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

I'm Jodie Foster and this is the timeline of my

career

, an incredibly long

career

. I have been in the film business for 52 years. The only thing I rely on is wondering if it's true or not. What color. What a lens. authentic and it's real yes, she was three years old and she was the Coppertone girl and the Coppertone commercial was on a boat in Sacramento and she was wearing just a bikini. They were going to force me to do things I didn't do. I want to wear a bikini top. I said no and I didn't have to wear one.

There you have it. I know Poli Smith. We would appreciate it. It was my second film and it was with the lion. How did I get involved? I don't know, I guess I didn't wonder, I didn't audition and then they chose me. I think that's all I remember. It's over again. It was very hot and during the course of the movie I was attacked by the lion. One of the lions he picked me up with. my hip carried me around, the coach finally said, let go and he let me fall down the hill, that was the great experience of that movie.

I got him involved with the taxi driver because he had our unit with Martin Scorsese called Alice doesn't live here anymore. So he wanted to cast me as a taxi driver and my mom thought he was crazy because you know he didn't really look like a prostitute and he had a lot of faith that I could transform and I did, it's hard to ask. a twelve-year-old boy, how they found his approach for his role. I just read the script and believed in the character, and Robert De Niro at that point took me aside and we did all these kinds of elaborate improvisations that I had never done.

Earlier in my life I realized for the first time that acting was more than just being yourself. I remember seeing the move for the first time and immediately saying, "This is a great movie, this is a great movie and it was very much in the tradition of cinema." that I loved at the time like straw dogs and a lot of those extraordinary movies from the 1970s, other antihero tracks I don't know who's weirder, you were me, I got involved with the cheese because I ran after it, I said, okay, I want to do this. They said they didn't want you so I had to break down the door and then they said they didn't like how I acted so I had to come back.

The director wanted me, but I had to go back. There is a real rape scene. in the movie and that was difficult and traumatic, especially for the men. I think it was very hard for them, the boys cried a lot and I found myself in the role of making everyone feel better. While I was there, I met a lot of people from rape crisis centers and that surprised me by having to create a character, so who said it was definitely a jarring movie? Coming out here trying to read limit was my first feature film. I read the script immediately as an actress. and I said I wanted to direct this movie, so once again I knocked on the door and told them I would act in the movie, but I really wanted to direct the movie, they didn't really listen to me and I finally got to do it. getting the movie financed with me directing and acting in the movie and that's how it happened, one part of it that I didn't really understand was the editing so that was something I had to think about and I went into some editing rooms to be able to I understand that what it means is the gift of being young is that you're a little bit blind and you don't realize 100% that other people are going to see your movie, you just do it for yourself and I think that was the gift of do little I meditate at such a young age The agent is an honest trace.

I had to hit some people over the head to get The Silence of the Lambs. I had already won an Oscar, but the director I knew had another actress in mind, so I flew to New York. York and I went to his office and an aspirin appointment and told him I want to be your second choice. I had many memories of Sauce the Lambs, of course, it's the scenes with Lecter that stick in my memory the most. Anthony Hopkins when they cordoned us off. separated from each other because he was always behind bars or behind a plexiglass and I was on the other side and since the scenes were so long sometimes they were eight ten pages one day we did his side and the other day my side many times.

The work we did was straight to camera, so sometimes I just wouldn't see it all day. I was looking at the camera and doing all my lines to the camera, but he was a voice in the distance and vice versa. It was a strange thing, a strange thing that all of those scenes felt so intimate and yet we couldn't see ourselves forget what he is, he's a monster, we got involved with Nell as a producer, the other producer, Renee Missile and I, hired a writer. and we developed the script for many years we were actually in the Smoky Mountains, away from everything, we were an hour and 45 minutes from any kind of town in the dry county, just a bunch of cabins, no restaurants, and we were there for months and Six months living in The Forest is like no other experience I've ever had.

I learned a lot from making Nell and I don't know if it's everyone's favorite movie I've made. I feel like it's my favorite performance for me. That's something I've never played before and that's something I don't do, so I'm very proud that the interpretation of the character's emotions is more than just language contact, it was a great movie at the beginning, really a massive movie, already You know, there were all kinds of different locations and You know, elaborate sets and things like that that I once did and it was amazing to be able to think about science.

