That's what Jodie Foster believes, and certainly her attitude helps to explain how she's weathered the jump from child star to teen fox, from Oscar-winning adult actress to feature film director. Here, she talks with Lawrence Grobel about her new picture Little Man Tate, magic in life, and violence in the movies.
Jodie Foster gives me the choice: We can talk over breakfast or in the conference room of her publicist's office. I'd rather opt for breakfast and see what I could learn by watching her eat, but an interview needs quiet. She comes in wearing a gray Armani suit, a cotton striped blouse and no makeup. She knows that I have screened her latest film, Little Man Tate, with my 7-year-old daughter in tow, and since it's about a 7-year-old child prodigy, Jodie is anxious to hear not only my reaction, but my daughter's. The film is something special for Jodie because she not only acts in it but she nurtured its development, talked it through meetings, and proved to any doubters that she could direct a major feature film.
When Jodie sits down, it's not on the couch but on the floor, where she stirs a styrofoam cup of coffee and then twists and bends the plastic straw throughout our conversation. Since she's been in the business since she was three, she is obviously used to talking. "I actually like doing interviews," she tells me. "You get to work out how you feel about things."
At 28, Jodie Foster has appeared in 27 films--a pace she deems slow because she feels she needs time to regenerate after making a picture. After spending her childhood years doing commercials, she followed that with TV, and did her first feature, Napoleon and Samantha, before she was 10. At 11 she played Ellen Burstyn's daughter in Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and a year later, in 1976, she chilled us with her portrayal of a child hooker in Scorsese's tour de force, Taxi Driver.
A child prodigy herself, Jodie attended Le Lycee Francais, a private school in Los Angeles where she wound up delivering her graduation speech in French. Her mother raised her, two older sisters and brother by herself. Jodie grew up barely knowing her father, who remarried, started another family, and remained in Los Angeles.
When it came to making career decisions it was her mother who made them, with Jodie always involved in the process. She obviously made the right ones, for Foster's career has never really faltered, even when she took time off to attend college at Yale.
She continued to make movies, appearing in Foxes, Corny, The Hotel New Hampshire and Five Corners among others, but it wasn't until she let it all hang out as a rape victim accused of provoking her own rape in the 1988 film The Accused that Foster finally entered the ranks of major, serious performers. Her Oscar-winning performance brought her new respect within the industry, and she cannily managed to follow that triumph with another Oscar-calibre role, as FBI trainee Clarice Starling in Jonathan Demme's huge hit, The Silence of the Lambs. She also got the go-ahead to star in and direct her first feature, Little Man Tate.
LAWRENCE GROBEL: Since Little Man Tate is the first film you've both directed and acted in, do you feel twice as much about it compared with any of your other films?
JODIE FOSTER: Oh absolutely. More than twice!
LG: And will you be doing twice as much publicity?
JF: I always do what's appropriate for the film. I did so much PR for The Silence of the Lambs and for The Accused. But a movie like Little Man Tate needs a different kind of handling: It's not a date movie, it's not an action film, or based on a Stephen King novel, and I don't want it to be sold that way. It should be done on a more grass roots level. I want to do high schools, I want to go to smaller film festivals, go to Planned Parenthood. That's more appropriate for the film.
LG: Was it winning an Oscar which gave you the chance to direct?
JF: This project came before the award. But, yes, it is absolutely a function of clout: I would not be able to have gotten the kind of budget that I got if I was not in the movie, if I didn't cut my price and appear on the head of the marquee in what is basically a supporting role.
LG: How long did it take for you to feel you were ready to direct?
JF: A lifetime. You can learn in five minutes what you are supposed to do technically, but it's the going beyond what you're supposed to do, it's the imagination that takes really a lifetime--knowing what movies can and don't do.
LG: Jonathan Kaplan, who directed you in The Accused, called Little Man Tate a very personal and brave first movie to make. In what ways was it brave?
JF: In his mind, it was brave because it doesn't hit you over the head and say "Look at me." It's about people. They are not grand, they are not princely, there are no helicopter crashes...
LG: Not even a slap!
JF: Not even a slap--exactly.
LG: What ate the main themes that Little Man Tate deals with?
JF: The most interesting thing about a child prodigy is not so much that they know math or something else, it's that they are a herald to a new age. When the great prodigy comes, it means they are necessarily alone--and things will change from then on. Who will the next Renaissance man be?
I do like the idea of a movie that shows an unconventional relationship between a child and a parent. These are unconventional people, basically, who do not fit into society. They are misfits. It's about these people trying to find an unconventional way in a world that keeps shoving ideas of conventional happiness down their throats. The movie is about love, but it doesn't say that what the world needs now is love sweet love.
