Jodie Foster picks passion projects
Actress, director chooses her own signature journey over more conventional successes
LOS ANGELES — Writer-director Drew Pearce hadn’t even sent out the script for his futuristic thriller Hotel Artemis when Jodie Foster asked to be cast.
Foster said she’s done that quite a few times: It’s a strategy for finding the best roles. The 55-year-old actress said she tries to read everything written for a certain age range, male or female. That’s how she became the first person to join Hotel Artemis, in which she plays a 70-something nurse and proprietor of a hospital for the bad guys in a riot-torn Los Angeles.
Q You haven’t put yourself in front of the camera very often recently. What was it about this film besides the age range?
A
I just love the idea. I’d been looking for a while and I really was hell-bent on wanting something that felt like a full transformation.
Q It’s kind of unusual to have a woman of this age leading an action film.
A
I think it’s great. I mean, why not? And it’s funny because, I’m not sure I would call me an action hero, but I did a lot of movies with a lot of action in them and maybe I wasn’t like a sheriff or a policeman, but I was the girl carrying her daughter to safety with the explosion in the background, so it’s fun to see me inhabit a movie like that but in a different capacity.
When people look back and they sum up my career and they say, “Well, you played a strong woman in this movie and a strong woman in that movie and how’d you manage to do that?” And I’m like, “Uhhh, I don’t know? I saw the script and I was drawn to it because that’s who should fascinate me, she’s who I should be interested in.” I’ve never been interested in the girl who wears that jewelry so well or the wife of the interesting person. I wanted to be the central character.
Q Do you have any directing projects coming up?
A
I don’t. I’m happy just being open to something coming along that I love and I feel passionate about and I never know where that is going to take me. There’s part of me that’s really scared because I’m kind of a good student and like, what college do I go to next? But I think it’s really good for me. It’s really good for me to be humble and say, like, maybe I’m going to act on an iPhone. Why do I have to keep proving to everybody over and over again something that I did 25 years ago?
I believe that The Beaver, for example, which I believe is my best movie and I know it’s not for everybody, but I do think people will look back on that movie and will finally say “Oh I see, it’s better than .... ” There was a lot of baggage that got hoisted onto the film. I feel like the film was really trying to say something important.
The truth about directing is I don’t really care, because, I got to make a movie that I love. And that is such a pleasure in itself that that really is the greatest reward. So I don’t really take a lot of offence about how it is received. I’ve learned to shrug my shoulders and go “I’m sorry you didn’t like it” but I did my best.