She receives the highest awards – and with all her might strives to remain in the shadows; does not consider herself strong – and makes films, raising two children on her own; prefers loneliness – and I am sure that you can move forward in life only by making friends. Meeting with Jodie Foster – perhaps the most unknown woman from the most famous stars to us.
She sets up a date in an ordinary Parisian cafe: it is crowded, the tables are pushed together so close that at lunchtime you can’t squeeze through. But now breakfast is over and dinner hasn’t started yet. Empty. I see Foster through the glass: she is alone, sitting in the corner, looking confident. Who would think that a small, thin blonde in black, with a laptop on the table, is the same Agent Starling, the same savage Nell?
Nobody. Foster wanted this when, at the age of 15, she bought an apartment in Paris with royalties from television and film roles. She graduated from the French Lyceum in Los Angeles, spent a lot of time in France, French is her second native language, and she knows Paris better than other guides. Jodie taps something on her laptop, stares at what is written through thin metal-rimmed glasses… Answers an unasked question: “I love Parisian cafes, I like to sit quietly in them, watch people, write letters… This is a letter to one friend.”
“It’s important for me to be able to just get away from ordinary life here, where I usually don’t,” she says of her attachment to the Paris apartment. Foster has always closed her life to the curiosity of the outside world. And it is quite understandable: her past, and the present, are full of very non-trivial events. They say her parents divorced because her father caught her mother in treason … with a woman. That this woman, after a divorce, connected with the mother of the future star and was engaged in raising Alisha (real name Foster), her sister Connie and brother Buddy. Her name was Josephine Dominguez, Jo-Dee, and it was in her honor that the actress took her pseudonym. That Jodie was even conceived after a parental divorce – her parents continued to sort things out … That Foster does not consider men as life partners, that she was bisexual in her youth, and now she is homosexual. That her children Charles and Kit were born from an unknown donor, chosen by the actress from a huge base for an unthinkably high IQ … All these versions are largely generated by Foster’s stubborn unwillingness to lift the veil of secrecy over her personal life. Respecting him, we talked with her about her inner life.
Briefly and clearly
What have you missed in life?
Perhaps communication with peers in childhood: I grew up in Hollywood, among adults.
What is your favorite way to spend your free time?
Alone.
Why do you only collect black and white photos?
They have an absolute past. It’s always clear what’s black and what’s white.
What surprises you in people?
Each has its own. In Americans, for example, their fantastic frankness with casual acquaintances.
How do you feel about Baby Foster, your brother Buddy’s ultra-revealing book about your childhood and youth?
Like a cry for help.
The most offensive thing that was done against you?
100 thousand dollars that one newspaper promised for intimate information about me from my former life partners.
What is family for you?
People who love each other.
Psychologies: Perhaps as much as with your films, you are known for refusing to talk about your life off screen. No one knows the reasons for the separation of your parents, the names of the partners or the fathers of the children. You don’t talk about your relationship with your brother, who wrote a book about your childhood. What explains this?
Jodie Foster: I don’t talk about my personal life and my royalties because I don’t want to become either a sexual object, or a financial enterprise, or the subject of gossip. When what is important to you, what you value above all else, gets on the pages of the newspapers … it is somehow belittled, becomes trivial.
But your silence provokes gossip…
D.F.: But they are born without my participation. You know, I started working at the age of three and since then I have been “at my post”: advertising, television, then films … I grew up in this business. And one day – before other children – I began to understand: my and only my life is very important to me. I remember when I was 11 years old I really wanted to go to Disneyland. Then I said to myself: if I go there, it will be without the society chronicler’s camera behind me. I don’t want my personal experience to be broadcast, and I don’t want to experience it “on camera”. Even then it was clear to me: I would have to fight for the right to live my life – so as not to lose it. And did not become a celebrity in the sense in which it became, for example, Madonna or Michael Jackson. I’m not a pop idol, I’m just an actress. And that’s why no one especially tried to see me, so to speak, “without clothes.” I’m happy to be left alone. Yes, I’m not Madonna, red carpets and evening dresses are hard work for me.
