Scorsese appears in the film on two occasions. The first is a Hitchcock-like spot, watching Betsy as she walks into her office in a slow-motion tracking shot narrated by Travis.

The second is more memorable and disturbing, as the jilted passenger who sits in the back of Travis’ cab and fantasises about shooting his cheating wife. Scorsese gave himself the part when the actor originally cast fell ill.

“I was very much influenced by a film called Murder By Contract, directed by Irving Lerner,” he says. “It gave us an inside look into the mind of a man who killed for a living, and it was pretty frightening. I had even wanted to put a clip of it into Mean Streets, the sequence in a car when the main character describes what different sizes of bullet do to people, but the point had already been made. Of course, you find that scene done by me in Taxi Driver.”