Martin Scorsese wanted to use gun, steal ‘Taxi Driver’ rough cut

You talkin’ to him? 

Martin Scorsese, 82, said he nearly threatened the movie studio over a disagreement about his 1976 classic “Taxi Driver.”

In a first-look clip from the October Apple TV+ documentary “Mr. Scorsese,” the legendary director opened up to Steven Spielberg about how Columbia Pictures was allegedly anxious about the movie’s disturbing content, and wanted him to cut some key materials. 

“Marty was very upset,” Spielberg, 78, recalled in the clip.  

“I get a call at the office, and he said, ‘Steve, Steve, this is Marty. Can you come over to the house?’”

Scorsese was then shown saying, “They wanted me to cut all the blood spurting. They wanted me to cut the guy who loses the hand…”

An unseen interviewer asked the “Goodfellas” director if he got a gun, to which Scorsese replied onscreen, “I was going to get one.”

When asked what he planned to do with a gun, Scorsese explained, “I don’t know. I was angry. I said I was going to threaten them… I’ll maybe just shoot or something. I had no idea.” 

“The Wolf of Wall Street” director added, “I mean, I was just threatening. What I wanted to do, and not with a gun, I would go in, find out where the rough cut is, and break the windows and take it away. They were going to destroy the film anyway, you know.”

The Oscar-winning filmmaker added, “So let me destroy it. I’ll destroy it. But before destroying it, I’m going to steal it.”

Scorsese explained that Spielberg talked him out of it, telling him, “Marty, stop that. Marty, you can’t do that.”

Laughing, he recalled, “I said… The more they said no, the more I said I was going to do it.” 

Spielberg recalled that in the end, someone came up with an idea to “mollify” the Motion Picture Association of America by toning down the bloodiness of the scene to make it look grainier, like a tabloid photo.

 “He just had to take the color red down to a kind of brown,” Spielberg said.  

“Taxi Driver,” which follows the deteriorating mental state of former Vietnam War vet turned taxi driver Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), went on to earn a “Best Picture” Oscar nomination.

De Niro and his co-star Jodie Foster, who was just 12 when she played a teen prostitute in “Taxi Driver, also got Oscar nods for their roles in the flick.

“Mr. Scorsese” premieres on AppleTV+ on Oct. 17.