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Jodie Foster can go years without making a movie.
“I’m picky,” she admits. “I’m not really interested in acting just for the sake of acting. It has to really speak to me.”
It’s a few hours before the Cannes premiere of “Vie Privée,” a French thriller that Foster, despite her natural aversion to performing, found impossible to resist. After meeting Rebecca Zlotowski, the French filmmaker who also wrote the script, Foster discovered they shared a passion for character development and narrative. And the story, which finds Foster playing a therapist who becomes convinced that her patient’s suicide is actually a murder, was too tangled and intriguing to turn down.
“Rebecca has this command of the intellectual world, as well as the emotional world,” the 62-year-old Foster says. “We think about cinema in the same way. She wanted to make sure that the audience was brought into the interior life of the character, and that’s what I enjoy doing as an actor.”
Foster took a long hiatus from acting in the aughts to focus on raising her kids. But she’s been on screen more frequently as of late, earning an Oscar nomination for her work as a swimming coach in 2023’s “Nyad” and an Emmy for her performance in 2024’s “True Detective: Night Country.” It’s part of a new perspective she discovered after she turned 60, one that found her focusing more on ensemble movies and shows and less on star turns. It seems to have reawakened a love for a job she’s been doing since she first captivated audiences with her turns in Disney classics like “Freaky Friday” and grittier stories like “Taxi Driver,” before winning Oscars for “The Silence of the Lambs” and “The Accused.”
Why did you decide to make “Vie Privée”?
I’ve been wanting to go back and do a French movie, because I haven’t done one in a long time. For me, it’s always about trying to find the right piece of material. I didn’t want to do some overblown American and French co-production. As an actor, I need a story. And a lot of French movies, which I love, are behavior films where you just sort of follow people around for three days or something. That’s not what I do. I’m interested in narrative. I’m all about developing a character who propels the story. This ticked all the boxes.
When the movie starts, your character Lilian seems very confidant, but we quickly see the cracks in her facade. A lot of the people you’ve played are trying to maintain control or assert control. What attracts you to those parts?
It’s a pretty human thing. Maybe it’s a female thing. Maybe I bring that to the table, because I was not born somebody who’s emotionally accessible. I’m not a “pour my blood all over the table” kind of person. It’s why I wasn’t born to be an actor. I just got thrown into it at age 3. It wasn’t something I chose to do. I would never have chosen to be an actor. I’m interested in the coverings that people use to adapt to this crazy world, and the layers that they need to maintain to keep themselves safe.
You wouldn’t have chosen to be an actor, but do you enjoy acting?
Yeah, I do. But I like it on my terms. When I was a kid, I worked so much that by the time that I was 18, I needed to take a different approach. I see a lot of young actors, and I’m not saying I’m jealous, but I don’t understand how they just want to act. They don’t care if the movie’s bad. They don’t care if the dialogue is bad. They don’t care if they’re a grape in a Fruit of the Loom ad. If I never acted again, I wouldn’t really care. I really like to be a vessel for story or cinema. If I could do something else, if I was a writer or a painter or sculptor, that would be good too. But this is the only skill I have.
You’ve directed four movies, including “Little Man Tate” and “Home for the Holidays.” Do you prefer directing to acting?
I do prefer directing, but it’s hard to get things off the ground. I have to work on the material for so long in order to make it mine. I love the movies that I made, and they speak to my life. And for me, they feel like auteur films. If I can’t do it that way, I don’t really want to do it.
Nicole Kidman recently revealed that she has worked with 27 female directors in the last eight years.
Wait, what? [Foster bangs the side of the couch she’s sitting on]. That’s incredible. She’s always working!
What’s your reaction to that? Do you hope more actors use their influence to get female directors opportunities that maybe they wouldn’t be considered for?
I hope so. I’ve watched things change a lot. When I started acting, the only woman I ever saw on set was a makeup artist or script supervisor. Then I started seeing some more female technicians. But the last bastion has always been directors. When I decided to direct, I was lucky. The people that made decisions knew me, so they didn’t consider me a risk as a first-time director. But as an actor, before my last three projects, I only had made one movie with a woman director. That’s over 50 years.
