Jodie Foster, who began her career aged three, calls acting ‘a cruel job’ she never would have chosen | Jodie Foster
Jodie Foster said about parents encouraging their children to take action:[s] “How dangerous.”
Speaking at the Marrakesh film festival, Foster said, “He would never choose to be an actor, I don’t have the personality of an actor. I’m not someone who wants to dance on the table and sing songs to people.”
He added: “It’s actually a brutal job that was chosen for me as a young person and I don’t remember starting.”
Foster’s first booking came when he was three years old. Coppertone sunscreen lotion advertisement. He had no intention of participating, but accompanied his older brother to the audition and wowed the cast.
More commercials followed before she began work on sitcoms in 1968 and made her first film at the age of six. His childhood was featured in television shows and movies such as Tom Sawyer (1973). Three years later, at the age of 12, she was cast as a child prostitute in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.
Foster said his experiences at the time meant he now found himself “reaching out to the young child actors of this era.” Wait a minute, where are their parents? And why doesn’t anyone tell them they should stop making so many movies or stop getting so drunk on the red carpet? “I want to take care of them because I know how dangerous it is.”
He also expressed his surprise as to why people are interested in this profession today. “I don’t know why anyone would want to be an actor now if they knew they were going to have to deal with having their lives taken away from them in some way to be perfect. I don’t know how you understand that other than having what my mother helped me do, which is having such a strict boundary between your private life and your public life.”
Foster’s views differ from this expressed When he told Interview magazine in 1987 that he loved acting as a child. “Some people take short breaks and say, ‘I will never advertise! This is so despicable,'” he said. “I want to tell them: ‘I’m really glad you have a pretty face, because I’ve worked 20 years to do this job and I think it’s really valuable; it’s really taught me a lot.’
In Marrakesh, Foster acknowledged that his skepticism about the profession may have enhanced his ability to succeed in the field. “This makes my job a little different because I’m not just into acting for acting’s sake,” he said. “If I was on a deserted island, the last thing I would probably do would be to take action. So I was just trying to survive.”
Foster’s latest film is Rebecca Zlotowski’s French-language comedy thriller A Private Life. The actor said he felt comfortable shooting the film because he had been attending a French school since the age of three.
“It’s a part of my personality and half of my culture that I’ve never been able to use,” he said. “I love the global family that makes movies. It feels like it’s the same people wearing the same jeans and complaining about coffee at three in the morning. But it also allows me to open up and learn a new culture.”
She also touched on having four consecutive films directed by female directors, after a career mostly directed by men.
“Until 15 years ago, when you looked at the list of mainstream films and you looked at the list of directors, I would not see any female names,” she said, emphasizing the mistake of giving big budgets only to experienced directors.
“If you’re making a movie that carries a certain risk… They say, ‘Wow, there’s no woman directing a movie that cost $125 million.’… The goal wasn’t to give women these huge mega movies if they didn’t have the experience. How about giving women that experience first?”
