Marlon Brando from his auto-biography "Songs My Mother Taught Me":

A movie that I was in, called On the Waterfront, there was a scene in a taxicab, where I turn to my brother who’s come to turn me over to the gangsters and I lament to him that he never looked after me, he never gave me a chance, that I could of been a contender, I cudda been somebody, instead of a bum…

And people often spoke about that, “Oh, my God, what a wonderful scene, Marlon, blah blah blah.”

It wasn’t wonderful at all.

The situation was wonderful.

Everybody feels like they could have been a contender, they could have been somebody, everybody feels as though they’re partly bum, some part of them. Not bum, but they are not fulfilled and that they could have done better, they could have been better.

Everybody feels a sense of loss about something.

So that was what touched people. It wasn’t the scene itself.

There are other scenes where you’ll find actors being expert, but since the audience couldn’t clearly identify with it, it just passed unnoticed. Wonderful scenes never get mentioned, only those scenes that affect people.

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From Budd Schulberg, the screenwriter of On the Waterfront, about the taxi cab scene:

Just before the lunch break our script girl, Roberta Hodes, mentioned to me that Marlon had told her again he couldn’t play the cab scene. I blew up. Kazan came over to quiet me and said, “Look, as soon as Charlie [Maguire, our assistant director,] calls lunch, let’s go down in the kitchen and have it out once and for all.” When the three of us sat down in the tenement kitchen that we had been using as a set, Kazan said, “All right, Marlon, we’ve been hearing about this fucking thing for too long. What in hell is bothering you about the cab scene?”

Marlon said, “Look, in the script I’ve got all that stuff to say about ‘You were my brother, you should of been looking out for me’—a whole big speech—and all the time Rod [Steiger] has a gun pointing at me. It doesn’t work. I don’t believe it. How c’n anybody play that scene with a gun in his face? I won’t do it.”

Kazan thought a moment and said, “What if you just reach out and put the gun down, and then pick up your lines?”

Marlon said, “Oh, that’ll be fine.” That was it. A conflict that had been tearing us apart was solved with a few simple words. In Marlon’s defense, my stage directions had failed to indicate Kazan’s simple solution. And though Marlon had overstated his case, his instincts were right. Of course he couldn’t play a pivotal scene until his brother’s gun was no longer a threat. If only Marlon could have been more specific the week before, instead of damning the entire scene. But that’s how he worked—not intellectually but from his gut.

No matter what Marlon said later about the cab scene, he basically stayed with the script I had written. But here and there he added a word for punctuation that was so right it spoke volumes. When Steiger pulls the gun on him, after a marvelous look that conveys more sadness than anger, Brando sighs, takes an eloquent pause, and says, “Wow.” That one little syllable is so right that it provides an emotional key to the entire scene.

The King Who Would Be Man, Vanity Fair article by Budd Schulberg