Actor Jodie Foster is currently starring in A Private Life, a French indie film directed by Rebecca Zlotowski.Illustration by Ashley Floréal
In 1974, when I was 12, I was skilled enough on my pogo stick that I could jump it up and down the five concrete stairs off my back porch, and I knew all the words to the top sitcom theme songs. In 1974, when Jodie Foster was 12, she was working for Martin Scorsese, in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. She’d also appeared in four other movies, 27 television shows and countless commercials, was the family breadwinner, and was fluent in French. (She attended the Lycée Français de Los Angeles; at her graduation in 1980, she gave the valedictorian speech. Then she went to Yale.)
Her preternatural talents never dimmed. She won awards by the shovelful, including two Oscars, for culture-shaking performances in films including Taxi Driver, The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs, and became an acclaimed director. Married since 2014 to Alexandra Hedison, a photographer and director, Foster has two adult sons (an actor and a scientist) with her ex-partner, Cydney Bernard. In 2024 she won her first Emmy, for the HBO series True Detective: Night Country.
Review: Jodie Foster’s je ne sais quoi saves zany French dramedy A Private Life
She’s currently starring in A Private Life, a clever, very grown-up French indie directed by Rebecca Zlotowski. Almost entirely in French, Foster plays Lilian Steiner, an American expat psychiatrist in Paris, who’s convinced that one of her patients was murdered. But the deeper mysteries lie elsewhere: How can we be 60, smart and not know ourselves? Why does love fade? (Foster and Daniel Auteuil, who plays the ex-husband she ropes into her sleuthing, have lovely chemistry.) Can we correct the mistakes we made with our children? (Lilian, a new grandmother, has a tense relationship with her son.) Foster and I Zoomed in December; here are highlights from our conversation.
How does A Private Life reflect your life right now?
Oh, for a lot reasons. Like Lilian, I am a solitary person who explores and experiences the world through her mind. I perceive the world first through my head, to make sure I’m safe, and then the second wave is through my stomach. I like to make movies that appreciate that those things are two components of us, and they’re working at us, for us and against us at all times. Lilian is a very smart woman who is very dumb in her heart. She needs to learn about herself in relation to other people.
That’s been a big struggle for me, too. As a young person, I wanted my life to be centred, meaningful, important. I wanted to cut everyone else out and have it all be about me. Then I hit 50, and I suddenly got curious about who I was in relation to other people. I think that’s really changed my work in the last 10 years. I’m more interested in my character’s dynamic with the other characters, and less interested in “central character on her hero journey.”
Jodie Foster, left, and Daniel Auteuil in a scene from A Private Life.Jérôme Prébois/The Associated Press
A Private Life is also such a mature film, about adult concerns.
A woman of a certain age, who’s wondering about her relevance?
[We both laugh wryly.]
She needs to cast aside some of her life-long survival mechanisms, and change. She has to ask the questions she never dared to ask, about why the relationships in her life are the way they are, especially with her son. We created this back-story: Lilian moved to France to become her fantasy of a Parisian woman; French was not her native language. From the time her son was little, he decided he was not going to speak English. Which kept him smarter than her, funnier than her, interrupting her, watching her get flustered. She was always frustrated by and fighting his attempts at dominance.
Foster, left, and Virginie Efira in A Private Life.Jérôme Prébois/The Associated Press
Isn’t that also your story, with your late mother, Brandy (a single mom who became your manager)?
You learn something on every film, and you’re always surprised at what you learn, because it’s not what you went in thinking you were going to learn. For me as a child, speaking French was about, “How can I do something perfectly that my mother doesn’t understand?” My mother didn’t speak one word of French. She couldn’t help with my homework, she couldn’t look at my notes, she couldn’t listen into my dreams. I had this whole personality she was not allowed to have, that she couldn’t touch. There was something wonderful about that. About a truly, well, private life. I didn’t 100 per cent understand this until I made the movie.
I have to say, I’m relieved to learn that even Jodie Foster has blind spots.
I’ve always loved movies about ambivalent mothers. I want to do a film festival with only those films: We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Babadook. Mothers and their children, it’s a lifetime of working it out. Especially if you’ve birthed someone of the opposite sex, and they are part of a system that oppresses you.
What are you liking about this age?
So many things. I feel a freedom I never had. When I was younger, I was filled with anxiety. I worried about my future, I worried if I measured up. Could I compete with other people and get to the top? Then, could I stay on top? I don’t know what happened, I hit 60 and I didn’t care any more.
I do think that self-centred phase is really necessary, though, especially for women. My work as a young woman said, “I matter. I’m not just the sister of, daughter of, wife of. My stories are human stories.” I wanted to see the arc of the hero applied to a woman. That got me here. Now I’m ready to relate to the rest of the world.
This new phase was the answer to my prayers, though I understand how many 60-year-old women struggle with it. I’ve finally got some wisdom. My kids are out on their own, they have good partners, they’re figuring out their job stuff. My parents, bless them, have passed away. All these responsibilities have lifted off my shoulders. A couple of weeks ago I promised myself, “I’m never going to wear high heels again.” It was practically the happiest day of my life. Why did I ever think I had to?
Has your relationship to acting itself changed? You started so young. Do you feel like you chose it, or it kind of hijacked you?
I’m torn. Part of me would choose it again, because it was really fun, I’m proud of what I accomplished, I like the people I met. But I wonder what it would be like to have grown up a different way. I’m curious about who I might have been. This job was chosen for me. It didn’t come to me naturally. I would never have been an actor. Never. I don’t have the right personality. And yet, this is what I did my whole life.
What’s the right personality?
When people become actors at 22 or 23, Io think they want to be the centre of attention, to dance on a table and have people clap. They want people looking at them. They want to be unbridled emotion, to live in the moment. I’m the opposite of all that. I’ve always been uncomfortable with that part of my job. I had to dig deep to figure out how to be authentic in a job that’s really fake. It forced me to come at it in a different way.
Rebecca, your director, told me that you’re in total control of the moment you want to be seen, and the moment you want to disappear. What part of acting rewards you?
Had I not had this outlet, I think I would have been a really repressed, neurotic lonely intellectual, by herself all the time. With it, I had to interact with people. I had a community. I had to not always pay attention to my mind, and focus on how I felt about things. I would have been an emotionally small person had I not had this outlet.
Mostly I see how blessed I was, to have been born in the time I was born in. I feel sorry for the women born way before me, and really sorry for the ones born after me. I had the sweet spot: I got thrown into the 1970s golden age of cinema. And there I was, alongside all the guys, making movies at six, eight, 10 years old. I got to embody a new singular vision for what women could be.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Special to The Globe and Mail