An Interview with Jodie Foster

Jodie Foster has been in the film business a long time. How long? Well for starters, she played the daughter in Freaky Friday a decade before Lindsay Lohan was in her Dad’s sack. In a life-spanning career approaching four decades, she remains the only actress to win two Academy Awards before turning 30. One for her emotional turn as a rape victim in The Accused, the other for her role as F.B.I. agent Clarice Starling in the creepy, psychological thriller Silence of the Lambs. Adding to her critical acclaim and box office success on-screen, she has made a respectful transition behind the camera, directing the films Little Man Tate and Home for the Holidays. Having first worked with the legend as an adolescent, she plans to soon re-team with Robert DeNiro in Sugar Kings, a socio-political drama tackling the subject of exploited, migrant cane workers.

Last seen in David Fincher’s Panic Room three years ago, Foster addresses the similarities between her last starring role and Flightplan, her newest film opening nationwide this Friday.

Jodie Foster: They’re both thrillers and they’re both in confined spaces. I have a daughter in both. But I think they’re very different characters. Panic Room is a different kind of thriller. It’s more of a visual, stylish thriller that’s all about camera moves and the camera as a character. This film is really a profile. It’s a thriller but it mostly works on a profile of this woman and how she descends.

Following aircraft engineer Kyle Pratt, the film tells the tale of a widow traveling with her daughter aboard a jetliner while transporting the body of her dead husband to the states. Awaking from an in flight nap, she is horrified to discover her daughter is gone. Worse, no one on board has any recollection of seeing the young girl. This thriller of a mother questioning her own sanity while attempting to find her missing child was originally set to star...Sean Penn?

Jodie Foster: It was a movie for a man. I think it works better for a woman. There were all sorts of interesting things that don’t make any sense if it’s a man. As was said in the original version, his back story is he’s an engineer on this airplane and he hasn’t spent a lot of time with his daughter because he didn’t make her lunches and he didn’t- So his wife’s died, and now here he is with this kid and he doesn’t know a lot about her. And so he sort of has to find out who she is in some ways and own her in a lot of ways. Or own his love for her in some ways by rescuing her and come to save her. When you get to the part where he can no longer distinguish whether she’s dead or not and maybe he’s so grief stricken that maybe he made it up...so does not make sense for a man. Men don’t- They blame other people and they’re really good at going, “No, no, no no you’re the problem.” Traditional men, and there are exceptions everywhere, they know the distinction between the two. They know that their arm stops here and the child’s arm starts there. And they have the ability to distinguish between themselves and their child. I believe, it’s so clear to me, you couldn’t make that work with a guy. It’s just not plausible.

Pratt sums up a great deal of bravery throughout the film in the course of searching for her daughter. Foster discusses how a parent’s love for a child conjures a base instinct in guarding them.

Jodie Foster: I think that there’s a strange, symbiotic, primal connection between you and your children where your entire identity is consumed with protecting them. And the fact that you can’t protect another individual really from harm. You really can’t. You can try, but ultimately there’s only so much harm you can keep them from. It’s excruciatingly painful.

As a mother herself, Foster explains how her notion of survival altered with parenthood.

Jodie Foster: I never really cared about getting on an amusement park, or getting on a plane, or plane going through turbulence. When you have a child, you fear for your own life. Not because you care about your life, you’re like “Eh, if I go I go.” Because you don’t want your child to be left without a parent. The idea of your child being left without a parent is so horrendously painful to you that it keeps you living.

Would Foster, a former child star, promote Hollywood acting to her children?

Jodie Foster: I don’t think I discourage them, but I don’t mention it. I try to talk about what I do about being a director, about being a producer, and about how films are made. How you do CGI and green screen. I try to de-romanticize any kind of acting and try to emphasize how wonderful films are, and the world of making films and the technique that goes behind it. They don’t seem to have actor personalities so I’m not to worried about it.

Foster explained how her children have not watched many of her movies but have seen a number of trailers for them. Her son, not surprisingly, had a favorite.

Jodie Foster: For some reason he kind of got obsessed with Contact just because I play, what he thinks is an astronaut. He remembers that from the trailer. Every time I say I’m going to go to work, he’s like, “Are you going to be an astronaut?” He wants to know if I’m going to be going in a space suit.

Familiar with both jobs, Foster here talks about lessons she’s learned in the acting game and what it’s taught her to expect from the person calling the shots.

Jodie Foster: As an actor your whole life is about becoming self-knowledgeable. You learn about yourself. You learn your weaknesses. You learn that you can do everything. You learn both things in a strange way. You carry both those things in your pocket. And I’ve learned something in the last few years that I didn’t really realize about myself was that, well, I learned a lot about how to stay happy. You know you get really unhappy doing things and then you have to learn that you shouldn’t do that anymore. It’s important for me to be happy working or, “I feel resentful, I don’t like this, I hate myself.” So, what I realized that I didn’t know before was that I really need to love the director. I need him to be a good parent and then I will lie down on the train tracks for him. I will go to the ends of the Earth for him, and I want to go to the ends of the Earth for him as long as I feel like he’s a human being or individual who deserves it. It’s very hard to be in a situation where you have to open up your chest for somebody whose a bad person or whose just an asshole. Whose ego is more than anything else. Or who doesn’t deserve the opportunity they’ve been given. But I’ve always felt like I still must serve him because it’s my job to serve him no matter what. No matter what kind of a bad person he is. And you never know what that dynamic is going to be. Now that I’ve learned that, I need them to be a good parent to me. I used to say, “I don’t need anything from you.” Now I’ve learned that I do. And so this guy Robert Schwentke is just such a lovely man.

Does she have a competitive edge in her career? Not, at least, when it comes to her acting roles.

Jodie Foster: I didn’t inherit that competitive thing. Definitely not about acting. As a director, I’m a young director and I’ve got a lot to prove and a lot to find out about myself as a director and a lot to learn. So the part of me is like, “Oh, I wish I’d directed that movie!” I do that as a director. And mostly it’s just out of admiration. I look at a film and I feel like wow that has my sensibility and look what a great job they did, you know?

Finally Foster shares a quick thought on taking roles that might not necessarily appeal to mainstream audiences.

Jodie Foster: You want them to take that ride. It’s the best part. If you get scared of that, boy you’re in trouble. I think the parts that feel like that where there’s complexity, you don’t want to get scared of it. People might not like it, but you got to really embrace it.