Jodie Foster Says Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro ‘Couldn’t Stop Giggling’ While Teaching Her How to Unzip a Fly on ‘Taxi Driver’ Set: ‘They Were Just So Nervous’

Jodie Foster reminisced about her time playing 12-year-old prostitute Iris in “Taxi Driver” alongside Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Paul Schrader during the film’s 50th anniversary reunion at the Tribeca Festival. One memory that remains “seared in [her] memory” is arriving on set and finding Scorsese and De Niro unable to stop giggling as they tried to explain how to unzip De Niro’s pants for a provocative scene.

“Marty was trying to explain to me how I was supposed to pull down [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. (Sure enough, he was).

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.” 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 transported back to Scorsese’s set all those years ago. “She had an authority — I’m not kidding — an authority,” Scorsese concluded. “She was really quite supportive, if you could put it that way, because it was a hard shoot.”

During her January cover story interview with Variety, Foster said she’s always found working with male directors “kind of simple.” Her philosophy, as she put it: “You tell me what you want; I do it.” Her passion for cinema began with trips to the theater alongside her mother, where she was introduced to European, French New Wave and Japanese cinema. Yet it was De Niro’s slow-motion saunter into Tony’s bar in “Mean Streets” (set to the beat of Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”) that crystallized her ambitions.

“The truth is, I saw ‘Mean Streets’ when I was a kid … and that was it,” Foster said, smiling toward De Niro. “I just wanted to be a part of this. Anything that you would have offered me, I would have done.” She then sprang from her seat and turned toward Scorsese. “In fact, I think I tried to be an extra in ‘New York, New York,’ but it didn’t work out because I was under 16 and they wouldn’t let me work at night.”

And then, moderator W. Kamau Bell said, “you did ‘Taxi Driver.’”