Jodie Foster: 'there aren’t very many well-fleshed-out
female characters' CREDIT: ROBERT TRACHTENBERG/SONY PICTURES
Jodie Foster is wearing shoes that are so unstylish it’s quite possible they have
travelled the full bell-curve and become stylish again. I can’t stop looking at
them. They are slipper-like in their construction and have no zips or laces,
seeming merely to consist of two flaps of stitched-together black leather. They
are the kind of shoes I can imagine a Danish lumberjack wearing on his day
off.
The rest of Foster, 53, is more conventionally
dressed: a well-cut trouser suit, discreet flashes of diamond at each earlobe,
tortoiseshell spectacles. The shoes, though. Bizarrely, they kind of suit
her.
But perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. Her footwear
makes a virtue of its un-showiness and Foster, too, has navigated a four-decade
career in Hollywood with a quiet intelligence that has always seen her place
content above style. As an actor, she seems to care more about the quality of
the work than about how her choices look to the outside world.
At the age of 12, Foster was Iris, the scene-stealing
teenage prostitute in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. That same year, she
impressed the director Alan Parker so much while starring in Bugsy Malone that
he admitted: “If I had been run over by a bus I think she was probably the only
person on set able to take over.”
Money Monster trailerPlay!02:34
As an adult, Foster went on to win the Best Actress Oscar twice – for a traumatised rape victim in The Accused in 1988 and for
FBI agent Clarice Starling in 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs. Her choice of
roles since then has been both varied and challenging – from a feisty female
con artist in Maverick to a Manhattan power broker in Inside Man.
She is drawn to strong women. But there aren’t many of
them written into movie scripts, are there? She grins. “I mean,
practically every movie that I work on as an actress I have to go back and, you
know, really make the character deeper than it was,” she says. “It’s just part
of what you do because there aren’t very many well-fleshed-out female
characters.”
Has she ever experienced direct sexism? “I think there
isn’t a woman on the planet who hasn’t. But it’s something you deal with every
single day… We don’t even write it in our journal, it’s just part of our
culture.” Over the past few years, Foster has been concentrating more on
directing. The new release Money Monster, starring George
Clooney and Julia
Roberts, is her fourth full-length feature film in the director’s chair.
The movie tells the story of a disaffected
working-class man (the British actor Jack O’Connell) who has lost all his money
on the advice of narcissistic talk-show host Lee Gates (Clooney) and who storms
the television studio in a suicide vest to get answers. The hostage-taking
occurs live on air and it is left to Patty the unflappable TV producer
(Roberts) to negotiate Gates’s release.
Money Monster unfolds in real time and was, says
Foster, “a tough technical movie… The same moment happens in 15, 20 different
places. It was a jigsaw puzzle.” She enjoyed the challenge because “I’m
decisive. The more decisions I make the less anxious I am. That’s just my
personality. I think it’s easier for me to be at the helm of everything and
control everything than to be one of the cogs and not really know how my stuff
is being used.”
This desire for control is particularly interesting
given so much of Foster’s life has been lived in the public eye. She can barely
recall a time before she was famous. Her mother, Evelyn, worked as a film
publicist and started putting her daughter up for advertisement and television
roles at the age of three. Her father, Lucius, was never on the scene: the
couple divorced before Foster was born.
Evelyn now suffers from dementia, but in Foster’s
youth "[she] just loved movies," she recalls. “She took me
to every weird film when I was a kid and we went to lots of foreign films. She
really took me to everything. She travelled and ate strange food and was very
curious. And even though she had no real education, she would really
self-educate. She read everything about everything – every news item, every
magazine. She was just a great inspiration.”
But it must be odd to become famous without being
given much choice in the matter. When Foster went to Yale to major in
literature (her thesis was on the author Toni Morrison) she was stalked by John
W Hinckley Jr, a mentally unbalanced man obsessed with Taxi Driver. In 1981,
Hinckley attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in a bid to impress
her.
Foster refuses to comment publicly on the episode, not
least because the White House press secretary James Brady was left permanently
disabled by the incident and died as a result of his injuries 33 years later.
How does Foster feel about fame now?
She looks startled. “How do I feel about it?”
Yes. “I don’t know. I mean, I’ve never not been a
public figure, from the time I was three.”
She says this matter-of-factly even though it is quite
an astonishing thing if one gives it a moment’s thought.
Foster thinks she “developed some healthy survival
skills”, which she compares to “little straws that you breathe through
underwater. You develop a system for yourself to stay alive, really, to stay
conscious and to stay grounded and to, you know, to struggle free of the
psychological problems that land people in hotel rooms with needles in their
arms.”
What is her system? Again, that startled look.
