Lobbying for ‘Hotel’
Foster returns to big screen as nurse tending to criminals
Why is Jodie Foster only now returning to cinemas in Friday’s “Hotel Artemis”? “I’m so picky. It’s hard to find anything that I love,” the two-time best actress Oscar winner explained of the five-year gap since her last role, in “Elysium.”
“Hotel Artemis” is a high-tech ER for criminals set in a bleak near-future and run by Foster’s Nurse. A members-only club, Artemis is where an assassin lurks, where the nation’s mightiest crime czar tries life-saving surgery, where rules are ripe for breaking.
Foster, 55, was the first to board writer-director Drew Pearce’s feature debut.
“I ran after it,” she revealed. “I tracked down the script — before it even went to any of the (casting) agencies. For some reason, that’s a pattern in my life. That was true of ‘Silence of the Lambs’ and ‘The Accused’” — her Oscar-winning performances.
“Even though it was a firsttime director and a small movie,” she said, “I was just excited about playing the character. Playing someone who could be somewhat of a transformation, physically and otherwise.”
Nurse is aged, slightly stout, but hardly doddering. She bustles around various locked rooms — actually operating theaters — with keys jangling and her assistant, a hulk known only as Everest (David Bautista, “Guardians of the Galaxy”).
“I like the weird originality of the premise. That it has this retro, vintage, Old Hollywood ‘Casablanca’ kind of movie vibe with this amber tone over everything and these references to old movies and you have this banter and stuff. All these people are stuck in this prison of their own making. They can’t get out. Then you’ve got the sci-fi thing.”
As for Nurse, “She’s haunted by the ghosts of her past,” Foster said, “that force her to be on this little hamster wheel that’s going around. She does the same thing over and over again: Fixing people, fixing people.
“She keeps saying, ‘I can fix people,’ as a way perhaps of thinking that somehow she can ‘fix’ the past.”
Since Foster’s focus has shifted to directing, she said, “The big reason I want to act now is that you’re part of this team. And it’s nice going back to acting, it’s like going back to an old friend. I got to see people on my team that I’ve worked with before, whether hair and makeup or my stunt double. It’s always nice to go back to an old home.”