Jodie Foster Breaks Down Her Career, from “Silence of the Lambs” to “Hotel Artemis”

I'm Jodi Foster, and this is my career timeline.

Incredibly long career.

I've been 52 years in the film business.

The only thing that I trust is to ask myself that question

is it true or is it not true?

What color, what lens, is it authentic and is it real?

Don't be a pale face, use Coppertone!

Yes, I was three years old,

and I was the Coppertone girl in a Coppertone commercial.

It was on a boat in Sacramento,

and I was wearing only a bikini.

I was gonna be made to do things that I didn't wanna do,

like wear a bikini top.

I said no and I didn't have to wear one.

There you go.

Napoleon and Samantha.

I guess it was my second movie, and it was with a lion.

How'd I become involved?

I don't know, I guess I went on an audition and then...

they cast me.

I think that's all I remember.

It was Oregon, it was really hot,

and during the course of the movie I was mauled by the lion.

One of the lions, he picked me up by my hip,

shook me around, and the trainer eventually said 'drop it,'

and he dropped me and I went falling down a hill.

That was the big experience from that move.

That a boy, Maj, you really showed him.

You talkin' to me?

I became involved in Taxi Driver

'cause I had already made a movie with Martin Scorsese

called Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore.

So, he wanted to cast me for Taxi Driver

and my mom thought he was crazy

'cause I really didn't look like a prostitute,

but he had a lot of faith in that I could transform,

and I did it.

It's hard to ask a 12-year-old

how they found their approach to their role.

I just read the script and believed in the character

and Robert De Niro, at that time, he took me aside and he...

We did all these sort of elaborate improvisations,

which I had never done before in my life.

I realized for the first time that acting

was something more than just being yourself.

I remember seeing the movie for the first time

and immediately saying this is a great film.

This is a great film,

and it was much in the tradition of movies that I loved

at that time like Straw Dogs and Lenny.

Those extraordinary movies from the 1970s,

auteur-driven antihero films.

God, I don't know who's weirder, you or me.

I became involved with The Accused because I ran after it.

I said okay, I wanna do this.

They said they don't want you,

so I had to kind of beat down the door.

Then they said they didn't like how I acted (snorts),

so I had to come back.

The director wanted me, but I had to come back.

There was a real rape scene in the film

and that was difficult and traumatic for...

especially for the men, I think, very hard on them.

There was a lot of crying from the guys,

and I found myself in the role

of making everybody feel better.

While I was there,

I met with a lot of people from rape crisis centers,

and that kind of shocked me into

having to create a character.

So, it was a...

It was definitely a jarring movie for an actor.

Get outta here.

Time to read.

Little Man Tate was my first feature film.

I read the script immediately as an actress

and said I wanna direct this movie.

So, I, once again, kind of banged down the door

and told them I will act in the movie,

but I really wanna direct the movie.

They didn't really listen to me, and then, finally,

I was able to get the movie financed with me directing

and acting the film, and that's how it happened.

Part of it that I didn't really understand was the editing.

So, that was something that I had to think about,

and I went into some cutting rooms in order to understand

what editing was.

The gift of being young is that you're kind of blind,

and you don't 100% realize

that other people are gonna see your movie,

you just do it for yourself, and I think that was it,

the gift of making Little Man Tate at such a young age.

I love you, mom.

Oh.

Oh, I love you too, kiddo.

[Narrator] Killer is on the loose.

A rookie FBI agent is on his trail.

I had to punch some people in the head

to get Silence of the Lambs.

I had already just won an Oscar,

but the director I knew had in mind another actress.

So, I flew myself to New York and I went to his office

and asked for an appointment

and said I wanna be your second choice.

I have a lot of memories from Silence of the Lambs.

Of course it's the scenes with Lecter that are the most

broiled into my memory.

Anthony Hopkins was...

We were cordoned off from each other

because he was always behind bars or behind a plexiglass

and I was on the other side,

and because the scenes were so long,

sometimes they were eight, 10 pages,

we would do his side one day and my side the other day.

A lot of the work that we did was directly to camera,

so sometimes I just wouldn't see him all day.

I would be looking at the camera

and doing all of my lines to camera,

but he would be some voice

off in the distance and vice versa.

So, it was a strange...

a strange thing that all those scenes feel so intimate,

and yet, we couldn't see each other.

[Narrator] Never forget what he is.

He's a monster.

I became involved with Nell as a producer.

The other producer, Renee Missel,

and myself brought on a writer

and developed the screenplay over many years.

We really were in the Smoky Mountains far from everything.

We were an hour and 30 minutes from any kind of town,

dry county, just a bunch of cabins, no restaurants,

and we were there for months.

It was six months of living in the woods.

It's like no other experience I've ever had.

I learned so much from making Nell,

and I don't know that it's the favorite...

Everybody's favorite movie that I made,

but I feel like, for me, it's my favorite performance.

That's something that I'd never played before,

and that's something that I am not.

So, I'm very proud of that performance,

of the emotions of the character

being more than just language.

Wow, Contact was a big movie.

A first really massive movie.

