Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. My guest is Jodie Foster, and we're going to look back on her life and career, starting with her early days as a child actor and her Oscar-nominated performance in Taxi Driver when she was 12.
Chapter 2: What was Jodie Foster's experience as a child actor in 'Taxi Driver'?
Next month marks the film's 50th anniversary. She recently received an Oscar nomination for the film Nyad and an Emmy win for the latest season of the HBO series True Detective, and is now starring in a new French language film, A Private Life. Along the way, Foster won many awards, including Oscars for the films The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs.
In a private life, she plays an American Freudian psychoanalyst in Paris, and with the exception of a few lines, she speaks French throughout the film. When the film begins, everyone is angry with her, including her patients. One of them accuses her of having wasted his time. He's been in therapy with her for years, hoping it would help him quit smoking. It hasn't helped.
So he tried a hypnotist, and after only one session, he quit cigarettes. Foster's character is very skeptical of hypnosis, but when one of her patients, a beautiful woman, dies under mysterious circumstances, Foster's character wants to get to the bottom of what happened, hoping she wasn't in any way responsible.
Despite her skepticism, she sees a hypnotist, goes under, and that sets her on a path to uncover what happened to her patient. Jodi Foster, welcome back to Fresh Air. It's been years, and my impression is your life has changed a lot since then.
I don't know. It's moved on. But, you know, it's the same old me. And I'm always so happy to be on NPR because I'm such an NPR fan and such an NPR head.
That is so great to hear. So your new film is in French and you went to French language school, right?
Yeah.
Yeah. My mom, when I was about nine years old, she had never traveled anywhere in her life. And she, right before then, she took a trip to France and fell in love with it and said, okay, you're going to learn French, you're going to go to an immersion school, and someday maybe you'll be a French actor.
And so they dropped me in where it was a school, Le Lycée Francais de Los Angeles, that does everything in French. So it was science and math and history, everything in French. And I cried for about six months. And then And then I spoke fluently and got over it.
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Chapter 3: How does Jodie Foster describe her new film 'A Private Life'?
So I tried everything, and I tried to quit a million times. And, you know, like everybody, I'd get edgy or I'd gain weight or I couldn't sleep. So I went to this guy and, you know, wrote the check for $90 and said, I don't know. He said a few things. I felt a little sleepy. But other than that, I didn't, you know, didn't go into any kind of trance. And I left thinking, well, this is dumb.
I can't believe I gave that guy $90 and I could smoke tomorrow. And then I just never smoked again.
Wow. That's great. That's kind of what happens in the movie.
Yeah.
Well, not really. And the movie sets her off on this like mystery. She becomes kind of a detective.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of people, my character, Lilian Steiner, is a Freudian psychoanalyst. And, you know, in the United States, psychoanalysis and Freud, we've kind of canceled him. You know, we decided he's, you know, a misogynist and, you know, nobody really wanted to follow Freudian principles.
But what he was most famous for, of course, when he started was these case histories of people who came in with hysterical illnesses and said... You know, my right arm won't move or I'm blind for no reason. And he would say, well, let's uncover parts of your past and that will help this physical ailment. And in this character's case, she goes there because she can't stop crying.
Not crying, but just water just keeps coming out of her eyes and she's really annoyed. That's never happened to her. She's not particularly sad. She just water keeps coming out of her eyes. So, interestingly, she goes back to this hypnosis, rolling her eyes the whole time. And psychoanalysis and hypnosis, they started off together with Freud and then grew apart and he denounced hypnosis.
So there's this ongoing hatred between the two that gets looked at in the film.
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Chapter 4: How did Jodie Foster learn to speak French for her film?
Which one? Huh? All the girls here are my mother. Just what a father wants to hear. Pardon me, young man. But I'm looking for Howie and Barbara Dickerson. He's meditating. Well, can't he hear me? Only if you're Buddha. Look, I'm not going to stand here and play straight man to you.
I really I do remember Paul Lynn because I really liked him. He's funny. He was funny. He was funny. He was really nice to me. And of course, he's very memorable. So I do remember being on that show.
Okay. I actually got one more. Okay. This is a Crest TV commercial.
Oh, yeah.
So four guys are playing golf. One of them sinks a putt. The other guys react. And at the same time, you run up on the green, excited to tell your father about the visit to the dentist that you and your brother just had. Okay.
