Lines Nobody Wrote

Paul Schrader wrote Taxi Driver in a few weeks in the early 1970s, by his own account in a bad state, and the script he produced is precise about almost everything. At one point, though, it is not. Travis Bickle, alone in his flat with a gun, is to look in the mirror and talk to himself. What he says is left to the actor.

What Robert De Niro said was "You talkin' to me?", repeated, varied, turned round and pointed at the mirror like a weapon, and it became one of the most quoted lines in the history of film. Schrader has said plainly that the words were De Niro's. That matters. When a writer gives credit away for the most famous line in his own film, the story has a good chance of being true. Where De Niro got it from is a further question, and accounts differ; one version has him borrowing the patter from a Bruce Springsteen concert, which is the sort of detail that may be right and has certainly been repeated more often than it has been checked.

Four years later, in The Shining, Jack Nicholson's Jack Torrance smashes an axe through a bathroom door and pushes his face into the gap. "Here's Johnny!" was Ed McMahon's nightly introduction of Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, a phrase every American of a certain age could hear in their sleep. Nicholson put it into the most frightening moment of the film, and the collision of a cosy television ritual with a man trying to kill his family is part of why it lands. Stanley Kubrick, who had lived in England for years, reportedly did not recognise the reference at first. That last detail is the sort that gets told because it is charming; it is plausible rather than proven.

Then there is Blade Runner. Near the end, the replicant Roy Batty, dying, sits in the rain and tells the man he has just spared what he has seen: attack ships on fire, C-beams glittering in the dark. The scripted speech was longer. Rutger Hauer, by his own account, thought a dying man would not make a long speech, cut most of it, and added a line of his own: "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain." Ridley Scott has agreed that the line was Hauer's. It is perhaps the best example in this chapter of an actor improving a script by subtracting from it.

The tempting conclusion from these three is that great acting is spontaneous, that the best moments arrive when the actor throws the plan away. It is almost exactly wrong.

De Niro had spent weeks preparing for Travis, including driving a cab in New York. Nicholson knew Jack Torrance well enough to know what kind of sick joke he would make. Hauer had thought hard enough about Batty to know what he would not say. None of them invented a character on the spot. They invented a line, and they could only do it because the character was already built. Improvisation is the last step of preparation. It is what preparation makes possible, not a way round it.

The case that tests our evidence is Midnight Cowboy (1969). Dustin Hoffman's Ratso Rizzo is crossing a Manhattan street with Jon Voight when a taxi nearly runs into them, and Hoffman slaps the bonnet and shouts "I'm walking here! I'm walking here!" Hoffman has told the story for decades: they were filming with a hidden camera on a real street, a real cab ignored the shoot, and he stayed in character instead of breaking. It is a perfect anecdote, and that is the trouble with it. Others connected with the film have said the moment was planned, and a scene shot on a busy street with a concealed camera is not as easy to leave to chance as the story implies. Nobody can settle it now.

This does not make Hoffman a liar. A story told many times by the person at the centre of it gets smoother with every telling, because the rough parts do not get laughs. The smoothness is not evidence. The habit worth taking from this chapter is a small one: when you hear that a line was improvised, ask whether the script survives, and who is telling you.