Having started working at the age of three, did you find yourself deprived of your childhood?
D.F.: No, I don’t feel like I was missing anything at all. It’s just that my childhood was different than other children’s. If I were the daughter of, say, a diplomat, everything would be different for me too. But an atypical childhood does not mean an unhealthy one.
But your entry into the industry was forced, right?
D.F.: Do you mean money? To some extent, yes. My parents separated before I was born. From my father, we – mother and three children – received $ 600 a month, and even then not every time. Even in the 60s, this was not enough … My brother Buddy started acting in a television series, then I started in commercials. Mom was our agent. She was devoted to us endlessly. But she wanted to make my career. Do you understand? She is my career. She saw me as a Grace Kelly who didn’t have to be the Princess of Monaco and who could do as she wished. There was probably something Freudian here, but my mother is so arranged that she is not able to put pressure on anyone – I just lived in the conviction that I had a destiny. Work was a kind of background for our family existence – and our love for each other, and games.
Has your life changed since Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver? For the first serious role of a little prostitute, you were nominated for an Oscar at the age of 15 …
D.F.: You see, I studied at a private school – at the French Lyceum. The discipline there was … not French: strict rules, strict control over academic performance. Uniform – knee-highs, jackets and turn-down collars, like Peter Pan. So in the eyes of people I read: “Yeah … and she is not a“ sweet Hollywood thing ”at all. But Hollywood still influenced me: during my childhood there was a certain gentleman’s code. I was raised on it. All these people who then ran the studios, and now out of business – they were like fathers or grandfathers to me. Even today I try to behave in the same way: it doesn’t matter if we drank until three in the morning, whether we have known each other for an eternity or just met, I will not put you on the bandwagon in work.
Are you trying to live by your own principles?
D.F.: It is impossible to live differently, it will not work. You can move forward in life by making friends, not enemies. I realized this, faced with so much, sorry, crap … When you lie to your face, you just need to find another way. I never asked for favors, and I never got anything for nothing.
So what is fame to you?
D.F.: Everything is good in it – both the fact that you receive a certain respect, and the fact that you are provided for, and the fact that you can do the work that you like. Only all the time you think: how to organize your life so that fame does not gobble you up?
Do you mean a specific situation? When did John Hinckley, obsessed with your Taxi Driver character, shoot President Reagan to get your attention?
D.F.: I mean the whole structure of life as a whole. And I’m not talking about what happened after “Taxi Driver” – from the very moment it happened. Then I couldn’t speak at all for a week.
Usually you play strong women. Everywhere: in The Silence of the Lambs, Panic Room, Illusions of Flight, you attack and defend. Are you that strong in real life too?
D.F.: I play the strong…because I don’t know how to play the weak. I don’t think I’m that strong in real life. It seems to me that strong people do not do martial arts. And I was seriously involved in kickboxing … But I also like to play strong, I think that’s right. Such films can change the stereotypical view of a woman. This, if you like, is my civic choice: I believe that it is necessary to change the opinion of society about the place of a woman.
Once you even took away a role from a man …
D.F.: You see, when the script for Illusion of Flight came to me – about a man who loses his daughter on an airplane, finds himself at the center of a conspiracy and must find and save his child … I just said to myself: I want to play this! No one will play like me, even Sean Penn – he had to act, and he is a genius … There is a female role, psychologically female. When this hero loses a child and he is told that he was not on the plane, that he was flying alone, he begins to doubt himself: is he in his right mind? But this is not in the nature of a man. It is in his nature to point the finger at the culprit: “You did it!” This is a woman’s nature: to always doubt yourself, your truth, integrity … And men look around in search of someone to blame. They don’t destroy themselves that way.
In this film, you acted as if you yourself experienced the loss of a child …
D.F.: I’m afraid all mothers experienced this – not in reality, but in nightmares. But I did lose Charles, my eldest son, once. Less than a minute. He was two and a half, I could see his head through the crowd, but I could not get through to him. He shouted: “Mom! Mum!” It was so terrible… You know, I would call it a mother’s primordial fear of not being able to protect her children. And the point is not so much that some kind of danger may threaten them, but that in life they will have to face a lot of injustices, and you can’t change almost anything here.