It's also about intimacy, and that doesn't necessarily have to be parental. A lot of this movie is about boy meets girl, boy gets taken away from girl, girl calls boy on the phone and he says, "I'm busy," then the boy comes back and says, "I'm sorry." It's romance. It's about two people who are in love.
LG: And it just so happens that the two people are a 7-year-old boy and his 30-year-old mother. Do you think that some who see this film will compare it to your own life, and interpret it as your valentine to your mother?
JF: In some ways that could be definitely true--although it's not an autobiographical movie at all, it doesn't have anything to do with my life. I identify with all the characters. Binary opposites are something that I'm obsessed with: People are continually dancing with opposites. The world of men and women shouldn't be about women trying to be like guys and guys trying to be the same. Tate's relationship with the two women in his life is about balancing two sides of himself: the masculine and the feminine. So it's a very traditional dilemma in the formation of the self and the formation of the artist. You have to have the outer self and the inner self, the public self and the private self. Everything in my life is about trying to balance two very separate identities.
LG: How influential were J.D. Salinger's stories on you?
JF: Franny and Zooey is my favorite book. It changed my life when I was a kid.
LG: Was it Salinger's ambiguities?
JF: What fascinates me are layers of meaning. So much of what fascinates me about being an actress is what people don't say, the things that are implicit. That's why I was a literature major and why I stunk in history. 1917...like who cares? I'm not interested in facts, I'm interested in truth, which is different.
LG: Marlon Brando told me: "Shaw said that thinking was the greatest of human endeavors, but I would say that feeling was." What do you think?
JF: I agree absolutely. It's the continual saga of my life, anyway.
LG: Would you say you lean more towards romance, or cynicism?
JF: I'm both. "Cynicism masks an inability to cope," said John Fowles. That's quite true. It is a protection for people who are too romantic.
LG: Is the movie you shot the story you sold to Orion?
JF: The draft that I signed on to direct originally bears no resemblance to this movie at all. That was not a movie really about two people and a child, it was a movie about a little kid who went to college and did wacky things in fraternities. But I got fascinated by the two women pulling him from side to side. The screenwriter, Scott Frank, and I worked a lot together.
LG: You have a golden rule: Never make an actor feel like shit. How often have you been made to feel like shit in your career?
JF: Not as often as other people. I was very lucky. But yes, Little Man Tate does have a lot of overtones of subtle psychological abuse. How people deal with children, how people use children as props, how mothers sometimes use children against each other.
Acting is the perfect vulnerable childlike moment where you are in the hands of somebody and where it's very easy for a director as a father figure, or as a parent figure, to subtly work away at your psyche. You don't know who the director is until you get on that set. He could be Hitler. You're not always going to have the greatest guys.
LG: Have you had to work with any Hitlers?
JF: I had a bad experience with one particular movie. I thought that I could take on anyone. I never considered myself vulnerable to any kind of psychological insult. And I got on this set and for some reason this director insulted my soul and it really took me a long time after that to be able to work again with confidence.
LG: You obviously don't want to mention names, but was this when you were very young?
JF: Old. Twenty something.
LG: Right, old!
JF: The only thing you really have as an actor, the only armor you have, is confidence. And when that gets chinked away at, you can't be good.
LG: Does directing satisfy your need for control more than acting?
JF: [Big smile] Oh yeah. But it doesn't satisfy my need for performance. There is a side of me that needs to perform and that side will never go away. Only acting can do that.
LG: You got the nickname B.L.T. (Bossy Little Thing) on The Accused. Did they take out the "L" when you became a director?
JF: No, because I'm still so short. But in this one I told them to call me Boss Woman. Bossssss Woman!
LG: Now that you've joined their ranks, who are the directors you most admire?
JF: I'm a big fan of the French movies from the late '50s. I had a French education, I spent a lot of time there and lived there, and there is a side of me that has a French sensibility.
LG: We'll get to that part of your life, but sticking with directors, you recently worked in a Woody Allen film, Shadows and Fog. Did you learn anything from him?
JF: It was amazing how kind of okay I was about his very different, strange way of working. Nobody reads the script, nobody knows what the movie's called or what it's about. They don't tell you where you're going to be or what time period it is. Basically, it's his movie--it's in his head.
LG: What part do you play in the movie?
JF: I don't have particularly any kind of character--I was just another character in a brothel discussing the universe. I couldn't take the movie seriously because I didn't know what it was about. Usually that would bother me because I don't know how to act without telling the story, but that's how he wants to work.
LG: Are there any other directors whom you could so trust to work so blind?
