Jodie Foster
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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.
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.
So hypnosis plays a key role in the new movie. Did you ever go under, even for research?
Well, actually, I have. Yeah, I quit smoking. When I quit smoking, I went to a hypnotist, and I was a really, really big smoker.
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.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:15
2
What was Jodie Foster's experience as a child actor in 'Taxi Driver'?
0:15–2:36
3
How does Jodie Foster describe her new film 'A Private Life'?
2:36–6:14
4
How did Jodie Foster learn to speak French for her film?
6:14–7:27
5
What role does hypnosis play in Jodie Foster's new movie?
7:27–34:43
6
How did Jodie Foster's mother influence her acting career?
34:43–35:05
7
What challenges did Jodie Foster face growing up in the film industry?
35:05–44:10
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from Fresh Air
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