Why De Niro’s Taxi Driver Cab Pulls Up at The Continental

Liz Shannon Miller
·4 min read
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The post Why De Niro’s Taxi Driver Cab Pulls Up at The Continental appeared first on Consequence.

It’s never totally clear when the John Wick movies take place — after all, Mr. Wick doesn’t wear an Apple watch as he runs around the world on his revenge sprees. However, the implication is always that the timing is vaguely contemporary, which means that a prequel like Peacock’s The Continental would, by necessity, be set decades beforehand.

This ended up being the biggest source of inspiration for director Albert Hughes (Menace II Society, The Book of Eli). Prior to directing the first and third installments of The Continental, he and John Wick director Chad Stahelski had a Zoom conversation about the John Wick universe, during which Stahelski told Hughes not to worry about copying his own approach to the Wick films, and instead do what inspired him: “‘You don’t need to copy this, do your own thing.'”

And what ended up inspiring Hughes was crafting a take on the 1970s that leans hard into the rough-and-tumble films of the era. “I started getting into the Midnight Cowboys, Taxi Drivers, French Connections, and started laying in Easter eggs from that stuff,” he says.

The Continental focuses on the ascent of a young Winston Scott (Colin Woodell), as he confronts the world of the High Table as a young con man searching for his missing brother. Thanks to a line from John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, in which the elder Winston (Ian McShane) declares “I have served and been a beacon of order and stability to our industry for over 40 years,” we know how long ago he took over running the New York edition of The Continental Hotel, that infamous hive of scum and villainy — and thus, Hughes and his team dedicated themselves to creating the world of 1970s New York in Budapest, Hungary.

For his own inspiration, production designer Drew Boughton used his memories of 1980s New York, which he recalls as “a crap hole. I mean, it truly was very dangerous visually, completely different than it’s now. So right away you have a completely different sort of world build that you can go into.”

And Hughes’ inspirations were clear to everyone involved. “Albert was a huge Taxi Driver fan,” Boughton says. “He’d assembled these touchstones, and so you’re using that and building a bunch of boards for a lookbook. It made it pretty clear what he wanted to do, and then how we could stylize it so we just have a little bit more Wick — mixing your Wick into your Warriors with a Taxi Driver sprinkle.”

Hughes’ passion for Taxi Driver, according to Boughton, extended to some detailed Easter eggs in the background of certain scenes. “Albert is like, ‘I want the cab from Taxi Driver,” Boughton laughs, “And he was very specific about it. He actually brought pictures of the number on the [taxi sign], so our picture vehicle coordinator shipped us Checker Manhattan cabs, got them painted correctly, and then we painstakingly matched the graphics from the movie. So like in the very beginning, that cab, that’s, you know, that’s De Niro’s cab.”

In addition, Boughton added the hearse from The Warriors to the background, which he would try to convince the production to feature on camera, “so you can see like the nose of it in one scene.” It was an Easter egg that made sense to him, he says, because the classic Walter Hill film about roving street gangs is set around this time period and so for Boughton, “I just thought those guys are driving around New York somewhere [right now], on the way to Coney Island probably.”

While those influences were clear, visually, Hughes found another way to invoke ’70s flair, after finding an old set of Panavision lenses “that no one uses nowadays because they’re old, created in the 1950s for MGM and Pathé. The lenses we shot the show with shot Cool Hand Luke, The Graduate, and Dr. Zhivago. So I’m using the exact lenses and they’re not perfect.”

But we’re talking about 1970s New York here. Who cares about perfection?

The Continental Part 1 is streaming now on Peacock.

Why De Niro’s Taxi Driver Cab Pulls Up at The Continental
Liz Shannon Miller

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