Jodie Foster recalled playing 12-year-old prostitute Iris in Taxi Driver alongside Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Paul Schrader at the Tribeca Festival’s 50th anniversary reunion. One memory that is “burned into[her]memory” is that when they arrived on set, Scorsese and De Niro couldn’t stop laughing as they tried to explain how to unzip De Niro’s pants in a provocative scene.
“Marty was trying to explain to me how to pull down[De Niro’s]fly. They couldn’t stop laughing, and Bob was like, ‘I’ll tell her.’ He tried to tell me what to do, and then he started giggling,” Foster recalled Friday night at the OKX Theater in lower Manhattan. “They couldn’t give me notes because I was so young and they were so nervous.”
As the laughter continued, Foster took matters into his own hands. “And I thought, ‘Well, you just want me to do that – okay, okay! First I’ll put the fly down, then I’ll do this, and then I’ll walk there. What’s the big deal?’
Half a century later, Foster’s confidence and command of the room remain intact. One of the biggest laughs of the night came when she politely (and directly) called out Schrader, who began answering questions without using a microphone. “He could be sitting there!” Scorsese quipped. (Sure enough, he was).
It was this confidence that impressed Scorsese the moment they met in his office before production began on the 1974 comedy Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Although Foster was only 11 years old and still in uniform, he revealed that he already had eight years of acting experience.
“You just sat there[and said]’Yes, I can do it. All right, no problem,'” Scorsese recalled, imitating her nonchalant demeanor. “He asked, ‘What’s next?’ and she said, ‘Oh, I’m doing something else at Disney.'” Foster chuckled beside him, shrugging her shoulders and squirming in her seat as if she were back on a Scorsese set all those years ago. It was a tough shoot. ”
In a Variety cover story interview in January, Foster said she always felt it was “kind of simple” working with male directors. Her philosophy is “Tell me what you want and I’ll do it.” Her passion for film began when she went to the theater with her mother, where she discovered European, French New Wave, and Japanese cinema. But it was the scene in “Mean Streets” (set to the beat of the Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”) in which De Niro slowly walks into Tony’s bar that crystallized her ambitions.
“To tell you the truth, I watched ‘Mean Streets’ when I was a kid…and that was it,” Foster said, smiling at De Niro. “I just wanted to be a part of this activity. I would have done anything you offered me.” She then jumped out of her seat and turned to Scorsese. “Actually, I think I tried to be an extra on ‘New York, New York,’ but it didn’t work out. They wouldn’t let me work nights because I was under 16.”
And the host, W. Kamau Bell, said, “You did ‘Taxi Driver,’ right?”
