bitchy | Jodie Foster: Young actors just want to act, they don’t care about scripts or quality

Jodie Foster was in Cannes to premiere her latest starring role in Vie Privée, which screened out-of-competition. Jodie is fluent in French, and this film saw her acting and performing in French in a French production. Jodie has come back to acting in a bigger way in recent years, after largely taking a hiatus from Hollywood to raise her sons. But she loved this script, and she was especially chatty in Cannes. Some highlights from her Variety interview:

Doing a French movie, acting in French: “I’ve been wanting to go back and do a French movie, because I haven’t done one in a long time. For me, it’s always about trying to find the right piece of material. I didn’t want to do some overblown American and French co-production. As an actor, I need a story. And a lot of French movies, which I love, are behavior films where you just sort of follow people around for three days or something. That’s not what I do. I’m interested in narrative…It is fun [to act in French]. Acting in French was helpful, because I’m a different person in French than I am in English. I have a more vulnerable way about me. I’m less confident, not as sure of myself, which I think is more fun.

She’s fascinated by young actors today: “When I was a kid, I worked so much that by the time that I was 18, I needed to take a different approach. I see a lot of young actors, and I’m not saying I’m jealous, but I don’t understand how they just want to act. They don’t care if the movie’s bad. They don’t care if the dialogue is bad. They don’t care if they’re a grape in a Fruit of the Loom ad. If I never acted again, I wouldn’t really care. I really like to be a vessel for story or cinema. If I could do something else, if I was a writer or a painter or sculptor, that would be good too. But this is the only skill I have.

On Nicole Kidman pledging to work with so many female directors & actually doing it: “Wait, what? [Foster bangs the side of the couch she’s sitting on]. That’s incredible. She’s always working!… I’ve watched things change a lot. When I started acting, the only woman I ever saw on set was a makeup artist or script supervisor. Then I started seeing some more female technicians. But the last bastion has always been directors. When I decided to direct, I was lucky. The people that made decisions knew me, so they didn’t consider me a risk as a first-time director. But as an actor, before my last three projects, I only had made one movie with a woman director. That’s over 50 years.

Whether she would make a similar pledge to work with female directors: “It’s hard for me to be in the business of saying, half my movies are going to be made by women or men or whatever. Shouldn’t it be a more instinctual choice? You would hope that you’d be interested in the human being. I mean, Jonathan Demme on “Silence of the Lambs” was my favorite feminist director. That said, I think some sort of quota system is important when it comes to giving first-time filmmakers an opportunity. You need to start the process early so we all get the same opportunities.

What happened after she turned 60: “Something happens at 60. There’s a hormone that gets injected in your body, and suddenly you’re like, “Oh, I don’t care.” This all coincided with me getting really excited about helping to tell other people’s stories and to elevate voices that hadn’t been heard before. So with “The Mauritanian,” I was in that movie so I could tell Tahar Rahim’s story, not my character’s story. With “True Detective,” I wanted to engineer my part so it served the indigenous characters’ story. I want to bring whatever wisdom or experience or money or status I have as an actor to help with that. I got to tell my story, it’s someone else’s turn. And that’s much more fun. Who knew being a part of a community was so much more rewarding than being the person that has to open the movie on 1,500 screens?

The IDGAF Era: “My 50s were hard for me. It’s hard to embrace the transition. You feel like you’re a worse version of who you were. But something happened a few years ago. I woke up one day and was like, “I don’t care about any of the things that I cared about before. I’m gonna go down a different path.” Your kids grow up, your parents pass away, maybe you get divorced. Those life changes are shattering. But there’s a freedom that comes with that. As painful as it is to lose this other identity of being a dutiful mother or daughter or wife, you can also be like, it’s just me now.”

[From Variety]

This is an amazing observation from an older actor: “I see a lot of young actors, and I’m not saying I’m jealous, but I don’t understand how they just want to act. They don’t care if the movie’s bad. They don’t care if the dialogue is bad.” It’s true in the sense that a lot of actors – especially non-nepo babies who have really struggled in the industry – are just happy when they get a job, any job. They just want to book jobs and keep it moving. Jodie doesn’t get it because she was working with Martin Scorsese when she was 12 years old, you know? But I also think Jodie should acknowledge that a lot of the younger actors don’t care about quality anymore, and there’s been such a realignment where… the youths don’t give a sh-t about working with auteurs or finding great scripts. They don’t have the patience or the money to wait for a “good” project.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.