Jodie Foster: Meet the New Boss

by Mark Harris
Entertainment Weekly (April 2, 1993)

Jodie Foster doesn't like to sit behind her desk when other people are in her office. She's the kind of boss who views the trappings of bossiness with faint embarrassment. So when four staff members of her new company, Egg Pictures, troop in for a Friday-afternoon meeting, she pulls her chair into the center of the room and joins them in a circle. Balancing a plump Filofax on one knee, she ticks off items as if efficiency were encoded in her genes, speaking with the un-rushed self-assurance of someone utterly secure in her power — as a leader, as a decider, as a (though she might loathe the word) player.

Foster lays down the law — politely — about the budget for furniture in Egg's large new L.A. offices ("It cannot exceed our projections. It just can't"). She divides phone messages into calls she should return, calls somebody else should return, and calls nobody should ever return. She discusses the state of a dozen films her company may produce, script by script, separating writers who need coddling from those who need goosing, directors who will get a call from those who merit a meeting. "I want us to be really selective about who we work with," she tells the young turtlenecked and blue-jeaned Eggsecutives. "If we're not serious about making a movie, let's not do it." Rolling through her agenda, she betrays no self-consciousness, except, perhaps, for the fingers that she sometimes rakes through her straight blond hair or uses to adjust her elegant tortoiseshell glasses. Neither hair nor glasses are out of place. Her hand just needs something to do. Like its owner, it gets bored easily.

Cynics who have seen too many actors dabble at being executives might be tempted to write all this off as Foster's latest performance, marked by the same acumen and painstaking attention to detail that characterize her screen work. They'd be missing the point. At 30, running her own company, Jodie Foster seems less an actress playing the role of CEO than a born CEO who happens, by fate, to be an actress. Perhaps the only actress who could convince a movie company to bet on her prowess as an executive to the tune of $100 million — a figure PolyGram Filmed Entertainment could easily put into Egg's films in the next few years.

"The Hollywood community loks at her," says one studio executive, "and they don't just see an actress. They see momentum."

Foster hatched Egg while making Sommersby, the post-Civil War romance with Richard Gere that opened to warm reviews and good grosses in February. As Orion Pictures — where she had a nonexclusive deal — lurched toward bankruptcy, she began to look for a new pact that was "not an actor's deal, not even a director's deal, but a producer's deal." She found it with PolyGram and built her new company — christened Egg "because it's feminine and about beginnings and doesn't sound like Greek mythology" — by telephone and fax while sitting in her trailer on location in Hot Springs, Va., waiting for the cameras to roll. "When you're an actor," she says with irony, "you've got to occupy your days somehow."

Increasingly, Foster finds it difficult to occupy them with acting. "I'm dying to work — dying to. But it's become harder for me to say yes," she says. "I haven't acted in a year. It's almost becoming ridiculous, but I can't seem to find more than one movie a year to commit myself to." Even Sommersby, whose years-long develoment she followed as it passed through the hands of Tom Cruise and director Sydney Pollack and into Richard Gere's, went through extensive revisions at Foster's behest. Her character, Laurel, grew from a "naive, very weepy woman who was duped by an impostor" into "somebody who chose to deceive herself" before the actress agreed to sign on.

"Yes, I'm picky," she says, "and no, unless I understand where the movie is going, I can't be good. But look at how few real roles there are for women right now. I look at Basic Instinct and go, 'Huh?' It is shocking to me that after the success of The Silence of the Lambs and Thelma & Louise, last year was so bad for women. And I know the next year's going to be bad too," she says matter-of-factly, "because I've already read all the scripts."

It makes for an odd, what's-wrong-with-this-picture scenario: After 25 years in the business, two Best Actress Oscars in four years (for her breakthrough adult role as a rape victim in 1988's The Accused and again for 1991's Lambs), a well-received directorial debut (Little Man Tate), and a mountain of screenplays at her door, Jodie Foster can't find work as an actress. And she doesn't seem to mind.

"I have to say I've never been happier," she says softly, curling into a corner of her office couch and tugging her pullover sweater toward the knees of her scruffy jeans. "In terms of the professional-achievement stuff, thank God I'm in a better place than I was. After the Oscars and directing, I'm sure I'll find some new goals, but they won't be the big looming neon kind that can hang over your head. I would never want to be in my 20s again," she adds, almost shuddering. "I wouldn't have said so then, but I was very unhappy. The feeling of not knowing everything you don't know...it was awful. All that panic."

The stress Foster felt hit hardest during the 1987 filming of The Accused, the movie that initiated the adult phase of her film career. "I just said to everyone, 'I can'tt do this. And I'm so sorry that I ruined your movie,'" she whispers. "I thought it was the end of my career."

"I couldn't talk about it for a long time. It was so hard to admit that it was a difficult movie for me," she says, her face clouding a little. "I laughed, I joked, I made friends with the guys who played the rapists. But here's how bad it got. After I got the part, I never bothered to read the script again. I got to the set and bulls----ed about the story. I was acting so cool, and now, when I think about it, I was petrified."

