.png)
51 minutes ago
1
Jodie Foster has spoken out about parents who encourage their children to act, saying she “know[s] how dangerous it is”.
Speaking at the Marrakesh film festival, Foster said that she “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 added: “It’s actually just a cruel job that was chosen for me as a young person that I don’t remember starting.”
Foster’s first booking was at age three, on a commercial for the sunscreen lotion Coppertone. She had not intended to appear but accompanied her elder brother to the audition and charmed the casting agents.
More adverts followed, before she began sitcom work in 1968 and made her first film at age six. Her childhood was filled with appearances on TV shows and in movies such as Tom Sawyer (1973). Three years later, at age 12, she was cast as a child prostitute in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.
Foster said that her experiences at the time have meant she now finds herself “reaching out to the young child actors of this era. I feel like, wait, where are their parents? And why is nobody telling them that they should stop doing so many movies or maybe not be so drunk on the red carpet? I want to take care of them because I know how dangerous it is.”
She also professed bafflement as to why people would today be drawn to the profession at all. “I don’t know why anyone would want to be an actor now, if they knew that in order to be excellent they would have to contend with being robbed of their life in a way. I don’t know how you make sense of that except to have what my mom helped me do, which is to have this very firm delineation between your private life and your public life.”
Foster’s views diverge from those expressed in 1987, when she told Interview magazine that she had loved acting as a child. “Some people get quick breaks and declare, ‘I’ll never do commercials! That’s so lowbrow,’” she said. “I want to tell them, ‘Well, I’m real glad you’ve got a pretty face, because I worked for 20 years doing that stuff and I feel it’s really invaluable; it really taught me a lot.”
In Marrakesh, Foster did concede that her scepticism over the profession might have enhanced her ability to excel in it. “It makes my work a little bit different, because I am not interested in acting just for the sake of acting,” she said. “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.”
Foster’s latest film is Rebecca Zlotowski’s French-language comedy thriller A Private Life. The actor said she felt at ease making the film as she had attended a French school from the age of three.
“It’s a part of my personality that I just never get to use, and half my culture,” she said. “I love the global family of making films. It feels like they’re the same people wearing the same jeans and complaining about coffee at 3 in the morning. But it also allows me to open up and learn a new culture, too.”
She also addressed shooting four consecutive films by female directors, after a career mostly spent being directed by men.
“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 fallacy of only giving veteran directors big budgets.
“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 $125m’ … 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?”
