Los Angeles, June 7, 2026
Hollywood actress Jodie Foster is looking back at her days on the sets of the cult-classic ‘Taxi Driver’.
The actress recently spoke about her time playing 12-year-old sex worker Iris in ‘Taxi Driver’ alongside Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Paul Schrader during the film’s 50th anniversary reunion at the Tribeca Festival, reports ‘Variety’.
One memory that remains “seared in (her) memory” is arriving on set and finding Scorsese and Robert De Niro unable to stop giggling as they tried to explain how to unzip Robert De Niro’s pants for a provocative scene.
“Marty was trying to explain to me how I was supposed to pull down (Robert De Niro’s) fly. They couldn’t stop giggling, and Bob’s like, ‘I’m gonna tell her’. He would try to tell me what to do, and then he would start giggling”, Foster recalled Friday night at the OKX Theater in lower Manhattan. “They couldn’t give me a note because they were just so nervous that I was so young”.
As the laughter continued, Foster took matters into her own hands. “And I was like, ‘Well, you just want me to, okay, fine! First I pull down the fly, then I do this and I walk over there. What’s the big deal?’”.
Half a century later, Foster’s confidence and command of a room remain intact. One of the night’s biggest laughs came when she politely (and directly) called out Schrader for beginning to answer a question without using his microphone.
“He might be sitting on it”, Scorsese quipped. This self-assurance is what impressed Scorsese the moment they met in his office before production began on the 1974 comedy ‘Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore’.
As per ‘Variety’, Foster was just 11 years old and still wearing her school uniform, but she made it clear that she already had eight years of acting experience under her belt.
“You just sat down (and said), ‘Yeah, I can do that. Okay, I got it. No problem’”, Scorsese recalled, mimicking her matter-of-fact attitude. “What are you doing next?’”, he asked, to which she said, ‘Oh, I’m doing this other thing over at Disney’”.
Foster giggled beside him, scrunching her shoulders and squirming in her seat as if she was transported back to Scorsese’s set all those years ago.
“She had an authority, I’m not kidding, an authority. She was really quite supportive, if you could put it that way, because it was a hard shoot”, Marty concluded.(Agency)
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