shoe and finish off with a gunshot to the head. Travis attempts to commit suicide, but is out of bullets. Bloody and injured, he slumps on a couch next to a sobbing Iris. As police respond to the scene, a delirious Travis imitates shooting himself in the head using his finger. Travis goes into a coma due to his injuries. He is heralded by the press as a heroic vigilante and is not prosecuted for the murders, also receiving a letter from Iris's father, thanking him. After recovering, Travis grows his hair out and returns to work, where he encounters Betsy as a fare; they interact cordially, with Betsy saying she followed his story in the newspapers. Travis drops her at home, and declines to take her money, driving off with a smile. He suddenly becomes agitated after noticing something in his rearview mirror. Cast Credits adapted from: Production Development Director Martin Scorsese has stated that it was Brian De Palma who introduced him to Paul Schrader, and Taxi Driver arose from Scorsese's feeling that movies are like dreams or drug-induced reveries. He attempted to imbue within the viewer the feeling of being in a limbo state between sleeping and waking. The director cites Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (1956) and Jack Hazan's A Bigger Splash (1973) as inspirations for his camerawork in the movie. In writing the script, Schrader drew inspiration from the diaries of Arthur Bremer, who shot presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972, as well as from the Harry Chapin song "Taxi," which is about an old girlfriend getting into a cab. For the ending of the story, in which Bickle becomes a media hero, Schrader was inspired by Squeaky Fromme's attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford, which resulted in her being on the cover of Newsweek. Schrader also used himself as inspiration. In a 1981 interview with Tom Snyder on The Tomorrow Show, he related his experience of living in New York City while battling chronic insomnia, which led him to frequent pornographic bookstores and theaters because they remained open all night. Following a divorce and a breakup with a live-in girlfriend, he spent a few weeks living in his car. After visiting a hospital for a stomach ulcer, Schrader wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver in "under a fortnight." He states, "The first draft was maybe 60 pages, and I started the next draft immediately,