As you said, the last three projects you’ve made — “True Detective,” “Nyad,” and now, “Vie Privée” — were directed or co-directed by women. Was that a conscious choice?
It’s hard for me to be in the business of saying, half my movies are going to be made by women or men or whatever. Shouldn’t it be a more instinctual choice? You would hope that you’d be interested in the human being. I mean, Jonathan Demme on “Silence of the Lambs” was my favorite feminist director. That said, I think some sort of quota system is important when it comes to giving first-time filmmakers an opportunity. You need to start the process early so we all get the same opportunities.
America had a sort of golden moment of consciousness in the last 10 years where the men that made the decisions — and who were blind to their own xenophobia and racism and sexism — suddenly woke up and were like, “Hey, why are there no women on our list of directors?” They were being called out publicly, of course, but that forced them to look at themselves and decide to change. We’re reaping the benefits of that.
Do you think that will go away with the attacks that the Trump administration is making on companies that embrace DEI initiatives?
Yeah, it may all be over now. That’s certainly what seems to be in the works in terms of the administration. We’re seeing it in everything from academia to law firms to entertainment. I hope that it doesn’t happen, because we want to tell all stories. When we do, they make money. It’s amazing that it took this long to explain to studio executives that women are 50% of the population. Female filmmakers are not a risk. And by the way, it was not female executives that made this change happen, because we had Amy Pascal, Sherry Lansing, Dawn Steel all running studios at the same time. At one point, four of the six studio heads were women and those lists of directors were all men. We need the people who run studios to make sure that they don’t imbibe the institutional bias. I’ll get off my soapbox now.
There’s a lot of humor in “Vie Privée.” You haven’t been in many comedies. Was it fun to show a different side of yourself?
It is fun. Acting in French was helpful, because I’m a different person in French than I am in English. I have a more vulnerable way about me. I’m less confident, not as sure of myself, which I think is more fun.
Do you feel like you are funnier in French than you are in English?
I do. Maybe it’s easier for me to just be free of my persona or something. I don’t love doing comedies in English. And maybe it’s because, in America, when we make comedies, they don’t have a lot of subtlety or intelligence. For me, that’s essential. So I don’t find very many that I love. The one that I really liked, that I made was “Maverick.” Even though it was silly, it’s was written by William Goldman so it had a wryness and English intelligence about it. But it’s hard for me to be fascinated with comedy for longer than a week. After about a week, I’m like, “Oh, can we get this thing over already?” They’re much harder to make than dramas.
Why did you decide not to film a cameo in “Freakier Friday“?
I was busy doing this movie. But Jamie Lee Curtis is a really good friend of mine. I followed the shoot and all that stuff.
After you won a Golden Globe for “True Detective,” you said “this is the most contented moment in my career.” Why?
Something happens at 60. There’s a hormone that gets injected in your body, and suddenly you’re like, “Oh, I don’t care.” This all coincided with me getting really excited about helping to tell other people’s stories and to elevate voices that hadn’t been heard before. So with “The Mauritanian,” I was in that movie so I could tell Tahar Rahim’s story, not my character’s story. With “True Detective,” I wanted to engineer my part so it served the indigenous characters’ story. I want to bring whatever wisdom or experience or money or status I have as an actor to help with that. I got to tell my story, it’s someone else’s turn. And that’s much more fun. Who knew being a part of a community was so much more rewarding than being the person that has to open the movie on 1,500 screens?
My 50s were hard for me. It’s hard to embrace the transition. You feel like you’re a worse version of who you were. But something happened a few years ago. I woke up one day and was like, “I don’t care about any of the things that I cared about before. I’m gonna go down a different path.” Your kids grow up, your parents pass away, maybe you get divorced. Those life changes are shattering. But there’s a freedom that comes with that. As painful as it is to lose this other identity of being a dutiful mother or daughter or wife, you can also be like, it’s just me now.
English (US) ·