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Jodie Foster sweeps into the 14th Annual American Cinamatheque Moving Picture Ball--held in her honor--with pomp that surrounds true Hollywood royalty. Dressed in a demure but glamorous Giorgio Armani gown, she is flanked by an entourage of business heavies (including PMK top dog Pat Kingsley), assorted family members, her longtime makeup artist Lucienne Zammit and a rep from Armani. As she takes her place in the room full of movie stars, moguls and directors, Foster carries herself with the regal, reserved bearing of an anointed show-business veteran. The Cinematheque event, which raises money for film preservation, shows Hollywood at its most self-serving-- congratulating itself, unctuously preening its most influential players and, of course, airing ad nauseum on TNT. But beneath the full-throttle hype machine, it's clear that 37-year-old Jodie Foster is the real thing: the star of 33 films in 34 years; a four-time Oscar nominee and two-time winner (for 1988's The Accused and 1991's The Silence of the Lambs) Yale graduate; a successful director, and now a full-on producer, too. While Foster sits calmly at her table, an inscrutable grin plastered across her face, such stars as Anthony Hopkins, Robert De Niro and James Woods take the stage to laude her. And they sound not only sincere, but also genuinely in awe of the diminutive actress.
Two days later, Foster shows up for lunch at The Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, and it's as if she's left her Jodie Foster costume at home. Gone is all trace of makeup, of blown-dry, root-lifted hair and the elegant clothes familiar from her award show appearances. Gone is the beatific smile. Even the bearing is gone. Instead, she slumps into a booth swathed in an old loose top and skirt that practically dwarf her, and an equally oversized shoulder bag packed with paperwork pleading for attention. Today, she's all work and no play-straightforward right down to her manner of speaking: a rapid-fire staccato laced with irreverence and passion. Her mind runs almost too fast for her words.
"I never usually do these things," she says of the Cinematheque lovefest. "But Anna and the King is coming out just before Christmas, and it seemed like a good way to promote the movie. You couldn't drag me to other actors' tributes, unless for a great friend, like Tom Cruise or Mel Gibson. There's the weird feeling that you never deserve that kind of attention� She stares down at the table as if she were about to offer a humiliating confession. "I admit some people put me on a pedestal," she says, "But I didn't put me on a pedestal. It makes me shake with pity that anyone would look at me as a role model. I guess what people look up to are the decisions I made. But they weren't made for the sake of impressing; they were made to bring me pleasure with a capital 'P' Things for my benefit, wholly selfish decisions.�
Foster's view of herself is often at odds with her public image. To the industry she is as pure as a saint, as self-possessed as a princess; in her own eyes, she's your average working stiff who's struggled all her life to earn enough money and follow her muse. She started acting when she broke into commercials at age three with the famous Coppertone ad. Growing up as the family breadwinner for her single mom, two older sisters and brother, Foster remembers that money in her household was "always a source of pain and major stress." She may now appear to be the movie business' most rampant overachiever, but things weren't always smooth. When director Jonathan Kaplan cast The Accused, Foster's career at age 24 was in a slump, and neither the producers nor Paramount wanted her. Only when Kelly McGillis threatened to walk did Foster get the part. As for the fact that Hopkins, Mel Gibson and Jonathan Demme all claim to be intimidated by her, Foster is bemused. "I don't know what that's about," she says, "except image." As an example of just how misleading image can be, she cites Robert De Niro, her co-star in 1976's Taxi Driver. "He doesn't talk. He leaves these big pregnant pauses. We project all this inner life onto him, when he doesn't know that much about the history of movies. He doesn't know that much about current affairs. He doesn't know his presidents. He's actually sort of a tabula rasa, and that's what makes him a great actor. But if he was the kind of person who talked a mile a minute, you might go, 'What a bore!' "
Foster, who actually does talk a mile a minute, sometimes does so in unexpected ways. At the tribute, Dick Donner, who directed her in Maverick, described how she went mano a mano with co-star Mel Gibson in the dirty-joke department for the entire shoot.
"I do have a filthy mouth," Foster confesses easily, as though happy to have it out there. "People don't know that about me, I guess. Because in interviews you're supposed to be genteel and polite, so people think that's me.
Yes, genteel and polite. Not to mention controlled, elegant, graceful, articulate and commanding. "I can do that," she says with a sigh. "I know how to do that. But I don't think that's who I am essentially. I think," she begins, sounding like she's analyzed herself to death and finally given up, "I am a ton of contradictions."