Carl Sagan was there. You know he had originally written the first script before he wrote the contact book and then he was there. on set with us at the beginning, in fact, he gave us a lot of billions and billions and billions per class, like a seminar, so that was the best part. You tell me it was real, oh, I bought it in panic. because I got a frantic call from the first ad saying, "Oh my God, Nicole Kidman's knee is a problem. I think you should go in and play the panic room" and then very quickly I got a call from David Fincher .

Isn't it crazy that that's how it happened? Well, David Fincher is the most technically proficient and detail-oriented director. I think any of us that we have ever met in our lives will never meet and it was the longest shoot of my life. There was something that I really liked about the idea of ​​a woman who had just gotten divorced and had never lived alone, had really been, you know, gone to her mom's house to depend on a very rich man, there was something about that like a woman who was finding herself. her that she had completely lost herself and that she had no voice and that she suddenly finds the strength of character to become a hero throughout the film, the inner man was easy.

I read the script and said, I want to play, this is how it worked. Spike had the idea that they would spend a lot of time working on things that had to do with a bank and then not spend time on anyone else, so sometimes you would have a six-page long scene and not only would you have two takes and even if you mess up , he wouldn't hang up, he only has you, he just likes to keep calling Keep Calm, so he had no idea what would end up on the screen. There was something I loved about his joy in the middle. about this bank robbery with all these bad people and the fact that she was a corrupt lawyer who was there to fix everything you know about this hostage situation the beaver I remember where I was when I got the beer I remember exactly where that one was lying couch and I was like, wow, I've never seen anything like that and I had to make this movie, it's a crazy premise and it's an allegory that I felt was the story of my life at that particular moment, you know, and maybe it's middle age. . crisis that it was difficult to convince people that it wasn't a comedy and that's really what I spent making the entire movie.

I think it was trying to make people understand that this movie was a tragedy and that the tone of the movie had to change with their psyche, the man is fighting with the puppet, he is fighting with himself and for me, that is the most strong of the movie, when I'm standing behind the monitor and watching that, I felt that I was so moved that I understood that the phone I was working I was watching things to direct on television and I read the book of new black oranges and I said I want to do this and they said sorry , it's been a while so I spent a little time banging on Jenny's door to try to hurt her. to try to be able to do the pilot and they didn't, they wouldn't let me do the pilot and finally I reached out and said, well, I'll do an episode of the show because I would love the book.

I was very happy and proud to be given the episode that had to do with Laverne Cox's character, her transition from firefighter to woman and prison Amy, I love drama, you know, I love tragic comedy, the best thing about it that tragic comedy. It can be a way to make us understand our suffering and our moments of suffering in a way that really makes fun of ourselves and I love combining those two things. Pay close attention to your stool. I don't think I can ignore it. It will be part of our trial period. I was having lunch with Cindy Holland, who is the head of Netflix, and lamenting about the industry and how the feature business was annoying and I said, you know I want to make features for streaming and she said, "I think I'll do it." I've got something for you: My approach to directing that episode was different than a lot of the black mirrors.

I wanted it to be completely and totally based in reality, so that sci-fi felt like it was only five minutes away. look at something like the USS Callister which is like a sort of Star Trek world, a nod to a sort of design and futurism that I didn't really want, the Archangel episode is completely safe, you know why they call them Everest. I came to

hotel

rooms because I read. The script mysteriously passed by in a mysterious way and I tracked it down once again. I might be hitting people over the head and I said, I want, I want to play this character and they hadn't even released the script yet so I need the producer and He said, Well, when we finally release the script, I'll consider it.

I loved working with Drew Pearce as a director for the first time. I felt like he had a complete vision of the film and he really articulated his complete vision of the film in every ounce of the film. I loved playing a character that was just raw and real and a total transformation that's just a way that you normally would never see me and never would have thought of me and there's something that comes out of that physicality of the character, you know, the yellow . the teeth and the fat pad and the gray hair and you know, all those wrinkles in the way he walked that allowed me to have a kind of transformation that I wouldn't have been able to have without his physical appearance, my balance has changed in terms of direction . and acting used to be 90% acting and 10% directing.

I started when I was, you know, 25 26 and now I think that's going to change to the opposite, so I'll be mostly directing and occasionally acting in something and that's fine with me now. I guess the thing is, when I really love something, I beat people over the head to get it. I guess that must be my theme.