Five cities. Five taxicabs. A multitude of strangers in the night. Jim Jarmusch assembled an extraordinary international cast of actors (including Gena Rowlands, Winona Ryder, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Beatrice Dalle, and Roberto Benigni) for this hilarious quintet of tales of urban displacement and existential angst, spanning time zones, continents, and languages. Jarmusch’s lovingly askew view of humanity from the passenger seat makes for one of his most charming and beloved films
Cast
| Victoria Snelling | Gena Rowlands |
| Corky | Winona Ryder |
| Helmut | Armin Mueller-Stahl |
| Blind woman | Beatrice Dalle |
| Driver | Roberto Benigni |
| Angela | Rosie Perez |
| YoYo | Giancarlo Esposito |
| Driver | Isaach de Bankolé |
| Mika | Matti Pellonpää |
| Priest | Paolo Bonacelli |
Credits
| Director | Jim Jarmusch |
| Written, Produced, and Directed by | Jim Jarmusch |
| Music | Tom Waits |
| Cinematography | Frederick Elmes |
| Editing | Jay Rabinowitz |
| Original songs | Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan |
| Executive producer | Jim Stark |
| Co-producer | Demetra J. MacBride |
| Line producer | Rudd Simmons |
| Co-executive producers | Masahiro Inbe and Toboru Takayama |
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION:
- New, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Jim Jarmusch
- Audio commentary by director of photography Frederick Elmes and location sound mixer Drew Kunin
- Q&A with Jarmusch, in which he responds to questions sent by fans
- 1992 Belgian television interview with Jarmusch
- New and improved subtitle translation
- PLUS: A booklet featuring new essays by Thom Andersen, Paul Auster, Bernard Eisenschitz, Goffredo Fofi, and Peter von Bagh, and the lyrics to Tom Waits’s original songs from the film
by Thom Anderson
Sep 3, 2007
I was a cab driver once myself (in Los Angeles, in the mid-1970s), and I’ve been sensitive ever since to how the profession is portrayed on the screen. As it happened, I was driving a cab when Taxi Driver came out, and I was offended by its lies about the economic status of a cabdriver...
by Paul Auster
Sep 3, 2007
As the opening credits for Night on Earth begin to roll, we are informed that the film is a Locus Solus Production. A curious name, no doubt unfamiliar to most people, but one that reveals a great deal about Jim Jarmusch’s sensibility—what might be called the “Jarmusch touch”: that inimitable...
by Bernard Eisenschitz
Sep 3, 2007
A conversation, a misunderstanding. The basic pattern in many of Jim Jarmusch’s films is two characters, sometimes three, bound together by chance and wandering along toward an ill-defined goal, each trying all the while to get to know the other or to make himself understood through the use of...
by Goffredo Fofi
Sep 3, 2007
Jim Jarmusch is a difficult director because he works from the frontiers. What does it mean to be a “frontier” director in the film world today?It means a clear refusal, for ethical and aesthetic reasons, to be part of the mass of none-too-wild (indeed extremely housebroken) Hollywood...
by Peter von Bagh
Sep 3, 2007
A taxi, without a client in the car or anywhere else in sight, goes around Helsinki’s Senate Square, a place that resonates with history, having seen more patriotism, class struggle, and celebration than any other place in faraway Finland. It stood in for Saint Petersburg many times in American...