She's drawn to people of similar complexity. Like Mel Gibson, for instance. '"There's part of Mel that makes bad jokes. He's always trying to impress the girls--he has the personality of a guy who's not good-looking. But the other side is just as striking: his angry side. In the movies he's directed his work is all about being misunderstood and having a higher goal."
For a self-described feminist, Foster is surprisingly tolerant of badboy actors. Like Gibson, she says, her co-star in 1997's Contact, James Woods, has "a sick, sexist sense of humor." Yet it hardly fated her when he got up on stage at the tribute and made fun of the movie, joked about the mysterious father of her 15-month-old son, admitted that both he and Foster were "sick of acting" and imitated her making sexual hand gestures to crack him up while shooting. "I'm so used to him going too far, and that's what I love about him," she says. The same goes for Robert Downey Jr., who starred in her second directorial effort, 1995's Home For the Holidays. "We had to pull Downey out of rehab to do the looping," she says, "and he was Mr. Teary-Eyed sweetheart. A sweet guy, but a real jerk. He always says wrong thing, like Jimmy. I guess I like kind of jerky guys. I like a weird sense of humor. I don't mean this in any kind of romantic way at all, I love guys who are just a big bunch of mistakes. Now, I don't tolerate mistakes from women very much. I can't take jerky women. Luckily there aren't that many of them."
The roles Foster plays on film are the precise opposite of jerky women. "A major part of my persona, my image," she says, "is the intelligent protagonist. It's the part I play in every movie. It's usually the guy's part, the kind of thing Harrison Ford would do. And that's not so heinous to play again and again because it's not a bimbo or screwball comedy airhead." On The Hollywood Reporter's list of bankability in the movie industry, Foster rates number three among women, after Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan. And she is catching up on salary. For their latest movies Roberts earned $20 million, Ryan and Foster $15 million each. At the same time, Roberts and Ryan work far more than Foster does, and in lighter commercial fare.
Foster would like to make even fewer commercial movies "Sometime the movies I like"--she mentions Emir Kusturica�s Underground and Spike Lee's Get on the Bus--"are not the ones I do. Sometimes I make movies that I wouldn't necessarily want to go see. I'm a much more general public actress than a Resevoir Dogs kind of actress. I could never get cast in Reservoir Dogs, even though it might be a movie I prefer to see. Her understanding of her place in the industry, and what the public wants from her, is so strong that she invariably opts for epic, mainstream movies. "People offer me movies all the time that my audience wouldn't appreciate," she says.
One such movie is Hannibal, the adaptation of author Thomas Harris' follow-up to The Silence of the Lambs, which Foster, director Jonathan Demme and Anthony Hopkins had been eagerly awaiting for over 10 years. But when they finally got hold of it, it was more grisly than anyone could have imagined. For one thing, Clarice Starling, the heroine Foster had so memorably portrayed, becomes a cannibal, too. Demme has already passed on the project, although Hopkins is still waiting to see a script (which both David Mamet and Steve Zalliar have worked on).
"I'd stand to make more money doing that sequel than I've ever made in my life," says Foster. "But who cares, if it betrays Clarice--who is a person, in some strange way, to me. The movie worked because people believed in her heroism. I won't play her with negative attributes she'd never have." When talking about it, Foster sounds terribly disappointed pointed. A man-eating Clarice could not exactly be described as an intelligent protagonist.
But Anna Leonowens, Anna and the King's English governess who in 1862 travels to Thailand (then Siam) to teach the King of Siam's 67 children, certainly is one even if she does wear hoop skirts and frilly bonnets and speak with a crisp English accent. Directed by Andy Tennant, whose credits include Ever After, Fox's big budget adaptation of the 1956 musical The King and I seems an uncharacteristic choice choice for Foster. But she hadn't made a movie in two years, and she has a credo of only wanting to take on characters that she isn't a hundred percent sure she can do.
"I get all the scripts I'm typecast for," she says with a sigh. "Everything I've played before. The only reason to do a period movie--and I've done a few (Sommersby in 1993, Maverick in 1994)--is to bring some contemporary psychology to it. Otherwise, it's just going to be about landscapes and pretty dresses. Hoop skirts I've done. Accents I've done. But to tell you the truth, I had lust been all through Asia, and I really wanted to make a movie about Asia that wasn't just a bunch of white people and colonization. And underneath the surface, it's a story I love: two unconventional people (Chinese actor Chow Yun-Fat plays the King) constricted by conventions, and they have one opportunity to let it all go and choose happiness. I just love a good almost-love story. Romantic to me is nostalgia and longing for what you don't have--it's bittersweet sadness."