JF: Almost Scorsese, even though that's a much more dangerous category. But both of those directors have a continuity to their work and that's about the evolution of their character. As the years go on, each film evolves their character and the things that they believe in. And their vision. Most American directors hop on a movie, they go, "Oh, Days of Thunder, I'll take that. Top Gun, I'll take that." Whatever comes around.
LG: Do you feel Scorsese is our best director?
JF: Yeah, I do.
LG: Success allows you a certain power in the industry, but it's still a male-dominated world. Recently, a female brain surgeon resigned her position as a tenured professor of neurosurgery at Stanford because she didn't feel she was treated as an equal to the men. Are her problems also yours?
JF: I've been incredibly lucky. I've been in a position where I haven't had the kind of insults that a lot of women get in business, but there are, absolutely, and will always be, subtle pieces of sexism every day of my life. In some ways the greatest thing that my mom ever did for me was empower me with this delusionary confidence.
I remember sitting under a lemon tree outside my house when I was five or six and my mom came out and she said, "You know you're just so lucky to be a woman now, because you can do anything you want to do, you can be a lawyer, a doctor..." The message that I realized even then was that she couldn't and that I was going to be different, that my life was going to be very different.
LG: You're certainly different, but you're still a woman in what many women believe is a sexist business. Meryl Streep has been pretty vocal about the inequities of the business. Women don't get paid what men do. Are you struck by that?
JF: It's not something that I go to bed at night worrying about. A movie like Silence of the Lambs will do more for the inequities of women on the marquee than federally funded campaigns. Silence of the Lambs in a weird way is a more important film than anything that has happened in a long time--for a film to make $ 125 million and the hero to be a woman. This movie will change the next 20 copycat films that are made after that.
LG: How much convincing did you have to do to get the part?
JF: Oh, I ran after it.
LG: I wondered why the film was released so early in the year. Usually such a film would be a fall release for Academy consideration.
JF: There were studio reasons. Thriller or horror films almost never win Oscars. They get nominated, but they almost never win. When it was released at the beginning of the year the market was open, all the competition we had was The DOOTS and Sleeping With the Enemy. It was more important for Silence to be a commercial success than it was for it to be thought of as a movie with great performances. Though Tony Hopkins won't be overlooked: it's just too wonderful a performance in too flashy a part And I don't think the movie will be overlooked, either.
LG: Jonathan Demme gave you a lot of credit for helping direct the film. What were your contributions?
JF: The only contribution I really had was my character...but my character is the movie. That's the one thing that I can bring to a movie, the story and the literature of it, and the layers of meaning. And those Lecter/Clarice scenes--that's why I live is to do stuff like that!
LG: To get into the role, how much did you learn about cannibalism, sexual psychosis and ritual dismemberment?
JF: I know everything that every character I play knows. But I don't want to get into the curiosity factor of violence, because that's obviously a dangerous topic. But I'm absolutely fascinated with violence in our culture.
LG: With serial killers?
JF: With the fact of violence as an established piece of American culture. It isn't just serial killers, it's about child abuse, subtle abuse. Those things that make the hero the hero and the villain the villain.
LG: Did you worry much about the glorification of violence before you decided to do it?
JF: I'm not the filmmaker, I'm just the actor. And I feel very responsible for my character. But it's not the information that's bad, it's how it's used. You can take a 2×4 and you can either hit somebody over the head or you can build a building with it.
LG: That's the reasoning of the NRA--they support the sale of guns because it's not guns who kill people, it's people who kill people. Are you for or against gun control?
JF: I don't discuss it.
LG: It's pretty straightforward.
JF: Am I for it or against it? Absolutely for it. Guns are not information. It's an entirely different issue.
LG: Do you worry that some sicko will see a picture like Silence and get some new ideas about how to kill people?
JF: I don't believe in censorship of anything. I believe in not going to see something. I believe in making a decision about it.
LG: What about when it gets to child pornography? Or the resurgence of something like Nazism in Germany?
JF: This is what I think, okay? I do believe there are moral and societal imperatives. I know that putting rape victims' names in the paper is not against the law, never has been, and never will be. But the issue is not the legality of it, the issue is not the censorship of it. It is that there are moral imperatives and moral decisions. And the legal system which is about date and proof is not the be-all and end-all of what's correct. The Accused is a perfect example of that. Everything is not black and white.
LG: When your sense of morality is jolted, do you ever feel a need to speak out, being in the public position you're in?
JF: The one thing that you'll see from everything that I talk about is that I'm not political. It's not part of who I am. I don't like being a spokesperson.
LG: So you don't feel that you should talk about things that move you or that you feel passionately about?
