Category: Jodie Foster

Jodie Foster: At 55, ‘I can do what I want’

Jodie Foster, one of the most famous actresses in the world, is having a quiet night in.

“I’m at my house with my feet up,” the star, who’s been recovering from surgery after a February skiing accident, tells The Post.

The relaxed vibe is a relief for the intensely private actress, who normally does back-to-back phone interviews from desks in LA hotel rooms when she’s promoting movies. This time, she’s on her own couch.

“They were like, ‘You can do your phoners at home.’ And I was like, ‘What?! It’s a brand-new world!’”

Foster, 55, is all about being unrestricted at this point in her life. The Oscar winner, who stars in the new film “Hotel Artemis,” out Friday, says she has finally been able to choose her own adventure. Now, she only takes the parts she wants — calling herself “picky” — and has spent the last several years focusing on another passion: directing.

“I wanted to re-balance my work,” Foster. “You kind of have to choose, because they’re [each] really 150-percent careers.”

The actress is back in front of the cameras with “Hotel Artemis,” which comes after a five-year break from performing. Her last role was in “Elysium,” and like that 2013 flick, which co-starred Matt Damon, “Artemis” has many elements of science fiction — a genre Foster has grown fond of since starring in “Contact” in 1997.

“I love how predictive sci-fi is and has been,” she says. “I remember going to see … ‘The Matrix,’ and being like, ‘What?! A movie where a guy has an avatar and he’s actually on his couch and has no muscles? What?!’ And I’ve realized it’s just so predictive of where we’re headed.”

In “Hotel Artemis,” which also features Jeff Goldblum and Sterling K. Brown, she tackles the role of the Nurse, an eccentric who stitches up dangerous international criminals at a hotel in a dystopian LA.

The Nurse is far from Foster’s usual fare. For one, the character is 70 years old. She also has none of the actress’ signature confident swagger. The Nurse is a shut-in who shuffles through hallways, head down, and mutters with a Brooklyn accent, even though she lives in California. “Nobody in LA is from LA,” Foster says.

“I really wanted a transformation,” she adds. “That’s something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time.”

But while she was busy making herself totally unrecognizable, her co-star Goldblum was Jeffing it up.

“There’s nobody like him,” Foster says of working with the zany actor. “He’s always Jeff Goldblum no matter what he’s in. It doesn’t matter if he’s playing an 18th-century prince. It doesn’t make any difference. He’s always Jeff Goldblum!”

Foster has worked with countless other stars — among them Kate Winslet, Uma Thurman and Anthony Hopkins — over the course of her long career. As a 3-year-old in LA, she began working as a model in TV commercials because showbiz was in the family. Her mother, Evelyn, was a small-time actress. Her dad, Lucius, from whom she’s now estranged, was a lieutenant colonel in the military. But she never thought an ad for Coppertone would snowball into a full-blown Hollywood career.

“If I had a choice, I probably would’ve ended up being a lawyer,” says Foster, who married photographer Alexandra Hedison in 2014 and has two children, ages 17 and 20. Acting, she says, “is not my personality.”

Nevertheless, she went on to star in some of Hollywood’s most acclaimed films, including “Taxi Driver,” “The Accused” and “The Silence of the Lambs,” winning Oscars for the latter two. During her five-decades-long career, she’s seen the industry make huge changes. Many were for the better, such as the inclusion of more women in producing, writing and directing roles.

“When I was first starting, there were no women,” she says. “It was just me and the lady who played my mom. And sometimes a script supervisor or makeup artist.

“I think it got a lot healthier, and it felt better for everybody when women came into the picture.”

But, she adds, the business of filmmaking has lost its soul. Foster feels that big-budget superhero movies have cannibalized the kind of character-driven films she dazzled audiences with during the ’80s and ’90s.

“I’d like there to be more movies out there that people will go see on an opening weekend that are real stories about real people that don’t feel manufactured in order to get as many asses in seats as possible,” she says. “[Studios] have taken that bet and said, ‘We’re gonna be all in on movies that cost $200 million plus. Damn it, we’re gonna put it on 4,000 screens, and we’re gonna get as many people that first weekend as we can, and we’re gonna sell as much Coca-Cola as possible.’ ”

Nowadays, the best stuff, the actress insists, can be found at art houses or on television. She’s dived head-first into TV, directing episodes of “House of Cards,” “Orange Is the New Black” and, most recently, “Black Mirror” for Netflix. Foster seems to be content working more than ever.

