The Cab Licence

In the mid-1970s Robert De Niro, already an actor with a growing reputation, applied for a New York taxi licence and got one.

He then drove a cab for several weeks, picking up fares, working the shifts, learning the streets the way a driver learns them rather than the way a passenger does. The film he was preparing for was Taxi Driver, directed by Martin Scorsese and released in 1976, and the character was Travis Bickle, a lonely insomniac who drives nights because he cannot sleep.

None of this appears on screen as fact. Nobody watching Taxi Driver can tell that the actor holds a real licence, and nobody would think to ask. That is the first thing worth understanding about this kind of preparation: its product is not information. It is ease.

A driver who has done the job does not perform driving. He glances at mirrors without thinking about it, he knows how long a red light lasts, he has the slight boredom of somebody who has done the same thing for hours. An actor can fake all of that, and a good one fakes it well. What the weeks in the cab bought De Niro was the ability not to fake it, and therefore to spend his attention on the parts of Travis that could not be researched.

There is a famous story attached to those weeks, and it belongs in a different column. A passenger, so it goes, recognised the young actor who had just won an Oscar, and remarked that acting must be a tough business if he was back to driving a cab. It is a lovely story. It comes from De Niro's own telling, it has been polished in interviews, and there is no way to check it. The licence is a fact. The passenger is an anecdote.

The Oscar in that story was real, and it had come from an earlier act of preparation.

For The Godfather Part II, released in 1974, Francis Ford Coppola cast De Niro as the young Vito Corleone, the immigrant who would become the old man Marlon Brando had played in the first film. Most of the young Vito's dialogue is in Sicilian, and De Niro learned the dialect for it. He also studied Brando's performance, the hoarse voice and the economy of gesture, so that the audience could believe one man grew into the other. Brando had won Best Actor for the old Vito, and declined the award. De Niro won Best Supporting Actor for the young one. Two actors, two Oscars, one character, and it would be more than three decades before that happened again.

Then came Raging Bull, released in 1980, about the middleweight Jake LaMotta.

De Niro trained as a boxer for it, and he trained with LaMotta himself. LaMotta later praised his pupil's ability in the ring in terms that are often quoted; they are LaMotta's terms, generous ones, and should be read as such. What is not in dispute is the weight. Scorsese shot the fight scenes first, with De Niro lean and fit. Production then stopped for some months while he put on weight, a figure usually given as around sixty pounds, so that he could play LaMotta in his heavy, faded later years. The film was shot in black and white, and De Niro won Best Actor for it.

It is easy to read all this as a competition with himself, each film asking for more than the last. The more interesting reading goes back to his training. De Niro studied with Stella Adler, whose teaching put research and imagination at the centre of the work, rather than the mining of the actor's own past. Seen that way, the cab licence and the Sicilian lessons are not stunts. They are the homework Adler set, done with unusual thoroughness.

The difficulty is what happened to the idea afterwards. Preparation of this kind became famous, and once it was famous it became reportable, and once it was reportable it started to be treated as the achievement. Journalists asked how much weight and how many weeks. Those are questions with numbers for answers, and numbers make good copy.

The licence was never the point. The point was that, once the camera rolled, the audience saw a man who seemed to have driven that cab for years, and forgot that anybody had prepared at all.