Jodie Foster, aged 13, in Taxi Driver (1976) CREDIT: REX
“My system?” Yes. “I’m a compartmentaliser. I have
compartments for everything. I think my mom taught me that, I think that
was her influence. You go to work in the morning until whatever time at night
and when your day’s over, your make-up comes off and you go back home, and now
you’re in your real life. And I just didn’t ever mix the two.”
There’s little doubt that she maintains a healthy
perspective. When I ask her where she keeps her Oscar statuettes, she says that
they used to be in the bathroom of her Los Angeles home, “next to the bathtub,
but they started getting all corroded on the bottom, with all this green
stuff”, so she had to move them to a display case “where the TV and the DVDs
are”.
The nature of celebrity has changed in the time Foster
has been famous. She worries that the divide between public and private is
“completely eroded”, that “the defining line between pain and entertainment has
become really slim”.
In the past, she has been something of a mentor for Kristen
Stewart, the Twilight actress who was
Foster’s 10-year-old co-star in the 2002 film Panic Room. “Kristen was so confident
and she was so her own person: strong and hardworking, completely diligent, but
she’d say big dumb kid things like, ‘U2 is just a boy band’. Boy band?”
Foster shrieks. “Are you crazy?”
Foster with Kristen Stewart in Panic Room CREDIT: REX
Unlike Foster, whose transition from child star to
adult actor seemed smoothly and sensibly done, Stewart has had a more troubled
journey. In 2012, she was publicly derided for a rumoured affair with the
married film director Rupert Sanders. More recently, Stewart has been dating
women.
Foster came out at the Golden Globes three years ago with a moving, understated speech in which she paid
tribute to her then-partner, Cydney Bernard, the mother of her two sons aged 14
and 18.
‘There’s no way I could ever stand here without
acknowledging one of the deepest loves of my life: my heroic co-parent, my
ex-partner in love but righteous soul sister in life,’ she told the assembled
crowd. These days, she is married to photographer and actress Alexandra
Hedison.
Has Foster been offering Stewart any guidance?
“She’s at a very specific time of her life, so I
really leave her alone,” Foster says. “I don’t want to be prying and trying to
weasel my way into her life.
"It’s just so interesting to see how this world
has changed her – in some wonderful ways [and] in some ways you just want to
put your arms around her because it’s a tough life to grow up on screen and in
this era.”
Foster in Maverick, with her friend Mel Gibson CREDIT: REX
Foster is a loyal and non-judgmental friend: in the
past, she has been a stalwart defender of Mel Gibson, despite his anti-semitic comments and his abusive tirades against his
ex-wife.
‘It's not my job to adjudicate his behaviour,"
she told The New York Times earlier this month.
And it becomes clear, during the course of our
conversation, that she’s not much given to pontificating on public issues.
Until her public coming out, Foster had been in the
so-called “glass closet”: on view but unacknowledged. There are many who
believe stars have a responsibility to be open about their sexuality to
puncture the balloon of silence around gayness in Hollywood. Although there are
many more openly gay and transgender actors getting work on television, it
feels as though the mainstream movie industry still has a problem with actors
being open about their sexuality.
Is that true?
“I have no idea,” Foster says, unflinching. “I don’t
know. I mean, everything’s changed in the world, right? Hopefully we’ve
all changed for the better and hopefully there’s a consciousness that wasn’t
true 20 or 30 years ago. I have no idea. No idea.”
I’m pretty sure Foster has more of an idea than most,
but I can understand her reticence. It’s not that she wants to disown her
sexuality, it’s simply that she has no desire to have it politicised. “I’m not
a spokesperson,” she says.
Is that part of her compartmentalisation strategy;
part of the way she stays sane? “Yes. Yes it is. And I really appreciate it
when other people are [spokespeople], and I have benefited from it… It’s just
not me. It’s not my personality. It never will be, it never was… The work I do
with people has to feel real… and hands-on. And feeling like a representative
feels fake.” She smiles.
Foster as Becky Thatcher in Tom Sawyer (1973) CREDIT: REX
Foster is a lot smilier than I had expected: eyes
sparkling behind her prescription spectacles at frequent intervals; face
lighting up with delight at some unspoken joke she might have just told
herself. “I like your shoes,” she says suddenly, pointing at my Stan Smith
trainers. "I have those shoes too. Are they a re-issue?"
Yes, I say, obscurely flattered that she thinks I
might be trendy enough to have an original pair.
“When I was a kid my mom bought me three sizes of
tennis shoe because she thought I was going to grow out of them,” Foster
continues. “And it was so cool because I wore the one pair and then for
whatever reason I never wore the other two. Then I had two more pairs that
I found again in the Nineties.”
Foster seems genuinely pleased about this. It’s
probably part of her strategy for not ending up in a hotel room with a needle
in her arm. All she really needs is interesting work, a private life and a pair
of comfortable shoes.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2016/05/27/jodie-foster-interview-i-developed-a-system-to-stay-alive/
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