Michael Chapman shot Taxi Driver as a descent into a city that looks beautiful and rotten in the same frame. Nighttime New York is rendered through taxi windshields streaked with rain, turning every streetlight and neon sign into a smear of color — reds, greens, yellows bleeding across wet glass. Chapman used long lenses to compress the streets, making the city feel claustrophobic even in wide shots. The daylight scenes are almost worse: harsh, flat, revealing the grime that the neon conceals. Travis Bickles cab becomes a moving camera platform, and the city light that filters through it — red from a stoplight, green from a pharmacy sign, amber from sodium lamps — paints his face in constantly shifting color. For Fujifilm, Classic Neg handles the gritty warmth and muted neon, while grain is essential to the period texture.
These recipes run on Fujifilm's film-simulation engine — any current X-series body will do. A pairing to start from: