Jodie Foster gushes over how advice from Robert De Niro was ‘life-changing’

Jodie Foster got candid about how starring in Taxi Driver changed her life as an actress.

Foster, joined Robert De Niro, Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese for the Tribeca Film Festival Taxi Driver 50th Anniversary Screening and Panel at BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center.

Before the screening of the 1976 psychological drama, the group participated in a Q&A, where Foster spoke about her time working on the movie as a young girl.

"Well, I was a child actor, so I started working when I was 3, and I had already made Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore with Marty," she explained about her prior collaboration with Scorsese.

Then, Foster said that getting to be on the set of Taxi Driver was "just such a gift" and "at the time, I'm not sure I 100% understood that, but I was watching and listening."

"So, I probably remember more than everybody because I was just watching and listening. I remember everybody's shoe color and I remember the things they told me. [De Niro] took me, he picked me up every day or three times I think from the Essex House Hotel. He took me to a diner and he sat me down and we'd read through the script and then he'd sit in silence for like 20 minutes and I was just completely bored,” she recalled.

Through doing this process "a couple times," De Niro then introduced improvisation to Foster, which she recalled she'd "never done before" and "didn't understand."

Eventually, she explained that "it was like a light bulb went off in my head,” adding, "I remember getting all like happy and I came home, came up the elevator and came to the hotel and I knocked on the door and I said to my mom, 'Oh my God, I think I might want to be an actor. This is amazing.'"

"I thought acting was just saying words people wrote. I had no idea that there was anything more to it. And so, I really, you probably didn't realize that at the time, but it was a life-changing opportunity for me."

Taxi Driver, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, starred Robert De Niro as the cab driver Travis Bickle, Jodie Foster as a child prostitute named Iris, along with Cybill Shepherd, Harvey Keitel, Albert Brooks and more.