“I feel a kind of freedom now as an actress that I haven’t had in my career,” she says. “I’m 55. I can do what I want. So, if I feel like doing a tiny little part in a little indie movie with a first-time guy that’s shot on his iPhone in his apartment, I can do that.”

Jodie Foster Says Studios Are ‘Ruining’ Movies With Big-Budget Superhero Blockbusters

Jodie Foster takes aim at big-budget studio movies, telling Radio Times magazine that they could spell doom for Hollywood in the way they shape the expectations of American audiences.

“Going to the movies has become like a theme park,” she told the magazine, according to the Telegraph. “Studios making bad content in order to appeal to the masses and shareholders is like fracking — you get the best return right now but you wreck the earth.”

“It’s ruining the viewing habits of the American population and then ultimately the rest of the world,” Foster continued. “I don’t want to make $200 million movies about superheroes.”

Foster made it clear that if she were to direct a superhero movie, it would have to be one with a compelling story and character at its core. Rather than doing a brainless action film, it would have to be about a character with a “really complex psychology.”

The Oscar-winning actress has shifted her focus to directing in recent years, most recently taking on an episode of the Netflix sci-fi anthology “Black Mirror.” In the interview, Foster described a “lack of respect” for directors in Hollywood that accepts only the “untouchable” likes of Steven Spielberg or Clint Eastwood.

Jodie Foster to get lifetime achievement award at Golden Globes

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Double-Oscar winner Jodie Foster will receive a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes ceremony in January, recognizing her 40-year career as an actress, director and movie producer, organizers said on Thursday.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), which organizes the annual Golden Globe awards, said Foster will join the likes of past winners Lucille Ball, Barbra Streisand, Al Pacino, Morgan Freeman and Judy Garland, and become the 2013 recipient of the Cecil B. DeMille award.

“Jodie is a multifaceted woman that has achieved immeasurable amounts of success and will continue to do so in her career,” HFPA president Aida Takla-O’Reilly said in a statement.

“Her ambition, exuberance and grace have helped pave the way for budding artists in this business. She’s truly one of a kind,” she added.

Foster, 49, began her career filming commercials at the age of three and won international fame with her role as a streetwise teen in the 1976 film “Taxi Driver.”

She has since appeared in more than 40 movies, winning best actress Oscars for her role as a rape victim in “The Accused” and as the FBI agent in 1991 thriller “The Silence of The Lambs.”

Foster also branched out into directing (“Little Man Tate”) and producing for both film and television through her production company Egg Pictures.

Foster will be presented with her award at the Golden Globes ceremony in Beverly Hills on January 13, where the HFPA will also announce its picks for the best films and performances in film and television of 2012.

Jodie Foster will produce and direct a Showtime crime drama

Jodie Foster will direct and produce an upcoming drama pilot for Showtime. The project, called “Angie’s Body,” focuses on a sexy and dangerous woman who leads a family crime syndicate.

The project is Foster’s first directorial effort for TV, Deadline reports.

Foster will executive produce the project along with writer Rob Fresco (“Touch,” “Heroes”) and Russ Krasnoff (“Community”).

A two-time Oscar winner for acting, Foster has put much of her focus on behind-the-scenes roles over the past several years. She has directed three feature films: “Little Man Tate,” “Home for the Holidays” and “The Beaver.” Foster also produced several movies, including “The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys,” “Waking the Dead” and “Nell” (in which she also starred).

Foster has much less experience with television directing and producing. Her only previous TV directing credit was for an episode of “Tales from the Darkside” in 1988. In 1998, she returned to an off-screen television role when she produced “The Baby Dance,” an Emmy- and Golden Globe-nominated TV movie starring Stockard Channing and Laura Dern.

Showtime has not yet announced anything on production or broadcast dates for “Angie’s Body.”

Jodie Foster: ‘I may spend time on cable’

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Jodie Foster is looking to cable TV as a future site for her Oscar-winning talent, joining other big-screen stars who are finding pay TV can pay off.

