judgement.

Scorsese admits to having two more influences. Travis staring intently at an effervescent tablet fizzing in a glass of water is a homage to Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, and the lingering shot of a cup of coffee. German cinema auteurist, Werner Fassbinder, also influenced Scorsese and Taxi Driver. Compare the symbolism and colouring, the stark images and realism of The Merchant Of Four Seasons to Scorsese's masterpiece, and you'll see he was going for the same kind of "brutal honesty" with which the camera looked at the characters.

De Niro's famous line "Are you talkin' to me!?" spoken as Travis Bickle in front of the mirror was not written into the script by Paul Schrader but is the actor's contribution. Supposedly Bruce Springsteen inspired it: Scorsese and Robert De Niro saw a show together at the Roxy in New York in 1975, and the singer was known to use that exact phrase when he performed the song 'Quarter to Three'. Springsteen calls it an "urban myth", while Scorsese himself embraces that chain of events.

Fun fact for film buffs: Taxi Driver, in turn, influenced the music video for 'I'm Afraid of Americans', a collaboration between David Bowie and Nine Inch Nails.

Taxi Driver scene to storyboard comparison

You can see more of Martin Scorsese's hand-drawn storyboarding work for Taxi Driver in a comparison of the storyboards and the actual scenes. The video is an insight into how the filmmaker resolved the pencil drawings for the final shootout in which Travis confronts Iris's pimp at the brothel.

More Taxi Driver cinephilia

Taxi Driver marked Martin Scorsese's rise as a major filmmaker of critical acclaim and assured Paul Schrader's reputation as a screenwriter. Cinephilia and Beyond used the occasion of Scorsese's 72nd birthday to call the movie "the turning point in our lives in terms of film appreciation and education."

For cineasts, a good place to start is the Taxi Driver Two-Disc Collector's Edition (get it on Amazon), which includes several extras, such as an interview with the filmmaker, "Taxi Driver Stories", several documentaries, Scorsese's own explanation of his storyboarding process, as well as commentary by screenwriter Paul Schrader.

If you'd rather listen, the movie has also been widely discussed in the age of podcasts. The Cinematologists Podcast, the American Cinema Foundation, The Next Reel Film Podcast, as well as Newstalk all have good episodes on the film.

The origins of Martin Scorsese's hand drawn storyboards

Martin Scorsese was born to Italian immigrant parents in 1942 in New York City's Little Italy, but he soon learned to dream big. Perhaps influenced by his childhood wish to become a Catholic priest, 11-year-old Martin Scorsese had a vision for a widescreen Roman epic.

The Roman epic of the Eternal City

The Eternal City is a fictitious story of royalty and proof that Scorsese was already creating stories with a high level of detail and an excellent eye for composition while drawing pictures as a kid. For the Roman epic, he gave himself director and producer credit and had particular actors in mind for the film: among others, he'd cast Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Virginia Mayo, and Alec Guinness.

Though his story of royalty in ancient Rome never came to fruition as a movie, the 11-year-old Martin Scorsese's storyboards illustrated his views on the importance of storyboarding for filmmaking later in his life, namely that they are "the way to visualize the entire movie in advance."

The influence of Taxi Driver on Raging Bull

Including Taxi Driver, filmmaker Martin Scorsese and actor Robert De Niro have collaborated on nine feature-length films, with Killers of the Flower Moon as the tenth in planning. Goodfellas from 1990 with De Niro as James Conway, Ray Liotta as Henry Hill and Joe Pesci as Tommy DeVito was hugely popular with critics and viewers, many of whom consider it to be Scorsese's best crime movie.

Raging Bull from 1980 was another collaboration with Robert De Niro as the 1940s boxing champion, Jake La Motta, and Joe Pesci as his manager, Joey, and writer Paul Schrader. The biopic marked Scorsese's return to the detailed character study already seen in Taxi Driver, a tale of aggression, violence, emotional turmoil and ultimately self-destruction.

Raging Bull won two Academy Awards, Best Actor for Robert De Niro and Best Film Editing for Thelma Schoonmaker, with six more nominations, including Best Director for filmmaker Martin Scorsese. Critics consider the movie one of the greatest of all time, and the American Film Institute chose it as the best sports film ever.

Like in Taxi Driver, Scorsese relied on his hand-drawn storyboards in pencil to carefully calibrate each shot, which impressed Schoonmaker. Large portions of the film were shot with just one camera. Ten minutes of boxing scenes required a shooting schedule of ten weeks. Scorsese planned the film's final fight as meticulously as the famous shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, storyboarding and timing every punch.

There are drawings for every fight scene (many of which you can see thanks to Cinephilia and Beyond). Martin Scorsese recalls storyboarding Raging Bull: "It's very much like staging a dance to music. Instead of a verse with maybe twelve bars of music, it's four bars of punches. Because it's all choreography." With Thelma Schoonmaker's words about the film's cinematography, it's easy to draw parallels to Taxi Driver: "It's not just how the camera moves, it's the emotion that it shows."