Foster is tougher on her own movies--and her own performances- than she has any reason to be. When she made The Accused, she was convinced, right up until she won the Oscar, that she'd given the worst performance of her life. She describes Nell, produced by her company, Egg, and starring Foster as a sort of feral child, as well-meaning but flawed. "If we didn't get the first 10 minutes right, it was never going to be believable," she says. And she jokes about how Contact, which switched directors early on, from George Miller to special-effects king Robert Zemeckis, went from being "Lorenzo�s Oil in space" to "three weeks of me sitting in that chair in front of a blue screen, on my way to Vega.
Surprisingly, the movie she's most fond of is the one she seemed least likely to be in: Maverick "I know a lot of people thought, 'Why?' But I've decided that was the most brilliant thing I ever did," she says. "I had more fun on that movie than I've ever had, including the films I've directed.
Little Man Tate, considered when it came out in 1991 to be an auspicious debut for a young director, makes her cringe in retrospect. "When I look at it now, I'm kind of horrified," she says. "I love the material, but seeing it makes me realize how immature I was when I made it. I think Home for the Holidays is a much more evolved and complicated film."
It seems that becoming a director has given Foster a more critical eye, but she believes it has made her a less critical actress. "I think I'm a much happier person because I direct," she notes. "So I'm probably easier to work with. When I make a movie for another director, I can easily say, 'Well, it's not my vision. I have my own movies to make.' So now, as an actor, I don't need movies to fulfill every part of my personality.
Fulfillment for the workaholic Foster is definitely becoming more rounded. The birth of her son Charlie answered a lot of needs she didn't even know she had: the maternal one, of course, but also the need to work less, and to indulge her homebody side. "I was at that point in my life when I had him where I didn't want to go out anymore," she says, "so I thought I might as well have a child! It's not a big upset in my life. He's still young enough to travel with me. The only difference is, I'm tired. Definitely tired. You can do it all--but not forever. Some work has to go. I just don't have the energy anymore.
One way of arranging that was moving Egg from the defunct Polygram to Paramount, so the studio could help market and distribute the "dramas for women" that Egg now concentrates on. And while she shot Anna and the King for five months in Malaysia, she had Charlie with her. "When we arrived in Malaysia the first night, I had a panic attack. He'd had a melt- down on the 24-hour flight--I almost had one, too--and then he didn't like the car seat. So I started to think maybe I should send him home or quit the movie. But Charlie adjusted better than anybody. I took him to the park. And the best thing was, I didn't have to share him with anyone.
Becoming a mother may have coaxed out Foster's softer side, but it seems to have hardened her to the movie business--and to acting in particular. Yes, it seems industry queen Jodie Foster is getting a little jaded.
"I'm just not like so many people in this business," she admits. "I have a hard time always being front and center. Lately I've been feeling like I'm in the wrong business. And I wish, as an actor, I could be less cynical. Matthew McConaughey, for instance, was so gung-ho on Contact. He kept saying, 'I want to try it this way', and then, 'Let's try it that way.' I said, 'Fine, as long as I'm out of here by 5:30.��
For all the talk, she's not quitting anytime soon. Foster's been developing a script called The Legendary Flora Plum, starring fellow Yalie Claire Danes, that she intends to direct this spring. It's the story of a circus performer in the Forties who lies and cheats her way to becoming a legendary actress.
"It's a movie about actors," says Foster. "It's about an artist who yearns to be great. And part of becoming great is convincing other people you're great. To me, it's all about your body of work. Maybe I'm foolish. But I do believe that you win out in the end if it's about the work. Maybe you don't get as rich as other people. The globalization of this business has trivialized everything. I don't make movies to rip people off and open Planet Hollywood and make more money for myself."
Foster's body of work is established beyond doubt. And she's relaxed enough to play the Hollywood game in other ways: by giving eloquent interviews and projecting that movie-star aura whenever she turns up in public. If you look through her magazine covers through the years, her pictures have gotten increasingly glamorous.
"Part of it is that I'm older now and they're piling more makeup on me," she says with a laugh. "But I have to admit, allowing myself to do the dress-and-hair thing took years. That's one of the gifts of being an actor in the movie business. I would have been one of those people who's uptight about their body and uptight about their emotions and who would never have been able to cry in public or talk about their feelings or wear makeup. This gave me an opportunity to explore sides of myself that I might never have known. I've played vulnerable, emotional characters very intentionally."
As for the glammed-up photos, she simply says, "I don't relate to my photo stuff at all. I can sit in a chair for hours, while they do all this stuff to me, and just stare. I'm thinking. Meanwhile, people see the pictures and think that�s who I am. "Well," she sighs, "it's part of who I am. As I said � I�m a mass of contradictions.�
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