Anger and violence: 40th anniversary of 'Taxi Driver' brings out a slew of stars, memories.

NEW YORK CITY — Forty years later, Robert De Niro knows what you want to say to him. 

"Every day for 40 f*ckin' years, at least one of you has to come up to me and said, 'You talking to me?'" the actor told a crowd at the 40th anniversary screening of Taxi Driver at the Tribeca Film Festival. He introduced the special screening, along with TFF co-founder Jane Rosenthal.

"How many of you have already said it today?" he asked the crowd. "Let's get it out of our system right now."

And on the count of three, everyone shouted it together. 

"There — try not to laugh when you hear it in the movie now," he said. 

Following the screening of the iconic film, which is still as thrilling as ever, stars De Niro, Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel, Cybill Shepherd, director Martin Scorsese, screenwriter Paul Schrader and producer Michael Phillips did a panel discussion moderated by Kent Jones, sharing intimate details about the classic movie. 

"It was a film that I didn’t think anybody would really see," Scorsese admitted. 

He got the script back in 1972, when director Brian De Palma passed it over to producer Michael Phillips. 

“I read it and I thought I was looking into a naked soul," Phillips recalls. At the time, Scorsese didn't have much of a reputation yet, so he showed Phillips and Schrader a rough cut of Mean Streets. It won them over. 

By the time they were ready to shoot the film,Mean Streets was a hit and De Niro had just picked up an Oscar for The Godfather II. However, that didn't stop the actor from going method and driving a cab for a few weeks to train for the role. Scorsese recalls that someone once recognized the actor.

"He said, 'God, you just won an Oscar! Is it that hard to get jobs?'" he says with a laugh.

He also remembers the first time he saw De Niro in the mohawk wig. 

"I just dozed off for a moment and I felt a tap on my shoulder," he said. "I open my eyes and you were there with this thing — it was terrifying."

Keitel, who played the smug pimp Sport, hung out with a former pimp for a few weeks to learn more about the role — information he was clearly not trying share at the panel discussion. 

“He’s avoiding this!” Scorsese gleefully shouted, egging Keitel on. The actor eventually shared that he did go looking for a pimp, asking around until he got in touch with one.

"I played the girl," Keitel said of their acting sessions together. "He taught me what the pimp would do."

Jodie Foster, who played the tween prostitute Iris, shared that she had to be given a psychological exam in order to do the film, and that the Board of Education didn't want to give her a work permit (she was only 12). Once she was on set, she got scared that school friends would make fun of “the hot pants and the dumb hat and the sunglasses… the first day, I cried.”

Shepherd, who plays love interest Betsy, was always the first choice for the role, but everyone involved in the project thought she was way too famous. 

"I would have given my right arm to do it," she said at the panel, gushing about the film.

Someone who was way more hesitant to join the project was Bernard Herrmann, who created the iconic score. 

"He said 'I don’t do films about cabbies!’" Scorsese recalls. However, Herrmann changed his mind after reading the script. 

"He liked the fact that the character used peach brandy on the cereal," Scorsese says. 

Hey, whatever works

Aside from the sharp acting and script, the film is known for creating a time capsule of New York City in the '70s, though there were numerous rainstorms that kept pushing back production. 

"The city was wonderful at the time, I thought," Scorsese says. "Everybody told me it was dying, it was a terrible city … that’s what I grew up in."

“You forgot that these were all condemned buildings and there were gangs," De Niro adds. 

"Oh, that's right," Scorsese says. "But seriously, it’s part of being in the city at night in the summer."

He cites Michael Chapman's cinematography as a key part of capturing the city's ambiance. 

"You can taste the humidity," he says. "You could taste ... a kind of anger and violence that was emanating from the streets themselves.”

When the film was released in theaters, Schrader went to the first showing at a theater across town and was shocked to see a huge line down the block. 

"I thought 'Oh my god, something's gone wrong,'" he recalls. He asked an employee what was happening and she said all those people were waiting for thenext showing. They had a hit.

It was a different story at the prestigious Cannes film festival, though. Tennessee Williams, that year's president, hated the movie, calling it "far too violent," Scorsese remembers. 

It still ended up winning the coveted Palme d'Or. "Half the audience cheered, half the audience booed," Phillips remembers. 

Four decades later, it looks like the cheers have won.