Getting "Brave" with Jodie Foster

By Moira Macdonald

Seattle Times movie critic

TORONTO — Jodie Foster, blue eyes wide, is excitedly talking about books.

Movie-star interviews can be surreal encounters: a carefully measured 20 minutes alone in the company of someone who seems utterly familiar and yet a stranger. Everyone always asks me what these encounters are like, and their eyes fall when I say that usually, they're like little business meetings. The actors are almost always polite; they shake hands, smile and answer questions patiently, hitting their planned sound bites. Talking to the press is part of their job, and they do it smoothly, if often a bit soullessly.

But maybe I shouldn't have been surprised that Foster, at the Toronto International Film Festival to promote the vigilante drama "The Brave One," would be an exception. An actor since early childhood, Foster has long blazed her own trail. After playing an underage prostitute in "Taxi Driver" made her a star in her early teens, she didn't go off the rails but kept on working — and earned a degree from Yale in her spare time. She went on to win two Academy Awards, for "The Accused" and "The Silence of the Lambs," and made a stellar directing debut with "Little Man Tate." Now in her 40s, she's still headlining movies, usually dark dramas in which she can explore a character's complexity.

In a brief but thoughtful interview, an animated and friendly Foster seemed to genuinely enjoy talking about her work. And she especially lit up when asked about books — "It's my first love," she said. "It's how I approach film, which kind of drives people crazy. I approach film like a book report. But I love literature, I like dissecting it and talking about it and the side of it that's intellectual and the side of it that's emotional, and bringing those two together." She's currently re-reading John Fowles' "The Magus," which she first read at 15. "It totally changed my life," she said. "It's so beautifully, beautifully written."

"The Brave One" (opening Friday) was, in its beginnings, something of a literary exercise for Foster, who received the screenplay at an early stage. Its heroine, Erica, is a radio commentator in New York whose life is instantly altered when she and her fiancé, David, are viciously attacked one night in Central Park. David is killed, and a devastated Erica finds that she has changed — now fearful, she gradually becomes determined to wreak vengeance by way of vigilante justice.

Foster felt the original script, written by Roderick Taylor and Bruce A. Taylor, was promising but "needed a lot of work. The soul of the movie, in some ways there were glimpses of it, but it wasn't realized." With writer Cynthia Mort and producer Susan Downey, Foster worked closely for "months" to create a new draft, which she presented to director Neil Jordan ("The Crying Game").

"There will be people who don't like it," she said of the movie. "It is subversive, and it is difficult. It's moving in ways that are at once beautiful and also monstrous. I think that's what's great about the film: It's a very sophisticated filmgoing experience but, in some ways, in an unsophisticated genre. There's part of it that's an amazing intellectual journey that you want to talk about because of the ambivalence that you feel towards things, but it's also really satisfying. It's strangely satisfying."

Foster's interest in the film (for which she is an executive producer) partly stemmed from the female twist on the vigilante action-film genre. Women, she noted, rarely turn to violence. "We essentially are a species who turns rage inwards, and we hurt ourselves. We hurt the things we both love about ourselves.

"What if one day, we said, 'I don't want to hurt me anymore. I want to live, and I want you to die.' I think it is inside all of us. I love movies that say, there is a thing inside of me that I have never wanted to lay claim to, and here it is. I think that's what really resonates. It would be a totally different movie if it were a guy."

Foster has cut back on her film work in recent years to spend more time with her two young children. She hasn't directed a film since 1995's "Home for the Holidays"; two recent planned directing projects ("Flora Plum," with Russell Crowe, and "Sugarland" with her "Taxi Driver" co-star Robert De Niro), both fell through because of funding problems. She says she'd like to direct again, but it may be a while. "It's hard to do two careers at the same time," she said. "I won't make as many movies as a director as others do."

As an actor, though, she's as busy as she wants to be. Foster's currently shooting the family adventure film "Nim's Island" in Australia, and is in no hurry to find her next project. She's unconcerned about the conventional wisdom about the lack of roles for middle-age women.

"There aren't as many," she acknowledges," "but, you know, there aren't as many movies for 45-year-old men either. I don't think it's a plot. It's like novels. The primary experience of a novel is usually to see someone who goes from being an unconscious person of 20 or 21 to becoming a conscious person later. So there are fewer roles.

"My mom always said my career would be over when I was 40, so I needed to figure out what I was going to do. So I keep waiting!"

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725
or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com