The Marrakech Film Festival began last Friday, and Jodie Foster is there in support of her latest film A Private Life, a French comedy-thriller she screened earlier this year in Cannes. But that’s only her second reason to attend, as the festival honored Jodie with a tribute award on Sunday, where she also sat down for an in-depth career retrospective. At 63, Jodie has been candid lately about being in her “I don’t care” era, in the best way possible — as in no longer inhibited by limiting ideas or outside opinions. This liberated attitude made for honest and loose comments from Jodie. For instance: filming Taxi Driver as a tweenager, she found Robert De Niro “not the most interesting person on earth.” Jodie was also quite frank that she doesn’t think she’d have ever become an actor if her mother hadn’t thrown her into it as a child. Some highlights:
Premiering Taxi Driver at Cannes as a 13-year-old: “Nobody wanted to bring me because they didn’t want to spend money on me.” However, her mother — who was also her manager and enrolled her at a French school in Los Angeles — pushed for her to go. “My mom said, ‘No, it’s really important. She speaks French. This is Cannes!’” Foster said. “And so we paid for our own flights.” Foster had a laugh remembering that De Niro, Harvey Keitel and Scorsese “were really paranoid” because there was some buzz around the Croisette around the film being too violent and perhaps needing an X rating. “We all did the press conference together, but then after the press conference, they all got too scared, and they wouldn’t leave their rooms at the Hotel du Cap,” Foster said. “So I ended up doing all the interviews in French for the entire team of ‘Taxi Driver’!”
She wouldn’t have chosen acting herself: “I would never have chosen to be an actor, I don’t have the personality of an actor. I’m not somebody that wants to dance on a table and, you know, sing songs for people,” she said. “It’s actually just a cruel job that was chosen for me as a young person that I don’t remember starting. So right there, it makes my work a little bit different because I am not interested in acting just for the sake of acting. If I was on a desert island, I think probably the last thing I would ever do is act. So I was just trying to survive.”
The last four films she made were directed by women: “I mean, really up until 15 years ago, when you look at the list for mainstream movies and you go down the director’s list, I never saw a female name,” she said, before highlighting the glass ceiling that female directors face when they’re courting bigger-budget movies. “If you’re making a movie that has a certain risk attached to it … they would say, ‘Wow, there’s no woman that’s directed a movie that cost $12 million,’” she pointed out. She said “the idea was not to give women these huge mega movies if they had not had any experience. How about giving women the experience first?”
Killers of the Flower Moon should have been a limited series: “What we had was a very interesting movie about two guys who go back and forth and they talk to each other. I think everybody was excited that the Native story was going to be told. And what they found was like, ‘Wow, all the Native women are dead,’” she continued. “What they said was, ‘Well, it’s a feature, we didn’t have time!’ But there was time. There was an eight-hour limited series that was not made, that could have been made, where if you really needed to explore all of that male toxic masculinity, you could have done that, but you could have had Episode 2 actually center the Native story.”
I’d actually call that a fair assessment of (just some of) the mistakes Scorsese made in adapting KOTFM. Jodie’s thoughts on not being an actorly type were similarly pretty blunt, though I think it’s a misconception that all actors are extroverts. (Michelle Williams, anyone? Merritt Wever? Cillian Murphy?) And in reading more of what she said at this event, it’s clear that Jodie is excited by her own profession. Otherwise, continuing with it her whole life would have been an extended exercise in torture, non? (Or perhaps nothing seems tortuous after a lion picks you up in his mouth on set as a kid…) But even back to the conversation about working with De Niro at 12, Jodie shared that he introduced her to improvisation and it blew her mind at the time: “I remember being kind of sweaty and excited and giggly and coming back up into the hotel room to meet my mom and say, ‘I’ve had this epiphany.’” And speaking of Taxi Driver, I simply ADORE her anecdote of handling all the Cannes press while the male adults cowered in their hotel rooms — in French no less. Vas-y ma belle!
Photos credit: Best Image/Backgrid, Romuald Meigneux/Starface Photo/Cover Images, Julie Edwards/Avalon