We were in all sorts of different locations and elaborate

sets and things like that that I had never done,

and it was amazing to be able to think about science.

Carl Sagan was there.

He had originally written the first screenplay

before he wrote the book of Contact,

and then he was there on set with us

for the beginnings of it.

In fact, he gave us a whole kind of billions

and billions and billions class,

like a seminar.

So, that, that was the best part of the movie.

... tells me that it was real.

Oh, I got involved with Panic Room

because I got a desperate call from the first AD

who said oh my God, Nicole Kidman's knee is a problem.

I think you need to come in and play that part of Panic Room

and then very quickly after that

I got a call from David Fincher.

Isn't that crazy that that's how that happened?

David Fincher is the most technically proficient

and detail oriented director I think any of us have ever met

in our lives and will ever meet,

and it was the longest shoot of my life.

There was something that I really liked

about the idea of a woman who was just recently divorced,

and she has never lived alone, really.

She's been, you know, she went from her mom's house

to being dependent on a very rich man.

There was something about that,

a woman who was finding herself,

who had been lost completely

and who had no voice and who suddenly finds

the strength of character to become a hero

through the course of the movie.

Inside Man was easy.

I read that script and said I wanna play that,

and that's kinda how it worked.

Spike had this idea that they would spend a lot of time

working on the stuff that had to do with the bank

and then they would spend no time on anyone else.

So, sometimes you'd have a long, six page long scene,

and you'd only get two takes, and even if you messed up,

he would cut, he'd just have you...

He'd just like, 'keep going, keep going.'

So, I had no idea what was gonna end up on screen.

There was something that I loved about her joyfulness

in the middle of this bank robbery

with all these bad people

and the fact that she was this corrupt lawyer

that was there to fix everything.

Your Honor, you know about his hostage situation.

The Beaver, I remember where I was when I read The Beaver.

I remember exactly where I was lying on that couch,

and I said 'wow, I've never seen anything like this,

and I gotta make this movie.'

It's an insane premise,

and it's an allegory that I felt was

the story of my life at that particular moment, you know,

and maybe it is a midlife crisis.

That was tough to convince people that it was not a comedy,

and that really was what I spent the whole movie doing,

I think, was trying to let people understand that it was...

that this film was a tragedy

and that tone of the film had shift with his psyche.

When the man is fighting with the puppet,

he's fighting with himself, and for me,

that's just the strongest moment in the movie.

It's standing behind the monitor and watching that,

I felt like I was so moved,

then I understood that the film was working.

I was looking at things to direct in television,

and I read the book of Orange is the New Black

and I said I wanna do this,

and they said, sorry, it's taken (laughs).

So, I spent a little bit of time banging on Jenji's door

to try her...

To try to be able to do the pilot, and they didn't...

They didn't let me do the pilot,

and then eventually I came around and said,

okay, well, I'll just do an episode on the show

because I loved the books so much.

I was really happy and proud that they gave me the episode

that had to do with Laverne Cox's character.

Her transition from being a fireman

to being a woman and a prison inmate.

I love dra-medy, you know, I love tragic comedy.

The best thing that tragic comedy can be

is a way of having us understand our suffering

and our moments of suffering in a way

that really makes fun of ourselves,

and I love kind of combining those two things.

Pay close attention to your stool.

I don't think I could miss it.

Sara will be part of our trial period.

I was having lunch with Cindy Holland,

who's the head of Netflix, and bemoaning the industry

and how the feature business was annoying (laughs),

and I said I wanna make features for on streaming,

and she said I think I've got something for you.

My approach to directing that episode

was unlike many of the Black Mirrors.

I wanted it to be completely and totally grounded in now,

grounded in reality, so that the science fiction of it

felt like it's only five minutes from now.

If you look at something like USS Callister that's about

sort of Star Trek world,

a nod to sort of design and futurism,

which I didn't really want the Arkangel episode to have.

It's completely safe.

You know why they call him Everest?

I came to Hotel Artemis because I read the script

through a mysterious...

In a mysterious way, and I tracked it down, once again,

by beating people over the head,

and said I wanna play this character,

and they hadn't even released the script yet.

So, I knew the producer,

and he said when we finally release the script,

we'll consider you.

I loved working with Drew Pearce,

first time director who I felt was had a full vision

of the film, and he really...

His full vision of the film is articulated

in every ounce of the movie.

I loved playing a character that was just raw and a real

and a total transformation.

It's just a way that you normally would never see me

and would have never have thought of of me,

and there's something that comes from that physicality

of the character of the yellow teeth and the fat pad

and the gray hair and all those wrinkles,

the way she walked,

that allowed me to kind of have a transformation

that I wouldn't have been able to have

without the physicality of it.

My balance has shifted in terms of directing and acting.

It used to be 90% acting and 10% directing.

I started when I was 25, 26,

and now I think that's gonna be shifted to the opposite.

So, I will be mostly directing,

and every once in a while I'll act in something,

and that feels right to me now.

I guess the theme is is that when I really love something,

I smack people in the head in order to get it.

I guess that must be my theme (laughs).