At the end of both Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, the audience have followed a contradictory character, appearing both as criminal and saint, and have to decide for themselves whether to condemn or absolve.

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Martin Scorsese's Hand Drawn Taxi Driver Storyboards & the Stories Behind Them | Boords

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The 1976 thriller Taxi Driver is among filmmaker Martin Scorsese's most successful and most iconic movies.

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To properly finance your film, you'll need to understand how to create a budget. This guide will show you how to build a budget for your first film production.

As an aspiring filmmaker, you're probably thinking, " Create a budget? That sounds boring," but at minimum, understanding how to read a budget is one of the most important skills that you can learn as a filmmaker.

Making a budget will allow you to understand better the size and scope of your project. Going through your project scene by scene, listing out all of the locations, cast, and crew required, and assigning a dollar figure to each will allow a level of understanding and clarity that you previously did not realize.

Additionally, a movie budget breakdown is essential for ensuring that your film stays on track financially. By understanding how to allocate your resources properly, you can avoid going over budget and ensure that your film is completed on time and within its allotted budget.

First Draft of the Budget

For the first draft of the budget, you'll want to include everything possible. This means planning for worst-case scenarios in all aspects of the budget. Don't leave off a category just because you think that you'll be able to borrow some equipment or get free labor from a friend or relative.

Plan to pay for everything, and then make adjustments to the budget as the film progresses further into pre-production or later. It's always better to have money left over than to run out of money in the middle of a production.

Preliminary Film Budget vs Final Film Budget

The biggest difference between the preliminary budget and the final budget is that when making the preliminary budget, we won't have the shooting schedule as well as all of the rates of our cast and crew. We'll fill in the rates that we know and use placeholder data (industry standard rates) for the others.

Then, once all of this information becomes available, we can rework the budget into a final film budget that properly accounts for the shooting schedule and all of the exact rates of our cast crew and equipment rentals.

1. Break Down the Script

Before actually initiating the budget you'll need to break down the script into breakdown sheets. The data gathered in these breakdown sheets will be utilized to create the budget.

The first step in creating a budget is to determine the scope of your project. How many locations will you be filming in? How many cast and crew members will you need? What type of equipment will you need to rent? Answering these questions will give you a better idea of the overall cost of your project.

2. Tally All the Numbers

Now that you have the breakdown sheets, you have your script broken down into individual pieces, and now we need to count those pieces.

How long will the shoot be?

One of the first things to figure out is the length of your principal photography. To find this, we start by asking, how long is the script?

The general rule is that an independent film can shoot four to six pages per day. So if our script is 95 pages we can assume a shooting schedule in the range of 16-24 days.

Additionally, you'll need to break down those shoot days into studio shoot days and location shoot days. This means the number of days you plan to shoot on a set built in a studio vs. the number of days you plan to shoot at preexisting locations.

How large is the cast?

The size of your cast will dictate a tremendous amount of your budget. The more cast members you have, the more money you will need to pay them. And not just the principal cast, but also any extras or day players that might be required.

What crew members do you need?

The crew of a $500,000 and $5,000,000 film will probably look very similar. There will be a few extra crew members here and there, but largely they will be the same, that extra budget will probably go to the actors and above-the-line credits.

However, in terms of crew size, the difference between a $10,000 budget and a $100,000 budget will be substantial. The former will feel like a student project (and it might be) and the latter will feel like a small Hollywood film.

The point here is that your overall budget range will likely inform how large a crew you can afford. That said, there are several departments that every film should have, even if that department is comprised of just one person.

Build sets or location shoots?

Most low-budget filmmakers opt to film on location, utilizing the production value they can gain from choosing interesting real-world locations.

However, some locations don't exist in the real world, or they are impossible to film in, so they require a set to be built. Likewise, building a set offers a level of control that is impossible to achieve at real locations.

Either way, you'll need to understand how many shoot days you'll have on location and how many on a sound stage.

Travel and transportation?

If shooting on location, do these locations exist within city limits or within a reasonable driving distance?

If you're asking your crew to drive more than 30 minutes to a location, you'll need to account for that time in your schedule. If you're going to have the entire production stay out of town, you'll likely need to arrange for transportation, including vans for the cast, crew, and equipment.

Additionally, you'll be responsible for providing a place to stay for the cast and crew while out of town, either via a hotel or AirBnB or via some other arrangement.

Catering & craft services

Keeping your cast and crew well-fed is a relatively cheap way to keep morale high throughout the production.

You'll need to determine how many meals you'll need to provide each day as well as craft services. This will be a function of the number of crew and cast members as well as the number of shoot days.