JF: Yes, I do. And I will respond to them in a responsible way. My movies, that's how I express myself. I can't be forced to be somebody I'm not.
LG: Was it when you made The Accused that you first felt this?
JF: I always said acting wasn't stimulating enough, that it was beneath me in some way, that it was never going to be enough for me. And what I realized was that I was playing safe. And it was up to me to invest in it, with a gravity, to take that extra leap. The Accused was the one moment in my life where I really realized that what I wanted to be was an actor. That it was, ultimately, completely and totally satisfying.
LG: I know you've said that you don't learn by winning Oscars but rather by disappointments. But you said that before you won your Oscar for The Accused. Does that still hold true?
JF: I think it's very true. Disappointments are absolutely instrumental in people's lives. Those are the situations that force them to make choices and it's not the accolades or the Oscars or the money or the rewards, it's the disappointments that force them to evaluate and center themselves, or force them over the edge. The one thing that winning the Oscar gave me was I realized that I had been at the "big party" of the year. It made me realize that all these people sitting around going, "Got to get this kind of movie, got to do that kind of movie, got to do a light movie, got to do a comedy that makes $120 million"--it's just bullshit. I don't have to do anything I don't want to do. I felt as if this was just a brief indication of saying I will be rewarded if I just do what's right. And not consistently worrying about what other people are going to think or how people are going to perceive me.
LG: How do you think people perceive you? How complicated a person are you?
JF: I'm inordinately uncomplicated. I may be more complicated than I think, but I may be too young to know.
LG: How isolated are you in your private life?
JF: It's a balancing act. I have very, very few friends, but the ones I have I'm very close to.
LG: Do you make new friends?
JF: Very rarely. But I have great new acquaintances.
LG: Has it been difficult always being in the public eye?
JF: Yes, but I don't know anything else. It's just something that you accept, the way you accept being a diplomat's child or a Kennedy. The way you accept being black or anything that somehow sets you apart.
LG: How did your mother keep your head from getting too swollen?
JF: She would continually say, "What do you want to do when you grow up? Acting's a good hobby, isn't it? It's a fun thing to do." She was preparing me for the possibility that it would not continue, which is the case with most child actors. Also, I don't think she saw me as having the personality of somebody who would grow up to be an actor. And she's right, I don't have an actor's personality at all. I'm not one of those people you ask to dance and I'll get up on a table and do it. It's something that in my personal life I find painful, being the center of attention. I don't like it at all.
LG: You certainly must have been the center of attention when you wound up in the jaws of a lion during the making of your first feature film, Napoleon and Samantha, when you were just 10.
JF: That was an accident. There were three lions: the actual one who was 110 years old and didn't have any teeth, only drank milk, and very rarely wanted to do anything; a stand-in lion; and a stunt lion. The stand-in lion was brought in and I worked with him. We were going down a hill and the lion was in back of me. Got to the end of the shot, and I looked down, and he came around and picked me up, turned me sideways, and shook me. I watched everybody run away in panic. I went into shock. The trainer came and said, "Drop it." The lion dropped me and I went falling down the hill. When I woke up, I was on a stretcher in a private plane. My mother and I had long discussions about it and since I was going to be okay she felt it was important for me to get back and work with the lion, which I did two weeks later.
LG: Do you have a scar?
JF: Yeah, on both sides.
LG: That's better than a tattoo.
JF: Yeah.
LG: In your youth you were compared with Shirley Temple and Tatum O'Neal. Most child actors don't last as long or make it as far as you have. Is it more talent or luck, do you think?
JF: There's talent, there's luck, but there's also very specific management. And my mom spent a lot of time trying to disassociate me from the pack. For example, The Breakfast Club era, not having me be involved in that group.
LG: The Brat Pack.
JF: Right. My mom felt it was very important that I be recognized on my own. When there would be big things like the cover of Newsweek or Time talking about child actresses, she declined for me to be involved because she said it would serve me badly. I really am very lucky to have had somebody who was a real person who was there to protect me and who wasn't enamored with the possibility of a flashy career. Because you do live vicariously through your children's successes, so much of it was about her really wanting me to be respected and taken seriously.
LG: Were you brought up a Catholic?
JF: No. I'm going to limbo. Never been baptized. I didn't know anything about religion until I went to college. My mom was pretty down on it when I was growing up.
LG: So you've never prayed to God, even as a kid?
JF: Never. I did believe in the Easter Bunny, however.
LG: How significant was it for you to have learned French and to have lived in France?
JF: It's a big part of my life; it always will be. It's a real safety net for me, Paris. I still have a place there. It's like a womb, a very comforting place for me.
