Tarantino has spoken about Scorsese as both a viewer and a colleague. Their conversation, published by the Directors Guild of America in 2019, makes it possible to understand that relationship more precisely than a collection of isolated praise: they ask questions, disagree and examine how a film works.
Taxi Driver: admiring an uncomfortable film
Taxi Driver was part of Tarantino's selection for Sight and Sound in 2012. Years later, in the conversation with Scorsese published by DGA Quarterly in autumn 2019, he explained his fascination with the violence of the finale and with the position the film offers the viewer. The admiration is directed at a specific cinematic experience, not at the behaviour of its protagonist.
Travis Bickle observes New York through a mix of isolation, resentment and a desire to find a mission. The film allows us to approach his perception without turning every idea he expresses into a reliable description of the world. That proximity is uncomfortable because it does not always offer an alternative voice that immediately orders what we are seeing. The audience has to work with the distance between a subjective experience and its consequences.
The diary and the night-time drives reinforce that intimacy. We share an accumulation of impressions that may seem routine before becoming dangerous. The dramatic interest depends not only on when the violence will arrive, but on how someone reorganises what they see until they feel authorised to act. The film does not need to present that process as an explanation that absolves the character.
The taxi cab offers a singular position: Travis is close to many people and separate from them. He listens, transports and watches without necessarily joining their lives. That physical closeness combined with isolation makes concrete a conflict that, expressed only as loneliness, would be much more abstract. The city keeps moving even though he cannot find a way to take part.
In the 2019 exchange, Tarantino spoke of his cathartic response to the ending; Scorsese introduced his own relationship with threat and real violence. The conversation preserves a difference between intention, personal experience and reception. The fact that a scene produces an emotional release does not by itself resolve all the moral questions it raises.
From cinephilia to work with shots and rhythm
The DGA dialogue also addressed the editing of The Irishman and the decisions about its length and ending. Tarantino asked Scorsese about the rhythm of an extended narrative. That professional curiosity shows a form of respect that does not need to be reduced to an award or a grand statement: what matters is understanding how another director solves a particular problem.
Rhythm is a good meeting point because it is not limited to speeding a film up or slowing it down. A pause can allow a situation to change meaning. Returning to a conversation after a violent episode changes the way we hear those speaking. In Scorsese's cinema, observing a group's habits helps us understand what rules it considers normal before those rules produce a catastrophe.
Tarantino also works with conversations, routines and delays, although their effects are not identical. The comparison becomes productive when it attends to the differences. A journey can bring the viewer closer to a character's memory or make them wait for an explosion; a first-person voice can seduce them, limit their information or expose a contradiction.
Rather than treating Scorsese as a sum of ingredients Tarantino might have inherited, it is better to recognise a dialogue between ways of looking. Both attach importance to the everyday culture of their characters, but they organise the relationship between memory, violence and spectacle in different ways. Cinephile affinity does not erase the decisions specific to each work.
An admiration that allows for debate
The book Cinema Speculation, published in 2022, places 1970s American cinema within Tarantino's formation as a viewer. His way of discussing films usually starts from a personal reaction and moves towards an interpretation. Reading it as though it were a neutral record of shooting facts would lose that critical and subjective dimension.
The same applies to his views on the different stages of an author's career. Preferring an early film does not automatically mean rejecting the later ones. An objection to a scene also does not erase admiration for the whole career. To speak about a specific critique, it is necessary to identify which work it refers to and in what context it was expressed; an alleged permanent rivalry does not by itself explain his interventions.
The 2019 conversation offers precisely a less rigid relationship. Tarantino can describe the effect that Taxi Driver has on him and Scorsese can respond from the process that led him to film it. The result does not require the two to agree on a single interpretation. It allows us to see how a film remains open even for those who know its construction closely.
The strength of Taxi Driver in this exchange lies in that persistence. Its images allow for technical admiration, unease and discussion about audience identification. Tarantino approaches them with visible enthusiasm, but also with questions. That attitude explains his relationship with Scorsese better than a definitive ranking of who stands first among his masters.
See the selection of filmmakers and actors admired by Tarantino.