Jodie Foster: Mel Gibson Brought 'Lifetime of Pain' to Beaver

The Beaver finally debuts tonight for an audience at South by Southwest, where one half of the Jodie Foster-Mel Gibson braintrust that brought the celebrated-cum-troubled project together will present the film in person. Guess which half?

Indeed, Foster has undertaken the first step of the delicate promotional journey for The Beaver, bringing awareness to her film in part by helping restore Gibson's image as both an actor and a person. The former wouldn't be so hard without the latter -- the sneering, racist, boorish (and, of course, talented) ragehound whose principal accomplishment over the last year should have been his performance as a man whose beaver hand puppet accompanies him through a midlife crisis. But as Foster explains in a new interview, the capacity for such rage and darkness were precisely what drew her to Gibson in the first place:

"He's so incredibly loving and sensitive, he really is," she says. "He is the most loved actor I have ever worked with on a movie. And he's not saintly, and he's got a big mouth, and he'll do gross things your nephew would do. But I knew the minute I met him that I would love him the rest of my life."

She adds: "I know him in a very complex way. He's a real person; he's not a cardboard cutout. I know that he has troubles, and when you love somebody you don't just walk away from them when they are struggling."

Foster and Gibson -- the yin and yang of American pop culture, its moral avatar and current nemesis -- have been close friends since they met on 1994's Maverick. [...] She pauses, and this exceptionally intelligent, highly controlled woman has tears in her eyes.

"God, I love that man," Foster says. "The performance he gave in this movie, I will always be grateful for. He brought a lifetime of pain to the character that we've been talking about for years, that I knew was part of his psyche and who he is. It's part of him that is beautiful and that I want people to know, too. I can't ever regret that."

We'll see.... More to come on Movieline following tonight's SXSW premiere.

· Jodie Foster on Mel Gibson... [THR]