As a rule of thumb, expect to spend around $25 per person, per day on food. So if you have a cast and crew of 30 people, shooting for 20 days, you'll need to budget $15,000 just for food.

Props, Costume, art costs?

This will be a function of the size and scope of your production. Do you need to rent or build any props, set designs, or costumes?

Post-Production costs?

As a general rule of thumb, you should expect to spend around 20-25% of your overall budget on post-production.

Post-production is a broad category with a lot of different aspects, but the four main areas you'll need to consider are editing, sound, visual effects, and color grading.
Editing
Thanks to advancements in NLE software, editing can be done on virtually any computer these days. But that doesn't mean that it's free.
Sound
Like editing, audio software is more advanced and ubiquitous than ever. But if you want to do it right, you're going to need to hire a sound editor and/or mixer.
Visual Effects
Visual effects can range from simple green screen composites to full-blown CG environments and characters. The cost of visual effects will be directly related to the scope and complexity of the effects you need.
Color Grading
There are a number of cheap and even free options when it comes to color grading. But to be done correctly, it should be performed by a professional on calibrated equipment capable of displaying the full-color range of your project and giving you a true representation of how your film will look when projected in a cinema.
Titles
Simple titles can be done in the NLE or via easy-to-use plug-ins. However, if you plan to have animated (complex) titles, you should budget for that here.

Music?

Are you going to hire a composer? Perhaps work with a student? What about licensing preexisting music? There are also options, such as stock music websites, to consider.

3. Fill out the Topsheet

Using the data you've collected from the first two steps, it's now time to start entering that data into the budget form. This can come in the form of specialized software such as Movie Magic Budgeting or Gorilla Budgeting, or you could be using a spreadsheet.

If you're making anything less than a feature film (short film, music video, etc), using a spreadsheet is probably sufficient for your project. If you're making a feature film or want to learn more about specialized budgeting software, then, you'll want to go that route instead.

Starting with the topsheet, we need to enter all the data we can about the project; this includes:

Date: This will allow you to keep track of this budget with respect to others created at different times.

Title/Runtime: Title and total running time of the project.

Union/Non-Union: Identify if the project is to be a union or non-union project.

Studio shoot days: The total number of days that you plan to shoot on a sound stage.

Location shoot days: The total number of days that you plan to shoot on location.

Format: Film or video, 2k or 4k, etc.

Director: Name of director, if known.

Producer: Probably your name.

Director of Photography: Name of cinematographer, if known.

Editor: Name of the picture editor, if known.

Shoot dates: The dates of the shoot if known, if not known enter a proposed date in the future.

The Top Sheet will also contain totals from each category - a summary section. Whether using specialized budgeting software or a production budget template (spreadsheet), this section should be tabulated for you as you complete the other budget sections, so leave it empty for now.

The bottom of the topsheet is an area for any comments or notes that should be included.

4. Fill out the Account Line Items

Now that we have completed the topsheet, we can move on to the account-level line items. Here, you can begin to enter itemized expenses.

The easiest way is to simply work your way through each account and enter any costs that are appropriate for your film, and if it doesn't apply, simply leave it blank. For example, if your shoot will take place completely on location, you can leave blank any lines relating to sound stages or studio rental.

Once you have a good idea of what you'll pay for each line item, it's time to start filling in the blanks.

As you fill out each account, don't forget to include any discounts that you negotiated as well as the total number of days for that particular account. For example, if your shoot is 20 days but you're renting a special camera for just 3 days, be sure to enter 3 in the "amount" column.

Be sure to include a line item for miscellaneous expenses, as there are always unexpected costs that arise during production.

Wrapping Up

After you have itemized all of your expenses, it's time to start looking for ways to save money. One way to do this is to see if you can get discounts on any of your expenses. For example, many equipment rental companies offer discounts to student filmmakers. You can also save money by casting local actors and crew members, as they will likely be willing to work for lower rates than their out-of-town counterparts.

Once you have a complete film production budget, it's important to review it with your team and make sure that everyone is on the same page. By doing this, you can avoid any surprises down the road and ensure that your film stays on budget.

Creating a film budget may seem like an intimidating task, but it's worth it as it is an essential part of making sure your film is successful. By taking the time to understand how to properly allocate your resources, you can avoid going over budget and ensure that your film is completed on time and within its allotted budget. So get out there and start budgeting for your next film!

Next up, with a budget in hand, we'll take a look at financing your film!

FAQs

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How to Create Your First Film Budget: The Ultimate Guide | Filmmaker Tools

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In order to properly finance your film, you'll need to understand how to create a budget. This guide will show you how to build a budget for your first film production. As an aspiring filmma

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Script Development and Screenwriter Coaching

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Show Don't Tell - Script Development - Script Angel

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Show Don't Tell is an important tenet of great screenwriting. In this article we explore ways to apply it in your own writing.