Robert De Niro may be one of the most respected actors in the world, but when Jodie Foster was just 12 years old when she first met him on the set of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, she wasn’t all that impressed.
In a career-spanning conversation after winning the Tribute Award at the Marrakech Film Festival on Sunday, Foster recalled how De Niro “took me under his wing” and took her to coffee shops to line up for movies. However, De Niro had a method approach to his role, and she found him very boring.
“We repeated the lines a second time, a third time, and I think some of us were here when Robert De Niro was here, one of our greatest American actors and I’m very proud to have worked with him, but he’s not the most interesting person on the planet,” Foster continued. “He was the same type of person he was back then. So he was really uninteresting and I remember being at these lunches with him and being like, ‘What’s going on? When can I go home?'” And he couldn’t talk to me, so I was talking to the waiters and people in the restaurant. ”
However, Foster and De Niro had a breakthrough when they included her in the preparation process. “By the time we had our third lunch together, he finally taught me how to improvise, which opened my eyes to what acting was all about,” Foster said. “And at 12 years old, I realized, ‘Oh, it’s my fault for not bringing enough to the table.'” Up until now, you’re just saying lines, waiting for the next line, acting naturally, but building a character is different. And I remember how excited I was. I remember coming back to my hotel room to meet my mom, sweaty, excited, and giggling, and saying, “I had this epiphany.” And I think everything changed from there. ”
Foster was taken to the Cannes Film Festival for the first time in “Taxi Driver,” but she revealed, “No one wanted to take me there because they didn’t want to spend money on me.” But her mother, who was also her manager and had enrolled her in a French school in Los Angeles, encouraged her to go.
“My mom said, ‘No, that’s really important. She speaks French. This is Cannes!'” Foster said. “So we paid for the plane tickets ourselves.”
Foster laughed as he recalled that De Niro, Harvey Keitel and Scorsese were “really paranoid” because there was talk around the Croisette that the film was so violent that it might need an X rating.
“We all did the press conference together, and after the press conference was over, everyone was scared and wouldn’t leave their rooms at the Hotel du Cap,” Foster said. “So we ended up doing all the interviews with the entire Taxi Driver team in French!”
Jodie Foster at the Marrakech Film Festival.
Getty Images
The 63-year-old, who has been appearing in commercials since the age of three and made her feature film debut at the age of six, also spoke at length about the fact that this profession was not her choice.
“I never would have chosen to be an actor. I don’t have an actor’s personality. I’m not the kind of person who wants to dance on tables and sing songs for people,” she said. “It was actually a cruel job that was chosen for me when I was young and I don’t even remember starting. So that makes my job a little bit different because I’m not interested in acting just for the sake of acting. If I was on a desert island, I probably would never act. So I was just trying to survive.”
Perhaps for this reason, Foster said she feels she is “reaching out to the young child actors of this era.” “Wait a minute, where are their parents? And why doesn’t anyone tell them not to do so many movies or not to get so drunk on red carpets? I want to take care of them, because I know how dangerous it is.”
He added, “I don’t know why anyone would want to be an actor now, knowing that in order to excel, you have to fight against being deprived of your life in a way. I don’t know how else to make sense of it other than to do what my mother did for me, which was to set a firm line between private and public life.”
Foster said that although she did not choose to become an actor, she was always “gravitated to really strong characters” and only wanted “core” roles in films.
“I didn’t want to be …’s sister, …’s wife, …’s daughter, …’s girlfriend. I just wanted the movie to be about me,” she joked, adding, “It’s also responding to the second-wave feminist interest in, ‘I want to be important, I want to make films that matter.'”
Foster referenced the fact that she didn’t work with many female directors in the first part of her career, but exclaimed, “And in my last four movies, they’ve all been women!”
“I mean, really 15 years ago, if you looked at the list of mainstream films and went down the list of directors, you never saw a woman’s name,” she said, highlighting the glass ceiling that female directors face when venturing into bigger-budget films.
“If you’re making a movie that takes a certain amount of risk…they’ll say, ‘Wow, no woman has ever directed a movie that cost $125 million,'” she pointed out. She said, “The idea was not to give such a big movie to a woman who had no experience.Why not give the woman experience first?”
Foster has primarily worked in film, but returned to television in HBO’s “True Detective: Night Country,” which received rave reviews and an Emmy and Golden Globe Award. Foster praised streaming for giving storytellers a broader canvas to tell important stories such as the Native American journey.
“I embrace the idea that there are two ends to this industry. On one side is mainstream Hollywood, mainstream distributed films, and on the other side is more independent films…And streaming is really taking over the narrative role. You can take an eight-hour story or a five-season story and explore it from all angles in a way that a feature film would never be able to do.”
Foster brought up Scorsese’s 2023 film Killers of the Flower Moon as an example, saying, “What we had was a very interesting movie about two guys talking back and forth.”
“I think everyone was excited about Indigenous stories being told, and what they found was, ‘Wow, all Indigenous women are dead,'” she continued. “What they said was, ‘Well, this is a feature, we didn’t have time!'” But there was time. There was an eight-hour limited series that wasn’t made, and it should have been made, and if they wanted to explore all the toxic masculinity of men, they could have done that, but they could have also made episode two really center around the Native story. ”
The two-time Oscar winner is also at the Morocco Festival to screen her latest film, Rebecca Zlotowski’s French comedy-thriller Private Life. During our conversation, Foster revealed that he would like to make more films in French.
“Of course, I went to a French school, so I feel like that’s part of my personality and half of my culture that I’ll never be able to tap into,” Foster said. “I love the global families that make movies. They feel like they’re the same people wearing the same jeans and complaining about coffee at 3 a.m. But it also allows me to open up and learn new cultures.”
Foster ended the conversation by saying there is still much he wants to accomplish in his career. “I will continue to make films until the day I die,” she said proudly. “You can’t get rid of me that quickly.”
Foster’s first appearance at the Marrakech Film Festival will be with a host of stars in attendance, opening on Friday night. This year’s jury is chaired by Bong Joon-ho, director of “Parasite,” and includes Jenna Ortega, who starred in “Wednesday,” Anya Taylor-Joy, who starred in “Furiosa,” and Celine Song, director of “Past Lives.”
