The best taxi driver films

The best taxi driver films are the ones that put the driver at the heart of the story: Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), Collateral (Michael Mann, 2004), Night on Earth (Jim Jarmusch, 1991), A Taxi Driver (Jang Hoon, 2017) and Taxi Tehran (Jafar Panahi, 2015). In Spanish cinema, the standouts are Taxi (Carlos Saura, 1996) and the unforgettable taxi driver in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Pedro Almodóvar, 1988).

In this round-up we focus less on the car than on the person driving it: who they are, what happens to them and what each film says about a trade we know well from the inside. If what you want is a quick list to watch this week, you will find it in our five taxi films you should watch.

Travis Bickle, in Taxi Driver

Robert De Niro plays the most famous taxi driver in film history. Travis is an insomniac war veteran who asks for the night shift because he cannot sleep. The film uses the job to talk about loneliness: Travis spends hours surrounded by people getting in and out of his cab, yet he connects with no one. He is a disturbing character, not a model taxi driver.

Max, in Collateral

Jamie Foxx plays Max, a careful, punctual Los Angeles cab driver who is proud of knowing the city better than anyone. He dreams of having his own business one day. One night Vincent (Tom Cruise), a hitman, gets into his cab, and Max has to survive without ever stopping driving. He is probably the most professional taxi driver in cinema: the one who works out routes from memory and keeps calm when everything goes wrong.

The five drivers of Night on Earth

Jim Jarmusch presents five taxi drivers in five cities: a young Los Angeles driver (Winona Ryder) with very clear ideas about her future, a newcomer to New York who can barely handle the car (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a Paris taxi driver, a Rome driver who never stops talking (Roberto Benigni) and a Helsinki driver who tells his passengers a sad story. Together they make up the most varied portrait of the trade that cinema has produced.

Korben Dallas, in The Fifth Element

In Luc Besson's film (1997), Bruce Willis is a former soldier who drives a flying taxi in a future New York. He leads a lonely, routine life until an unexpected passenger, who literally falls from the sky, changes his life. He is the action-hero taxi driver par excellence.

Kim, in A Taxi Driver

This South Korean film, starring Song Kang-ho, is inspired by real events: in 1980, a Seoul taxi driver agrees to take a German journalist to Gwangju, where an uprising was being harshly suppressed. What begins as a well-paid job becomes a journey that forces him to take sides. It is one of the few taxi driver films based on a true story.

Jafar Panahi, in Taxi Tehran

Here the taxi driver is the director himself. Panahi drives around Tehran and films his passengers with a camera mounted on the dashboard, in a film halfway between fiction and documentary. It won the Golden Bear in Berlin and shows that a taxi and a camera are all you need to portray an entire city.

Spanish cinema has also climbed into a taxi on several occasions. The two most-cited examples are very different:

• Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988). The eccentric taxi driver, with his car full of outlandish details, appears in only a few scenes but has become one of Almodóvar's best-remembered supporting characters. The film was shot in Madrid and is a good portrait of the city in the late eighties.
• Taxi (1996). Carlos Saura directed this night-time drama, starring Ingrid Rubio and Carlos Fuentes, in which a young woman starts working as a taxi driver in Madrid and discovers the darkest side of some of her colleagues. It is a tough film that uses the trade as a starting point to talk about intolerance.

Both have one thing in common: the taxi as a vantage point on the city at night. It is a device that cinema uses again and again, as we explain in our article on the taxi's presence in film.

As taxi drivers, we watch these films with a mix of affection and amusement. Some things are very well observed:

• Knowledge of the city. Max working out routes in his head is very real. Knowing streets, access routes and traffic patterns is the foundation of the job, and in many cities you have to pass an exam to prove it; here we explain the requirements for working as a taxi driver.
• The conversations. Night on Earth hits the nail on the head: passengers sometimes talk a lot, sometimes not at all, and a good driver knows how to read each case. That accumulated experience is what we call taxi driver wisdom.
• The night. The night shift has an atmosphere of its own, with a different kind of journey and a different pace.

And others, fortunately, are pure fiction:

• The car chases. A real taxi driver respects speed limits and the rules, whoever they are carrying.
• The dangerous passengers. Cinema needs conflict; day-to-day life is much calmer: airports, stations, hospitals, offices and the journey home.
• The vigilante taxi driver. Travis is a tragic character, not a portrait of the profession.

What cinema rarely shows is the most routine part of the job, which is precisely what passengers value most: arriving on time, knowing the way, helping with the suitcases and charging what was agreed. On journeys to Barajas Airport, that means a clear price from the outset; you can check the areas in our airport taxi fares, with inside the M-30 at €33. And so you do not have to rely on finding a free taxi at an awkward hour, you can always book your airport taxi in advance.