The 49-year-old actress and director says she is “developing a few things” likely destined for cable, calling the format “a good outlet for what I do.”

“I think I may spend some time on cable,” Foster said at July’s Comic-Con, where she was promoting her next big-screen role: Starring opposite Matt Damon in “Elysium,” writer-director Neill Blomkamp’s follow-up to his hit Oscar-nominated debut, “District 9.”

Due next March, “Elysium” is set 150 years in the future in a world where Earth is polluted, diseased and overpopulated, so the wealthiest citizens create a utopic habitat in space.

Foster wanted to work with Blomkamp after seeing “District 9,” which she called “a perfect film … the movie I wish I would have directed.”

Foster said she intends to direct again, but hasn’t found her next project. Her directorial credits include 1991’s “Little Man Tate,” 1995’s “Home for the Holidays” and last year’s “The Beaver.”

“It’s a long process,” she said. “Because I do make personal films, they’re hard to get off the ground, especially nowadays.”

That’s why cable might be her next stop, as it has been of late for such big-screen staples as Nicole Kidman, Kevin Costner and Julianne Moore.

“I think it’s a good outlet for what I do,” Foster said. “What I do are personal stories and, in some ways, usually involve family and they have equal amounts of comedy and drama, sometimes an absurdist twist, and they’re very verbal. And I like constructing complex characters and hopefully seeing this sort of tapestry of how they interact with each other over time evolve. Well, TV’s the place for that.”

So would the two-time Oscar winner helm a series?

“Maybe,” she said with a smile. “You never know.”

