Al Pacino Could Have Starred in Taxi Driver

Levy writes that early in the development of 1976’s Taxi Driver, there was talk of Jeff Bridges or Al Pacino playing the lead role that went, of course, to Robert De Niro. The film became one of the iconic collaborations between De Niro and Scorsese, and we never got to see Pacino with a mohawk.

A year after Taxi Driver, Pacino played a race car driver in Bobby Deerfield. Pacino told interviewer Lawrence Grobel in 1979 that the film is about “avoiding — knowing when to duck, when to move, when to hide, when to roll with the punches. That is what I call my way of survival. I’ve had a lot of selfish incidents in my life. One day I just turned around and said, I am a selfish b——, and I don’t have to be.”