Okay. Yeah, Dad! Jody? A checkup. Jimmy only had two cavities, and I didn't have any. Hey, we really did it. How'd you do it? We brushed with Crest now. Must be the Crest. It has fluoride.
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Chapter 5: What role does hypnosis play in Jodie Foster's new movie?
The others we tried didn't. Hey, great. A toothpaste should fight cavities. Crest can't promise everybody results like this, but we can promise most people good checkups. Fighting cavities is the whole idea behind Crest. Hey, George, maybe your game is really tennis.
Ha ha ha!
Oh, boy.
The acting is so terrible. Oh, yeah. Well, but that was what you were supposed to do. You were supposed to be terrible. We didn't know. I mean, it just was a different style. You know, it was a different style.
By which I think you mean it sounds like somebody reading their lines for the first time.
Yes. Yes. And, yeah, I mean, I remember thinking, oh, well, this is not a job I'm going to do when I'm a grown-up because this seems like a very silly job. I just learn lines and then I say them. And somebody usually says to me, the first direction somebody tells me is usually act natural. Or maybe they'll say something like be excited on that line. And that part of it had held no sway for me.
I had no interest in that. The part that was interesting to me was being on set with these families of mostly guys. They really were all these brothers and fathers who – would teach me things, and they'd talk about how the camera worked. And, you know, we would all be freezing together or complaining about the food together. And there was this community of people that I belonged to.
And because I love movies and love television, that was such a big part of my life, I was a part of something. So that's the part that I remember. I don't remember the work particularly as being intriguing.
Well, your mother was behind you doing all of this. And since you didn't find it acting very intriguing, did you feel – oh, and also because you became like the primary – Breadwinner. Breadwinner, yeah. Did you feel like you were being forced to do it?
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Chapter 6: How did Jodie Foster's mother influence her acting career?
But I'm wondering, you know, you had played, even as a kid, and certainly in Taxi Driver, like girls who could talk back, girls who could talk kind of tough, girls who could challenge. Did that help you in life? Because you knew what it was to talk that way.
Yeah, I guess so.
Chapter 7: What challenges did Jodie Foster face growing up in the film industry?
I guess so. Yeah, I guess I was empowered by the people I played in some ways. And I also was born a powerful person. Don't ask me why. Sometimes, you know, I'm five foot three and every once in a while when somebody's doing some shenanigans, I get out of my car, I slam the door and I say, show me your license. Really?
And shockingly, people do it or they, you know, or they listen to me because I played a powerful person on TV or because I was born that way or I don't know, you know, maybe that's the Karen in me. that believes that somehow I should be listened to. I really should be listened to. I deserve to be listened to. You know, I do think that that has a lot to do.
Who I am in the public sphere, the personality that I was born with but also that I had to develop in order to stay safe and to stay powerful has kept me away from a lot of bad stories.
Can you give an example of a time you slammed the door and said, show me your license?
Oh, well, yeah, it was a real thing, I suppose, where I saw somebody being bullied in a car situation. And I got out of the car and was like, okay, you stand over there and you stand over there. I want you 10 feet apart, you know, that kind of thing. Wow. But all five, three of me. But yeah, I remember being in a situation. I was on a, you know, not to be named.
I was on a movie set with a, you know, powerful, out of control actor. And he called me to his home, and there were lots of problems happening on the set. And I just called you here because I wanted to tell you that I think your behavior on set's been terrible. And I feel like you're not participating in the movie. You're not doing your best work.
And I don't know what all this school stuff is that you're doing and all of this other stuff that you're concentrating on that's not the movie, but I'm really disappointed in you. And I think that you need to be more a part of things. And what do you think about that? I waited like five minutes. I swallowed and I said, I think that you've made very few movies that you don't have any experience.
I've made a lot of them. I think you have egregious behavior on set. And you may not understand what my education means to me. That's fine that you're ignorant. But it really doesn't. You know, and I went on this, like, I don't know where it came from. But I went on this super, you know, articulate rant. And at the end of it, there was a pause. And he said, okay, I'll meet you downstairs.
He was like, ah, whatever. You know. And so I guess when I look back at that moment, I'd be like, oh, was that? Oh.
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