LG: You've said your mother has saved you from social disgrace. Such as?
JF: She taught me tact, diplomacy, politeness. She taught me to send thank you notes. To say "yes--" or "no, ma'am," how to be a public person in a way that was graceful.
LG: Didn't she also teach you to appreciate Marlon Brando?
JF: My mom was fascinated with Brando when I was a kid. We had Brando books all over the house. She made me go to a Brando festival. I've seen every Brando movie ever made.
LG: Didn't you go to school with some of Brando's children?
JF: Yeah, sure did. Miko, and one of his daughters, too. Miko was a friend of mine. He was a great kid, a big goofball. Miko's mom, Movita, was a beautiful woman.
LG: Who was your favorite writer when you were a kid?
JF: Baudelaire. I really was obsessed with the darker side of things.
LG: You got into Berkeley, Stanford, Columbia, Princeton, Harvard and Yale. Why'd you apply to so many and how'd you choose?
JF: My mom was out of town and the applications had to be done. I got so paranoid about it I sent in as many as I could get. I chose Yale because it was close to New York but it wasn't in New York.
LG: Did you make many friends at Yale?
JF: All my friends I met on the first day. Isn't that funny? The production designer on Tate was my roommate in college. We had a wild apartment. Junk everywhere. We had a train, flashing Christmas lights all year long. We had a big blow-up plastic pool with animals on it, only it was attached to the wall. We had a huge Twister set on the wall. So all our toys were art pieces. My bedroom was Japanese minimalist, like a futon, an orchid.
LG: How difficult was it having to have security guards while going to college?
JF: I've spoken on the topic so it's not like I ever have to talk about it again. But it is hard being a public figure.
LG: You're tough, Jodie. In American Film you said, "I've done weird things when pushed to certain extremes. I've let myself be rolled over by a steamroller, then said, 'Please! Roll me over some more!' " Do you remember saying that?
JF: It comes from work, where the production wants me to hang off a cliff at five in the morning and I'm like, "Yeah, okay! My job!" I let myself be taken advantage of in movies because I want to be one of the guys and I don't want to be the histrionic actress who won't do anything. I want to be the person who takes chances and is adventurous. I don't want to be the idiot who sits in her trailer and says, "I can't do that."
LG: In 1987 you told Interview: "Girls from single-parent homes really want to get married. I do. I really believe in marriage." Still?
JF: That's funny. There's a yearning for family because a single parent relationship with a child is a very, very intimate experience. And that's what you know of love--that absolute intimacy. And you won't settle for anything less.
LG: Would you like to have children one day?
JF: Yeah, I do. If I don't have them I won't feel like I'm some kind of failure particularly. I just know it will be a different path. But it's definitely something I'd like to do.
LG: What do you think of this comment about you: that you have perfected the technique of seeming transparent while being unreachable?
JF: Well, anybody who's discussing this is a press person. My life with the press is very different than my life on the outside. It's my job. I promote movies. That's what I do.
LG: Last question: Do you believe in magic?
JF: I have rituals, and I believe in magic. I always tell my life as a series of "Twilight Zone" episodes.... My favorite one of that entire series was the one about the black prize fighter who's totally down and out. I always cry when I see this one. He was kind of good once but he's not good anymore and he lives in this boarding house with this woman and her child. The child totally adores him. The kid's always saying, "Joe, you're going to get that guy, you're going to pound him tonight." And the boxer says, "No I'm not, I'm going to lose." "No, you're not going to lose, you'll never lose."
"I'm unlucky kid, I'm old, I've been punched out." 'You've got to believe, you've got to believe!" So the boxer goes to the fights and he gets really mad at his trainer and he punches his fist into the wall and breaks every bone in his hand. Then he goes into the ring and in five seconds he goes down. On the count of five he wakes up and he's the guy on top and the other guy's down. It's fantastic! Everywhere they go afterwards it's "Joe, you were great." He starts to believe it because everybody's paying attention to him and when he goes home the woman says, "You did great!" But the kid's just sitting there. The kid has tears in his eyes and he says, "Do you believe now? Do you believe in magic?" And the boxer says, "Well, really no, I can't, I'm too old." And the kid just says, "If you don't believe in magic it just goes away." And the boxer wakes up." ... Ten." He's on the floor, he comes back...everyone hates him. He runs up to the kid and he's kind of desperate. And the kid is back the way he used to be. He says, "You'll get it next time."
I don't know why I love this story. It's the whole Franny and Zooey thing. You must have a fat lady. And it doesn't matter whether she exists or not. But it's very important to believe that anything is possible.
Lawrence Grobel interviewed Sally Field for our July issue.