THE DARK SIDE OF TECHNOLOGY, WITH ADDED TINSELTOWN
Hollywood legend Jodie Foster tells Kaleem Aftab how she came to direct an episode in the coming new season of Charlie Brooker’s cult series Black Mirror
Say bonjour to Jodie Foster instead of hello and you get access to the deeper recesses of her subconscious. “Sometimes in my dreams, I’m yelling at people in French, like full-throated: ‘I can’t believe you did this and I’m taking you down.’”
As with everything the American seems to do, she speaks French to perfection. Growing up in Los Angeles, she attended a French school, learning the lingo so fluently that she has acted in the language in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s First World War drama A Very
Long Engagement (2004) and even dubs her own roles when movies are released in the land of La
Marseillaise. But this has also led to a pet hate when she senses snootiness from Parisians when tourists try to speak their language. “It’s terrible and makes me so mad,” she says. “I’m like: ‘You can’t treat people like that; they are not going to embrace your culture, what are you thinking?’”
We meet in a London hotel to talk about her directing an episode of Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker’s show that is now in its fourth season. The episode,
Archangel, is about a mother who implants a chip into her young daughter so that she can follow her movements. What starts off as a well-intentioned security measure soon turns into something far more sinister, because her mother can also stop her daughter from experiencing scary events that she deems would have a negative impact on her child.
Foster admits that she hadn’t even heard of the show until she had lunch with Netflix’s vice president of original content, Cindy Holland. “I was bemoaning the fact that I really want to make narrative features that are an hour-and-ahalf long,” says Foster, who has previously directed four films –
Little Man Tate (1991), Home for the
Holidays (1995), The Beaver (2011)
and Money Monster (2016). “Not everything should be 10 episodes – some things have a beginning, a middle and an end.”
The Netflix executive asked Foster if she liked The Twilight Zone. When the double-Oscar-winner said that it had a huge impact on her growing up, Holland told her about Black Mirror. Foster was intrigued and Skyped with showrunner Brooker, who she describes as “amazing”.
Brooker asked if she would be interested in the Archangel episode. “I loved the script and thought it spoke to my experience, and I had some ideas to evolve in even further,” she says.
Foster could lean on her own family experience. “I grew up in a single parent home,” she recalls. “My mum is a huge part of my life, the most significant relationship. That whole process of being with someone from your birth until you leave, I really understand it from both sides – from a daughter’s side and also as a mother with two children [both teenage sons].
“I do think parental fear is a thing,” she adds. “My mum has dementia, and to watch her as she shed part of her socialisation and what we got back down to is this core of fear.”
The common theme that ties the episodes of Black Mirror together is our relationship to technology. Foster argues that the way technology is being used to monitor people, which is the major theme of Archangel is that technology has become about, “controlling people’s experience and curating people’s experience. I think that has a huge impact on our culture. We see it on everything.”
She argues that advances in technology have not made her life better. “Honestly, I don’t think there is a lot of upside for me with technology. I’m privileged, and for privileged people living in urban places, has technology really made our lives better? Was my life worse when I had to wind my car window up and down? I don’t think that having news alerts on my phone every five minutes has made my life better. It’s made it faster. It’s made my ability to succeed easier, has that made my life better? Maybe because I’m 55, I’m asking these questions. Is life better now than the 70s or 80s? I don’t think we are happier.”
The heyday of her fame as an actor was in the late 1970s to mid1990s. She reveals that recently she decided to concentrate more on directing than acting, which seems a shame for an actress who won Oscars for The Accused and
The Silence of the Lambs. “I decided that my 50s was a time that I really wanted to focus on directing and I wanted to do meaningful things,” she explains. “I’m excited about what is going to happen. Plus my kids are growing up, and over the last 20 years, I have been squeezing everything else in because I have been prioritising them.”
Part of the reason for turning her back on acting is the paucity of roles for middle-aged women. “I would be lying to you if I said the roles now are as good as they were in my 20s. I also feel like there was a lot of stories that I got out of my system that I don’t need to tell anymore.”
I ask which roles she is thinking of when she says this. “I don’t think I need to do The Accused again,” she clarifies. “You hit these milestones as an actor and then you say: ‘And now what? What do I have to say?’ I think a lot of what I want to say is better served as a director rather than an actor. Also, the life of competing to be an A-list actor, I don’t miss that part. I think you reach saturation level and you are not able to get through that again.”
Having said that, Foster has just finished her first film as an actor since Elysium in 2013. “It’s called
Hotel Artemis, and it’s set in a kind of dystopian, slightly forward future, and I play a 68-year-old nurse.”
Has technology really made our lives better? Was my life worse when I had to wind my car window up and down?