Los Angeles Magazine / March 1, 2002
INTERVIEWED BY: Amy Wallace
Jodie Foster sums it up: she’s focused, she’s critical, she’s downright mathematical. After so many movies, she knows how things work and why they don’t.
THERE’S A MOMENT IN DIRECTOR David Fincher’s upcoming thriller, Panic Room, that shows why Jodie Foster got the lead role. Playing a newly divorced woman with a young daughter, Foster has just rented a huge Manhattan brownstone that has one unique feature: a hidden chamber built as a sanctuary in the event of a break-in. You know from the movie’s title that something or someone will soon cause Foster and her daughter to take refuge there. Once they do, a breathless, freaked-out Foster looks straight into the camera, and you can see it, there in her alert blue eyes: a formidable intelligence that will save the day.
It’s the same intelligence Foster applies to her own life. Few people have seen the filmmaking enterprise from as many angles as she has. An actor since the age of four, she has appeared in more than 30 films and has won two Academy Awards (for The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs). The 39-year-old has worked with many of America’s most celebrated directors, has directed two of her own movies — Little Man Tate and Home for the Holidays — and has produced the latter and several others. Weeks before the March release of Panic Room, Foster agreed to sit down and talk about what she calls the “mathematics” and social dynamics of film production — a topic that fascinates her so much, it turns out, that she once considered writing a book about it.
Foster arrives exactly on time at the Four Seasons’ Gardens restaurant. She is alone, sans handlers. Fine boned and startlingly pretty, she is a master at blending in. Dressed in jeans and loafers, she wears nerdy tortoiseshell glasses and no makeup. She admits to being exhausted: Her second son, Kit, was born September 29, and she hasn’t had ten free minutes since — a point that is driven home later when she suddenly grabs the right armpit of her brown suede shirt with alarm. “Oh, man, how great is this? Look what I found,” she says, laughing as she reveals a bulky plastic security tag she is noticing for the first time.
Foster has stuck with the same editor, composer, costume designer, and first assistant director in both films she’s directed, and she has strong views about the collaborative nature of filmmaking. “Can you tell this is my obsession?” she asks at one point. “I could talk about this forever.” Now, as she attempts to simplify her life to make more time for acting and directing (she closed her 12-year-old production company, Egg Pictures, on January 1), Foster talks about the importance of ceding control, the appeal of opinionated people, and the realization that, over time, she has become less of a pain in the ass.
FOSTER: I’ve made a lot of movies with first-time directors and a lot of movies with directors who have made scores of films. You absolutely never know who’s going to be great and who isn’t. Some directors don’t do a great interview, and you’re like, “Whoa, this guy doesn’t have much to say.” And he comes on and brings so much to the process and is so observant. Then you’ll get a first-time director who seems like he’s got it down. And by the first week, everybody’s ready to kill him. He procrastinates. He doesn’t come up with anything. He’s one of those cocktail party directors who talks about it well but has nothing to deliver once you start shooting.
What I’ve learned also is that what’s wrong in your shrink’s office is what’s wrong on the set. Nine times out often, the thing that makes a film suffer is the thing that the director really needs to deal with psychologically. It’s usually issues of authority — not only how you handle other people’s authority but how you are as a leader. How you feel about yourself and how you project that onto other people or just the environment you set into play.
So now when I start a film with David Fincher or Robert Zemeckis or Andy Tennant, that first week I’m basically just sitting them on the couch. I’m doing the whole Freud thing on them so that I can figure out where their weak areas are and how to serve them. I really believe that the actor’s job is to serve the director. Even if he’s a schmuck, and even if by week one you realize he doesn’t know what he wants or you don’t respect what he’s going for or you don’t like his style, you still have to serve him. So you have to swallow any dissident thought. Not just because it will hurt the movie but because once a lead actor or anybody in a high position dissents, the rest of the crew no longer respects the director, and it’s down the toilet. He’ll never be able to take control.
