00:00More than 350,000 people pass through Times Square every day.
00:03It is one of the most popular neighborhoods in the world, and yet the film Vanilla Sky, released in 2001,
00:08is the first film to have been granted permission to privatize the venue on a Sunday morning for 3 hours,
00:14and empty it completely so that our dear Tom Cruise can run through it at full speed.
00:23We also find a deserted Times Square in I Am Legend.
00:26The square, which serves as a giant advertising spot, is totally representative of American excess.
00:32I can't say I found it beautiful, objectively it isn't.
00:35But I understood why many films came here to shoot their iconic scenes,
00:38and American blockbusters have not been shy about it.
00:56But if there is one film where Times Square really made an impression on me, it is Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.
01:13Released in 1976, the film follows the journey of Travis, a veteran turned taxi driver.
01:19The character will succumb to the darkness of the city, to its decadence, to its violence.
01:24And seeing him wandering around every evening in a taxi in a filthy New York,
01:27We can see a mouse trapped in this enormous urban labyrinth.
01:30Because yes, at the time, Times Square was not at all touristy.
01:33In the 1970s, the neighborhood was one of the most dangerous in the city.
01:43Scorsese is a child of New York.
01:44He grew up in the Little Italy neighborhood, and he would make the city his obsession.
01:48Over the decades, he will film New York in around ten films,
01:51and make it a character in its own right.
01:53In Main Street, released before Taxi Driver,
01:56He focuses his story on his home neighborhood of Little Italy.
01:59The film serves today as a true archival document of a New York that no longer exists,
02:03and in a neighborhood that almost no longer exists.
02:05In Gang of New York, he returns to the origins of the city,
02:08to its creation in blood and violence.
02:10In the late 1800s, the Five Points neighborhood was the heart of a multicultural New York,
02:14where gangs ruled, and problems were settled in the streets with axe blows.
02:19A time when corruption was rampant,
02:21and where New York offered a very different environment,
02:24which of course has since completely disappeared.
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