Jodie Foster on working with Scorsese: 'It was the greatest honour of my life'
In her latest role, Jodie Foster appears in French mystery thriller A Private Life, playing a psychiatrist who suspects her patient’s suicide may actually have been murder. She chats to James Mottram about her personal approach to acting, working with Scorsese and rediscovering how scary Silence Of The Lambs really is
What drew you to A Private Life? I like a story and it’s rare to get something that has such good architecture. I like different layers of meaning. The first thing that I think of is the character. Sometimes I’ll read the script and I’ll be like: ‘Oh, what can I play? Probably that! I can do that!’ For me, everything is really about the story and how I can serve the story. So I really responded to that. And then, of course, I’ve been wanting to do another movie in French for a long time.
With speaking so much French in the movie, how did you adjust to that? I had a great dialect coach… who wasn’t available for the shoot. Then she said: ‘You know what? My daughter’s bilingual, so she can come.’ And that was perfect. She wasn’t on top of me or anything, but just enough to say, ‘the meaning of this is…’ or ‘this is plural’ or ‘you forgot the word “de”.’ But it was actually the perfect amount of overseeing.
As a French speaker, do you watch a lot of French cinema and TV shows? I wish I did. I almost never do. I used to when I was young, but we just don’t get as much anymore. We don’t get it in the States. I have to come to France to spend a few weeks just going to movie after movie.
You play Lilian Steiner, a psychiatrist who believes one of her patients has been murdered. How did you find your way into the character? Gosh, I don’t know! It’s all there. I feel that about every movie that I make. I feel like it’s all there and it’s just up to me to uncover it. The characters are already there before I got there.
How do you like to approach acting? Is it instinct or are you theoretical? I like the juggle of the two. I like the two sides, for example, of intention and then freedom. We’re always playing with those two things. The director, of course, comes to the table with all of this intention: ‘I want this to be this way and I want that to be this way, and these are the circumstances that I’m going to create.’ But then somebody says ‘action!’ and you’re suddenly collaborating with human beings, and it doesn’t look like it looked in the storyboard. Not only do you have to be ok with that, but you have to enjoy juggling these two things.
You started acting so young. Was it always your ambition to act? I never thought I would be an actor when I grew up. My mom would say: ‘Are you going to be a lawyer? Are you gonna be a doctor?’ It was never assumed that I was going to be an actor when I grew up. And I was always surprised that I’m still doing the same job that I did when I was three years old. I’m still doing the same job! So even though it’s been incredibly rewarding, and I’m so grateful for everything it’s given me, I have to continually try to go out and do other things.
You recently contributed to Mr Scorsese, the superb Martin Scorsese documentary by Rebecca Miller Rebecca and I went to college together! We were in the same year, same class; my Freud/Lacan class was with her. She speaks French better than I do.
How do you look back on your time working with Scorsese? It was the greatest honour of my life. I don’t know how I got so lucky that, for some reason, at nine or ten years old, he decided to put me in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore; it changed my life. At the time, that was only the third film he had done after Boxcar Bertha and Mean Streets. I had seen Mean Streets with my mom a couple of times.
Talking of looking back, do you ever revisit The Silence Of The Lambs? I saw it again about eight years ago, because my kids had never seen it. I never showed it to them because it’s scary. Somebody said that it was on at the cinema so I was like, ‘ok, this is great, we’re gonna actually be able to see it in the movie theatre.’ I’d forgotten that it was so scary!
A Private Life is in cinemas from Friday 26 June; picture: Jérôme Prébois.