Foster casts ‘female eye’ on ‘Black Mirror’
Actress directs episode she says she can relate to
NEW YORK – Jodie Foster’s not a helicopter mom. She’s a cool mom.
When her two sons (ages 16 and 19) were younger and would complain about being sick, “I was like: ‘Oh, you’re fine! Here’s a Kleenex,’ ” Foster says, only half-jokingly. “I just keep working through any flu, and I think I did some damage to my kids. Now they’re like, ‘My stomach’s not feeling well — do you think I should get an MRI?’ ”
It’s safe to say her parenting style is far more lax than paranoid single mom Marie’s (Rosemarie DeWitt), who has a tiny chip embedded in her 3-year-old daughter’s brain in a Season 4 episode of Netflix’s Black Mirror (streaming Friday).
Foster directed “Arkangel,” an hourlong installment written by Charlie Brooker, after stints in the director’s chair on Netflix’s Orange Is the New
Black and House of Cards.
“I was trying to figure out a way to make feature-length movies on cable, because real storytelling is there,” Foster says. British-made Black Mirror, a sci-fi anthology series, fit the bill, with its self-contained stories about the perils of technology and social media in the near and distant future.
“Arkangel” is a cautionary tale about the consequences of surveillance taken to an extreme level. After her daughter, Sara (Aniya Hodge), vanishes (briefly) at a playground, Marie relies on the experimental implant to track her whereabouts.
But the device drives a wedge between them when Sara becomes a teenager (played by Brenna Harding). She craves the freedom to make mistakes of other kids her age, while her mom grapples with just how much independence to give.
As a mother of two young daughters (ages 21⁄ and 4), DeWitt, 46, “could definitely relate to the whole wanting to attach and be close to your children and to protect and love them,” she says. Then “there’s that moment of individuation, when you have to start loosening the tether. For this particular character, part of (that struggle) is reliance on the technology, and part of it just might be her own enmeshment: that the child became the partner.”
Foster, 55, experienced that sometimes overbearing relationship with her own mother, Brandy, who managed her career as a child star.
“We traveled everywhere together, and her whole identity in some ways was enmeshed in mine. It was a painful struggle,” Foster says. “When I needed to walk away, she felt like she was being abandoned. I felt forever responsible and continue to feel responsible for her well-being, and the roles are reversed.” Relatable narrative aside, Foster’s
Black Mirror outing also represents the kinds of female-fronted stories she wants to keep telling as a filmmaker.
“I grew up with no women (on movie sets),” she says. “There was a lady that played my mom, and maybe occasionally a script supervisor or makeup artist, but most of the time, it was just me in an all-male society. I’ve only worked with one female director in my whole life, and it is amazing to me that I’ve really never been in a movie that was about a woman where it was seen from a first-person perspective, without there being a male idea or fantasy.”
“Arkangel” marks an exception, she says. “It’s a female director, it’s about women and deals with being in a woman’s body: What is that perspective? That idea of a female eye is what the (episode) plays with.”