Robert De Niro may be one of the most respected actors in the world, but when Jodie Foster first met him on the set of Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” at just 12 years old, she wasn’t so impressed.
Speaking during a career-spanning conversation at the Marrakech Film Festival on Sunday, Foster recalled how De Niro “took me under his wing” and would bring her to coffee shops to run lines for the film. But since De Niro was taking a Method approach to his character, she found him quite boring.
“We’d run the lines and run the lines a second and third time. And I’m sure maybe some of you have been here when Robert De Niro was here. One of our greatest American actors, so proud to have worked with him — not the most interesting person on earth,” Foster continued. “And at that time, he was very much in character, the way he was in those days. So he was really uninteresting and I remember having these lunches with him and being like, what is happening? When can I go home? And he wouldn’t really be able to talk to me, so I would talk to the waiters and the people in the restaurants.”
But Foster and De Niro had a breakthrough when he let her into his preparation process. “He finally walked me through improvisation by the time we had our third lunch together, and it opened my eyes to what acting could be,” Foster said. “And I realized at 12, ‘Oh, it’s my fault because I haven’t brought enough to the table.’ I’ve just been saying lines and waiting for my next line and acting naturally, but building a character is something different. And I remember how excited I was, I remember being kind of sweaty and excited and giggly and coming back up into the hotel room to meet my mom and saying, ‘I’ve had this epiphany.’ And I think from there, everything changed.”
“Taxi Driver” took Foster to the Cannes Film Festival for the first time, though she revealed that “nobody wanted to bring me because they didn’t want to spend money on me.” However, her mother — who was also her manager and enrolled her at a French school in Los Angeles — pushed for her to go.
“My mom said, ‘No, it’s really important. She speaks French. This is Cannes!’” Foster said. “And so we paid for our own flights.”
Foster had a laugh remembering that De Niro, Harvey Keitel and Scorsese “were really paranoid” because there was some buzz around the Croisette around the film being too violent and perhaps needing an X rating.
“We all did the press conference together, but then after the press conference, they all got too scared, and they wouldn’t leave their rooms at the Hotel du Cap,” Foster said. “So I ended up doing all the interviews in French for the entire team of ‘Taxi Driver’!”
Jodie Foster at the Marrakech Film Festival.
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Foster, who appeared in commercials from the age of 3 and made her feature film debut at 6 years old, spoke at length about the fact that the profession is not something she chose for herself.
“I would never have chosen to be an actor, I don’t have the personality of an actor. I’m not somebody that wants to dance on a table and, you know, sing songs for people,” she said. “It’s actually just a cruel job that was chosen for me as a young person that I don’t remember choosing. So right there, it makes my work a little bit different because I am not interested in acting just for the sake of acting. If I was on a desert island, I think probably the last thing I would ever do is act. So I was just trying to survive.”
However, from a young age, she was “drawn to very strong characters” and sought only “central” roles in movies.
“I didn’t want to be the sister of, the wife of, the daughter of, the girlfriend of. I just wanted the movie to be about me,” she joked, before adding that she was also “reacting to a second wave feminist interest of saying, ‘I want to matter. I want to make movies that matter.’”
Though Foster addressed the fact that she did not work for many female directors for the first part of her career, she exclaimed: “Then in the last four films, they’ve all been women!”
“There were none, and they weren’t offered. I mean, really up until 15 years ago, when you look at the list for mainstream movies and you go down the director’s list, I never saw a female name,” she said, before highlighting the glass ceiling that female directors face when they’re courting bigger budgeted movies.
“If you’re making a movie that has a certain risk attached to it … there’s no woman that’s a movie that cost $125 million,” she pointed out. She said “the idea was not to give women these huge mega movies if they had not had any experience. How about giving women the experience first?”
The two-time Oscar winner is on hand at the Moroccan fest to receive a career tribute award and present her latest film, the French comedy thriller “A Private Life.” During the conversation, Foster revealed that she is looking to make more films in French.
“Of course, because I do feel like it’s a part of my personality that I just never get to use, and half my culture, because I went to a French school,” Foster said. “I love the global family of making films. It feels like they’re the same people wearing the same jeans and complaining about coffee at 3 in the morning. But it also allows me to open up and learn a new culture, too.”
This marks Foster’s first appearance at Marrakech Film Festival, which kicked off on Friday night with a slew of stars in attendance. Alongside “Parasite” filmmaker Bong Joon Ho as president, this year’s jury includes “Wednesday” star Jenna Ortega, “Furiosa” lead Anya Taylor-Joy and “Past Lives” director Celine Song.
