This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
Los Angeles-born Jodie Foster, 63, has been a Hollywood mainstay for almost six decades.
A child star turned two-time Oscar winner for The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs, and director for the likes of House of Cards and Black Mirror, she’s now back on screen in A Private Life, a French murder mystery that casts her as a therapist snooping for clues after the death of a patient. C’est parfait!
In A Private Life, you’re playing almost entirely in French – something you last did in 2004’s A Very Long Engagement. Were you actively looking for another French role?
Yes, I’d been looking for it for a long time, but I just hadn’t found the right thing. I knew that I didn’t want to work with a first-time director, because I’m scared in the language. I feel like I wouldn’t know how to do that. The first day on set, I kept saying, “I’m super scared.”
You play psychiatrist Dr Lilian Steiner. Do you see acting, and film-making, as something like psychoanalysis?
If you’re interested in therapy, you’re interested in acting. If you’re interested in character and you’re interested in people and humanity, and human impulses and why people do the things they do – all those instincts are our psychology. That being said, I think the worst grades I ever got in college were for psychology. I hated those books!
Were they too theoretical?
I like my ideas compartmentalised. I like my theory, and then I like my emotional life, and I don’t want them in the same book. In my heart, in some ways, I’m an academic. I’m somebody who reads a lot and I’m very mathematical in the way that I look at things. Yet, I do this cool job that’s all performance and instinct.
When you approach a role, is it a bit like detective work?
I think so. And then you try things on. Like, “Does that feel right? Is this true? Is that not true?” I think those are the only two questions I ever ask. Is this true, or is this false?
Your director on A Private Life used AI to help complete some sequences. How do you feel about AI finding its way into film-making?
I don’t have big opinions about it. I’m scared to death, like everybody else. I made movies and TV shows about this, like Black Mirror, for example. I don’t know what it is with Charlie Brooker…
Do you mean he’s very prescient?
He’s like Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator – sent back in time and predicts everything. But I think that his whole philosophy of that show is the idea that we’re projecting our worst vices, and our worst human instincts, onto a black box, and it’s just reflecting back to us, and that really is our experience. The problem is that we don’t control it any more.
You’ve directed features yourself since Little Man Tate in 1991. What prompted the sidestep away from acting?
People warn you that without applause you’re nothing, without being on the cover of a magazine you’re nothing. Having never known anything else in my life, it was a big step to be able to say, “Maybe I could be something else.”
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Taxi Driver. You worked with director Martin Scorsese on that and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore when you were so young. What drove you towards him?
I’ll never forget it. I was in the line at the unemployment, where you would go and get these crisp $50 bills, or whatever it was, because you were unemployed. And in the line was another actor that we knew that I had worked with, and my mom said to him, “Hey, Jodie’s thinking of working with this guy, Martin Scorsese. Mean Streets. What do you think?” He was like, “Oh, if you get the chance for Scorsese, that’s the way to go. He’s the young guy.” So, it was really all about my mom and the guy that we met in line.
You starred in True Detective season four in 2024, your first TV role in years. Was it different to making a movie?
Well, it doesn’t feel that different than doing a movie. It’s just a very long movie. There’s a lot of endurance to it. And trying to keep in your head everything that’s going to happen over the course of seven hours is really different than that hour-and-a-half format. But this is the golden age of television. That’s where the real narrative is. That’s really where the good writing is right now. We knew this was coming. And now, I don’t know about you, but I’m always so excited to see the Emmys and the Golden Globes, because that’s the stuff that I’m really invested in, that I’m really watching.
Do you ever think about retiring from acting? Or are you fearful that, like Daniel Day-Lewis, you’ll end up returning for more?
I have done it many times, and I would just say to Daniel Day-Lewis, “Don’t ever tell anyone. Just do it. Don’t tell anyone.” It just makes you look dumb when you come back.
A Private Life is in cinemas from Friday 26 June.
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