Jodie Foster is bullish on ‘The Beaver’
As she has crisscrossed the country tirelessly promoting her latest directorial effort, “The Beaver,” Jodie Foster has been keeping in touch via text with Mel Gibson. When the star of your film is also your close friend and Hollywood’s leading persona non grata, the messages can get a tad awkward.
“Mel said, ‘I will be dragged through gravel for you,'” Foster said in Beverly Hills. “He’s been in Costa Rica. I texted him back, ‘I don’t want you to be dragged through gravel for me. Please do not.'”
Left hanging in the air is what, if anything, Foster does want from Gibson at this point. His personal scandals delayed the film’s release for months, prevented him from participating in the movie’s publicity and threatened to hijack the message of “The Beaver,” a tale of a toy company executive battling depression. Now a famously private feminist icon is in the strange position of making the rounds to defend a man who has become an industry pariah for his racist, sexist, anti-Semitic meltdowns. Yet if she’s angry, sad or disappointed that Gibson’s problems have overshadowed her first work as a director in 15 years, Foster hides it well behind a kind of old-fashioned Hollywood omert‡. “I grew up with the idea that the movie business is a family,” she said. “It’s like the mob. You don’t rat on your friends. Who you are in a business relationship is a reflection of who you are as an artist.”
Whether it’s a code of honor or maybe just the latest manifestation of the savvy that has kept Foster, 48, working in entertainment since age 3, it seems to be succeeding. Whatever their distaste for Gibson, moviegoers and critics appear willing to at least give “The Beaver” a chance.
After the film’s distributor, Summit Entertainment, delayed the movie’s fall 2010 release, Foster began quietly screening it for select press shortly after the new year, showing up in person to introduce it. In March, just five days after Gibson pleaded no contest to charges of domestic battery related to a 2010 altercation with his ex-girlfriend, she took “The Beaver” to Austin’s South by Southwest Film Festival, where its first public audience gave it a relatively warm embrace.
Early reviews have been more positive than negative. Next week, “The Beaver” will debut in 10 theatrical markets including New York and Los Angeles before Foster takes the movie to the Cannes International Film Festival and the film expands to more theaters in the U.S. and abroad. It’s a gamble but one that the two-time Oscar winner may be uniquely equipped to pull off.
“Famous people always kind of have this air,” said Jennifer Lawrence, 20, who plays a friend of Gibson’s character’s son in the film and was nominated for an Oscar this year for “Winter’s Bone.” “They have this certain way of speaking ’cause they’re used to everyone listening to them. Jodie doesn’t talk like that. There’s a pureness about the way she goes around in the world. As I watched her on set, I said this silent prayer, ‘Please let me be like that when I’m older. I don’t want to end up like one of those crazy famous people who go off the deep end.'”
Like Foster’s previous two films as a director, “Little Man Tate” and “Home for the Holidays,” “The Beaver” covers the messy terrain of family relationships. Gibson is Walter Black, a despondent husband and father who begins communicating through a furry beaver hand-puppet he rescues from the garbage. Besides directing, Foster also stars as Walter’s long-suffering wife, while “Star Trek’s” Anton Yelchin is his troubled teenage son, Porter.
Gibson and Foster became friends on the set of “Maverick” in 1994. In early 2009, nearly three years after Gibson was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol and delivering an anti-Semitic tirade to a police officer, Foster approached him about playing the role of Walter in “The Beaver” by first-time screenwriter Kyle Killen. The screenplay, which had landed on Hollywood’s “Black List” of the top unproduced scripts in 2008, attracted Foster for its raw depiction of a family amid a catastrophe.
“I make movies that look inward, movies about the tragedy of family dynamics,” said Foster, whose father left her mother shortly before she was born. “But I’m a pretty well-adjusted person, and I just can’t cry in my soup about that.”
When Foster sent Gibson the “Beaver” script, he had just finished shooting the conspiracy thriller “Edge of Darkness,” which was released in 2010, but had not had a movie in theaters since 2002. His personal demons, which include alcoholism and bipolar disorder, did not deter Foster from casting him ó they may have made him even more attractive for the role.
“Walter had to be somebody who could carry a puppet with a certain amount of charm and lightness,” said Foster. “But more importantly, somebody who could really understand that man’s struggles in a way that was visceral and authentic and worn and tired and deep. I just didn’t know anyone else who would be able to do both. And that’s what I know of Mel, not only as an actor but as a person.”
Foster’s casting of Gibson in a film that deals with mental illness ó and contains one particularly disturbing scene of self-violence ó posed challenges from the start.
“There was only one distributor that said yes to two things,” said Foster. “Yes [to the violent scene], and yes it’s Mel Gibson.” That company was Summit, which released the “Twilight” movies and the 2010 best picture Oscar winner “The Hurt Locker.”
By the time production got underway in New York in September 2009, Gibson had undertaken two wildly divergent tasks ó the mechanics of puppeteering the beaver and voicing that comic character in a Cockney accent, and the art of expressing Walter’s pain.
“We rehearsed a cathartic moment,” Yelchin recalled. “We improvised. Mel talked, and I listened. He talked about a lot of pain and suffering, the combination of self-pity and self-loathing. You feel pain and then you feel bad for yourself.”
As a director who prefers to shoot only one or two takes and move on, Foster was a good match for Gibson, who won an Oscar for directing “Braveheart” and who delivers emotional scenes in quick bursts of energy. “Mel and I work in the same way,” she said. “We’re people who focus intensely but for a short period of time. One minute he’s standing there making a joke. And then, bam! He’s in it. It’s all about concentration. What do you need to concentrate?”
During reshoots last summer Gibson confided in Foster about his problems with his ex-girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva, which were about to become public when some racist and threatening voicemails Gibson had left her leaked online. Foster said she considered Gibson’s problems “not that unusual. People have struggles in life. Most of us don’t have ours expressed on the Internet.” Gibson’s agency fired him and actors on “Hangover 2” ó who had worked with convicted rapist Mike Tyson in the first film ó protested Gibson’s casting in a cameo scene. Foster, however, stuck by him.
“You couldn’t get two people who are more diametrically opposed on everything that they think about religion and politics than what we do,” Gibson said of Foster in an interview with freelance journalist Allison Hope Weiner, the only interview he has granted since the tapes were released. “But there is a core of goodness there that’s undeniable, and I just love her.” For all the melodrama surrounding “The Beaver,” it appears both star and director may emerge from the film with their reputations burnished. Foster has walked the delicate line of supporting a friend and defending a pariah, while Gibson has reminded Hollywood he can act and still has the goodwill of friends in high places. Both have new projects in the works. Gibson has attached himself to a script by “Braveheart” writer Randall Wallace, even though he told Weiner he would be happy even if he never acted again.
“I haven’t really gotten the chance to tell Mel people like the movie,” said Foster. “He’s much more sensitive to his self-worth being about whether people go see his films or not than I am, maybe cause he’s had more success. It hurts him.”
As an actress, Foster just wrapped production on “Carnage,” Roman Polanski’s adaptation of the play “God of Carnage,” and will next appear as a head of state on an alien planet in “Elysium” from “District 9” director Neill Blomkamp. She said she hopes to direct again, perhaps branching into genre films. Whatever type of film she makes, Foster said, its characters will have to be complex. “My bad guys aren’t really bad guys, even if they start out that way,” she said. “I need to know why everybody is the way they are.”

