Are you talkin' to him? Are you talkin' to him? Because Robert De Niro is talkin' to you — and he's addressing rumors that he will re-team with Martin Scorsese for a sequel to their 1976 classic "Taxi Driver."

"I have talked to Paul Schrader and Marty," the two-time Oscar winner told us on Tuesday, invoking the names of the writer and director of the classic film about Travis Bickle, a deranged driver intent on cleaning up the "scum"-filled streets of New York. "[We've spoken] about what would happen to Travis these years later."

Largely considered the greatest decade of cinema, the '70s yielded a huge collection of uncompromising classics at a time when studios seemed to give filmmakers more leeway. Scorsese and Schrader were a huge component of the era's mind-set, giving us such projects as "Mean Streets," "Hardcore" and "Taxi Driver," films that asked you to think about a lot — but not necessarily about sequels.

Recent rumors have popped up about the project, and in De Niro's first public comments, he told MTV News he remains cautiously optimistic.

"We had a thing and we tried to figure it out; Paul was trying to come up with something," De Niro said of their initial conversations. "And it just didn't seem to work."

As you might remember (30-year-old spoiler alert!), the original "Taxi Driver" concluded with an ambiguous ending that praised Travis' "heroism" after a failed assassination attempt. Many have considered it to be Bickle's dying dream — a theory that would seemingly be proven untrue if the "Taxi Driver" sequel went forward and brought back a living, breathing Travis.

"You never know — something could come up," said De Niro, who hopes to uncover a few more instant classics when he oversees the Tribeca Film Festival again later this month. "I thought it would be interesting to find a way to bring [Travis Bickle] back all these years later — maybe with something ironic about where he'd end up, as he did in the first one.

"All these years later, maybe we could," De Niro added, refusing to close the door on his most iconic performance. "It's still possible."

Check out everything we've got on "Taxi Driver."

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