Is this your only fear? Is there anything else that you are afraid of?
D.F.: I’m afraid of fear itself. I’m afraid to start making decisions out of fear. This is very common in the cinema, here many people work non-stop, because they are afraid: if they pause, they will not be invited again. They do action movies because they’re afraid there won’t be other roles. I was also afraid that I would not be able to support my family, that people would not like me … It’s so wonderful to find a place where you feel safe. And it’s scary to lose him. But, thank God, I am no longer 20. I know for sure: a safe place cannot be found – it can only be built. And she no longer intends to be afraid and live by the principle: more money, more success. At some point, you understand: it is better to be third, not first. I don’t need more money and all the envy it brings. I don’t want to be Tom Cruise. There is nothing wrong with Tom Cruise himself – he is handsome and talented and truly successful. But I don’t need to be.
Has having children changed you?
D.F.: I’ve been working for 40 years, but I’ve never been a workaholic. I just had no other life. And children are a different life. No, just life. Because when you constantly work, you leave reality. Children are the ultimate reality. I have always been drawn to this real life. Maybe because I always had a strong bond with my mother. And the same with children. But there is a danger here: one day you run the risk of not discovering the border between yourself and them, not understanding where your life ends and their life begins.
Are you a strict mother? Do you let them play video games?
D.F.: They mostly have educational computer games. I really don’t think I’ll be able to ban them from video games – it’s part of the culture of their generation. And culture is like climate, it cannot be avoided. In general, my children go to a normal school and I hope they get a good education.
You announced that you would raise your children alone. Does it give you strength that you yourself grew up without a father?
D.F.: Yes, I hardly knew my father. But this is not the main thing. I usually feel better alone than with someone.
Do you organize your life more as a mother or as an actress?
D.F.: I have no idea. My life is pretty boring. And I don’t want to be tired – I keep dreaming of a role that will make me learn another language or start playing the flute. It doesn’t work on my own – I quickly give up. Well, as in tennis – I missed two serves and I tell my partner: “Okay, you won.”
43 years – what is this age?
D.F.: Women at 40 are definitely more interesting than at 20. We lived longer, more self-confident. It no longer makes sense to pretend that you are on the crest and in the know, to worry about whether you are cool. Being who you are is a huge advantage.
You once said: “Celebrities by the age of 50 begin to dream of children so that at least someone will love them” …
D.F.: But at the same time, I never claimed that one should be ashamed of the desire to be loved.
Private bussiness
- 1962 Alisha Christian Foster was born in Los Angeles to a broken family of housewife Evelyn and military pilot, World War II hero Colonel Lucius Fisher Foster.
- 1965 Debuts in a commercial and becomes the “face” of a cosmetic tanning line.
- 1973 A multi-year contract with Disney culminates in the role of Becky Thatcher in Tom Sawyer.
- 1976 Role in M. Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” makes Foster the sex symbol of the generation and earns an Oscar nomination.
- 1984 Graduates from Yale University with a degree in English Language and Literature.
- 1988 Receives an Oscar for dramatic performance in the film “The Accused” by J. Kaplan.
- 1991 Oscar for the role of Agent Starling in The Silence of the Lambs by J. Demme; film debut as a director.
- 1992 Forms his own production company, Egg Pictures.
- 1993 Meeting with producer Sidney Bernard – for the next 12 years they will have a close personal relationship.
- 1998 Birth of son Charles. In her honor – Jodiefoster – asteroid number 17 744 is named. The publication of Buddy Foster’s book “Child Foster: A Frank Biography of Jodie Foster, written by her brother.”
- 2001 Birth of son Kit.
- 2002 “The Room of Fear” D. Fincher.
- 2005 “Illusion of flight” R. Schwentke.
- 2006 Shoots the film “Flora Plum” and prepares for the project “Sugarland”.