Jodie Foster Joins Matt Damon And Sharlto Copley In Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium
When Neill Blomkamp made District 9, his star was Sharlto Copley, a man who had never done any acting outside of Alive in Joburg, the short film that inspired the sci-fi feature. For Blomkamp’s follow-up, Elysium, however, he’s going a different route. In addition to Copley, Matt Damon has been attached to the project, and now Blomkamp has signed Jodie Foster.
Deadline reports that Foster has cast in the film, despite the fact that the project hasn’t even been sold to studios yet. Because no details about the movie’s plot have been released, it is unknown what kind of character that the actress will be playing, though it is known that Elysium will qualify as science-fiction. Foster’s next film, The Beaver, which she both starred in and directed, will be released in April of this year.
As a fan of Jodie Foster’s work, it’s really great to see her come back. Thanks to all of the Mel Gibson issues, we haven’t seen her in a film since 2008’s Nim’s Island, which is just far too long. She’s also set up to co-star alongside John C. Reilly, Christoph Waltz, and Kate Winslet in Roman Polanski’s God of Carnage, so it looks like this could be a very authentic comeback and we here at anythingbut.com welcome it.

Jodie Foster: I won’t “abandon” Mel Gibson
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) ñ Jodie Foster has once again come to the defense of her close friend Mel Gibson.
Despite the release of angry voicemails Gibson allegedly left the mother of his 8-month-old daughter, Foster told More magazine that he’s the “easiest, nicest person I’ve ever worked with… The second I met him, I said, ‘I will love this man for the rest of my life.'”
Foster, co-starred with Gibson in the 1994 film “Maverick,” and recently reunited with him for “The Beaver,” which she also directed. The film does not have a release date.
“When you love a friend, you don’t abandon them when they are struggling,” Foster told the magazine. “Of course, Mel is an undeniably gifted actor and director, and ‘The Beaver’ is one of his most powerful and moving performances. But more importantly, he is and has been a true and loyal friend. I hope I can help him get through this dark moment.”
On Tuesday, new emails surfaced between Gibson and his ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva. The two are cordial and supportive in the notes, which allegedly were exchanged two months after a January blowout fight that resulted in a photo being released of Grigorieva without her two front teeth. But law enforcement sources told The Hollywood Reporter earlier this month that officials doubt the photo’s authenticity.
In 2006, Foster stood up for Gibson after a police officer accused him of making anti-Semitic remarks while the actor was being arrested for driving under the influence.
“Mel is honest, loyal, kind, but alcoholism has been a lifelong struggle for him and his family,” she said at the time. “I just wish I had been there, that I had been able to say, ‘Don’t do it, don’t take that drink.'”

Jodie Foster Calls Teen’s Claims She Attacked Him a ‘Fabrication’
Jodie Foster is speaking out against allegations that she attacked a young man outside an L.A. mall, telling PEOPLE the accusations and the police report filed by the teenager are a “fabrication” of what really happened.
“This guy was most definitely a professional paparazzo,” the actress’s rep tells PEOPLE. “He had a large camera bag and 1000mm telephoto lens. He tailed Jodie and followed her all the way from the movie theater to the valet.”
According to a police report obtained by RadarOnline, the incident occurred May 29 at The Grove in L.A., where Foster was seeing a movie with her children. The alleged victim’s father claims his 17-year-old son approached the Oscar-winning actress for a photo but she “came after him [and] poked him in the chest” and “pushed and shoved him leaving scratches and bruises on his arm.”
Foster, however, says the teenager had been following her for a while. “He crowded her and her two young children and took photos of them the whole time,” says the rep, adding that the actress went up to him and asked him to stop.
“This guy’s behavior was completely inappropriate,” says the rep, “and the police report is a fabrication of the incident.”