Jodie Foster feels like a different actor performing in French
In a Q interview, the Oscar and Emmy winner discusses her new film, A Private Life
Jodie Foster has played many roles in her career, including an FBI trainee, an astronomer, a fixer in a bank heist, an Alaskan police chief, and a long-distance swimming coach. But now, she’s doing something she’s never done before: taking on her first solo lead role in a French-language film.
It’s called A Private Life (or Vie privée in French) and it follows the Oscar and Emmy winner as Lilian Steiner, a French-speaking American psychiatrist in Paris who suspects the death of one of her patients is not what it seems. In an interview with Q’s Tom Power, Foster says she’s been looking to make “a real French movie” for a long time, but wanted to wait for the right one to come along.
“I had a caveat, which is I just didn't want to do some bloated American co-production,” she says. “I wanted it to be an auteur-driven, small French film…. The other caveat was that I wanted it to have a story. Sometimes, you know, independent movies or smaller movies are behaviour films … there isn't necessarily a beginning, a middle and an end. And I think I'm a beginning-and-a-middle-and-end actress.”
Foster started learning French as a young child when her mother enrolled her in the Lycée Français de Los Angeles, a French-language immersion school. That education opened up doors for her to appear in the 1977 French film Moi, fleur bleue, as well as a small French-speaking part in the 2004 romantic war drama A Very Long Engagement. She says she used to dub all of her own movies in French, before new technology made the process significantly faster and more affordable.
“I have a totally different voice in French,” she says. “For some reason, I have a much higher voice in French, I think because I learned from these lovely French lady professors that all spoke a little bit like that.”
Despite her near-perfect accent, Foster says she feels less confident performing in French.
“I feel like I'm more vulnerable,” she says. “I'm a little more frustrated because I'm worried that I'm just not going to find that word when I need it, or I'm not going to be able to improvise something. So it gives the character a bit more neuroses than you would, maybe, normally associate with my work. I think you can feel the stress and the struggle and the frustration … at least in this character anyways. Maybe if I was playing a French stoner it would be different.”
Foster did all the press for Taxi Driver at Cannes
Last May, A Private Life had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival with the entire cast present. The first time Foster went to Cannes was in 1976 for Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver. Though she was only 13 at the time, Foster ended up doing all of the French press for the film, while Scorsese and her adult co-stars, Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, hid in their hotel rooms.
“[Columbia Pictures] wouldn't pay for me to come, so I had to come on my own dime,” Foster recalls. “When I got there, Scorsese and De Niro, especially, had been going through a lot of problems with the movie. They didn't know whether they were going to get an X rating because of the violence … and I think they were just completely traumatized. So they just didn't come out of the Cap-d'Antibes, which is a really nice hotel.”
While Foster says she can’t really take credit for saving the day, she thinks it’s “kind of funny” how she ended up answering on behalf of the film.
“I just can't believe how lucky I am that I was born at the right time,” she says. “Somehow, by some piece of luck, I ended up in the first movies of Martin Scorsese and I was a part of the greatest moment in cinema history for America, really the golden age of American cinema.”
Listen to Power’s full conversation with Foster to hear more about A Private Life, how she’s managed to separate her public and private life, and the freedom she’s found after turning 60.
The full interview with Jodie Foster is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Jodie Foster produced by Ben Edwards.