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Daniel Auteuil, Rebecca Zlotowski and Jodie Foster in Cannes
Photo: Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival
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Jodie Foster, who is at the Cannes Film Festival using her fluent French in Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life (Vie Privée), has gone on record as saying that turning 60 two years ago marked a positive accomplishment. She feels she can pick and choose projects entirely to suit herself, and has no qualms about leaving lengthy gaps between roles or directorial projects.
It helped that director Zlotowski had long cherished a desire to direct Foster – and finally persuaded her to participate in her sixth feature film, taking the role of a psychoanalyst Lilian Steiner, whose patient (Virginia Efira) mysteriously disappears. Lilian, with the help of her ex-husband (Daniel Auteuil), opts to investigate.
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Jodie Foster on her co-star: 'I have been watching Daniel since I was young'
Photo: Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival
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Zlotowski who had thought of the actress-director for her first film Dear Prudence (Belle Épine) without success, this time met Foster in Los Angeles ten years down the line. The pair went through the script in minute detail. As a result Foster declared: “I knew then that Rebecca was someone who took her work very seriously; that she had specific ideas for every aspect of the film. We think about cinema in the same way. She wanted to make sure that the audience was brought into the interior life of the character, and that’s what I enjoy doing as an actor.”
Foster admits she appreciates acting in French which makes her “a different person” than when she uses English. It had been more than 20 years since she last appeared in a French film: a small role in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement. To ensure she was up to speed with the language she arrived in Paris long before the shoot to become “acclimatised”.
She told journalists that her French vocabulary would approximate to the level of an 18-year-old although Zlotowski was quick to correct her to that of a 35-year-old. “This was the first time I had been in a French movie with this much dialogue. But I do become a totally different person. I have a higher voice and I am much less confident. I get very frustrated because I cannot express myself as well. It actually creates a new kind of character for me. I have been offered leading roles in French films before making Vie Privée, but I was too scared to take them on.”
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Jodie Foster and Daniel Auteuil. On speaking onscreen in French, Foster says: 'It actually creates a new kind of character for me'
Photo: Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival
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The chance to work with 75-year-old Daniel Auteuil was another reason she was keen to sign on. “I have been watching Daniel since I was young. I have his face memorised. I know where his dimples are, and all that kind of stuff. Thirty years later, we’re shooting a make-out scene.”
Foster has been a loyal attendee at the Cannes Film Festival for more than four decades – seven of her films, whether as an actress or a director, have been showcased on the Croisette.
She is also a devoted cinephile, both knowledgeable and passionate. She has made an active contribution to the restoration of the extremely personal work of Dorothy Arzner, one of the few directors at the heart of Hollywood studios who has filmed brave women exposed to the struggles surrounding class and gender.
This commitment matches Foster’s own. For some considerable time now, the Francophile artist has been expressing her views on parity in the film industry, for example at the 2016 Festival during a Women in Motion session.
Foster first attended the Cannes in 1976 for the world premiere of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver which received the ultimate accolade of the Palme d’Or. She was only 13 at the time.
Once asked what would the teenage Jodie think of the present Jodie she replied: "I would be really shocked that I was in the same profession for the last 50‑some years – I can't quite believe it. When I was young I wanted to be a director, but I didn't know that I would be able to. I didn't know any women directors; I knew [about] the European ones. I knew about Lina Wertmuller and Margarethe von Trotta – a few European women directors, but that was it. So I assumed I wouldn't be able to direct. I thought I'd probably just write."