Foster's problems crested three-quarters of the way through the shoot, during the filming of her climactic courtroom testimony. "I insisted that we shoot the rape first," recalls director Jonathan Kaplan. "In her screen test, the only thing missing was the deep rage within. I thought if she had already filmed the rape, that experience would flood forward when we shot the courtroom stuff. But her own life experiences — the whole John Hinckley business — had trained her not to get emotional in the courtroom, and she held back."

Foster and Kaplan each dug in — "she was really mad at me," he recalls — and filming became so grueling that Foster's mother, Brandy, wept when she saw takes of her shaken daughter on the courthouse set. When the film wrapped, Foster promptly took the Graduate Record Examination, convinced that "I was gonna go to Cornell and be a grad student in literature, and no one would hear from me again. I'd be found out as a fraud. The film was just very provocative for me personally."

Aside from the publicly happy ending — she was great, she won an Oscar, and the role kicked her into the first rank of young actresses — Foster came out of the experience somehow more defined. "Look at my work until then," she says of the nearly two dozen films that preceded The Accused. "It's okay, but it's not the same. I spent a lot of time acting like I thought everyone else on screen was an idiot, and that is the total sign of someone not committing to their work."

"If you read old stories about her," says Egg's co-chief of production Stuart Kleinman, 37, "she would always say things like 'I could leave acting anytime — I could always teach.' But in the last few years, I think she's entered a new phase of her life — she's looking at her career in the long term. And she's passionately, completely committed to the film business."

Outside Foster's office, someone is holding her calls. But the phone still tweets persistently, and her eyes dart reflexively to the receiver with each interruption, even as she attempts to ignore them. After rushing out to take one call privately, she stalks back into her office. "Eight weeks I try to get him on the phone! Eight weeks!" she sputters. "And then, when he finally calls, he's like, 'Oh, you want a meeting? Sure!' Aaagh," she says, slapping her datebook shut as a punctuation of disgust. "Unbelievable."

Such is Foster's uneasy relationship with the telephone. "It never stops. And now," she says, her voice squeaking with disbelief, "some people, certain people have decided that it's okay to call me at f---in' 7 o'clock in the morning!" As she tells the story, her brisk smart verbal stytle takes on an excited note of her Southern California childhood. "Seven o'clock! The truth is that I go to sleep late because I watch old movies. And no, I don't get up before 10. So this friend called and said, 'Well, it's nine in the morning! You should be up!' And I said, 'You know what? That's none of your business!"

"I finally have learned to create barriers in my life," she explains, "so I don't turn into someone I hate. Of course," she says with a giggle, "I guess I could just unplug the phone. But now that I've set down the law, I have a better relationship with people. That was my analogy for the day," she concludes with a mock flourish. "Barriers."

Barriers. It's a concept that comes up often with Foster, one of Hollywood's more famously private public figures. Discussing her Sommersby costar, Richard Gere, she says with genuine fondness, "I like him a lot, but really, we had absolutely no drama off screen. He went off and read his paper. I went off and read mine. Some actors try and get something something out of you all the time off screen. You're always trying to avoid them — 'Oh, uh, I can't talk now, I've got a doctor's appointment!' Richard wasn't like that, and I think our work was much purer that way." Likewise, she confesses that she has "had the same 15 friends for years. I'm sure they're all sick of seeing each other, but they're the only ones who know the way to my house."

Foster is the first to admit that much about her grows from a simple concept: She likes control. Even when she was unemployed for months at a stretch, she would arrange her days in rigorous order. It didn't matter that nobody was looking. "It's always been my way of coping," Foster recounts with a wry smile. "I'd go to the gym. Then I'd have lunch at a certain time. Then I'd to go this other place and have coffee and read scripts at a certain time. Then I'd go to the market. Not just once a week — no, I had to go every day. And then I'd make it home exactly in time for the news. The thing about being in control is, it's a lot more fun than not being in control."

That reputation follows Foster to the sets of her movies, where, she admits, she occasionally has to bite back her instinct to run the show. "Oh, yes," she says. "I do have all these little rules about how I like to work, and that probably gets irritating. Like, you can't be late. And you can't show up on the set without being prepared. I get a lot of anxiety when things are done in a kind of European, cavalier way. I can't handle it."

"Look at the Reconstruction!" Foster effuses. "Society had crumbled. Suddenly, there were no rules, and for women..." With the voluble enthusiasm of a grad student, she has been talking for 20 minutes about her heavy preparation for Sommersby when she suddenly does something uncharacteristic. She stumbles. She hesitates. She backtracks.

"I, I don't want you to think that this is the way I, you know, am," she says, sounding stumped. "Because all this stuff where I figure out the story and do my little report filled with totally personal literary criticism may never end up on screen. If you can't communicate it once the cameras roll, then none of it matters."

For a moment, she seems to chafe at the image that has become part of her public lore: the child actress-turned-Ivy league superachiever with an answer for everything: "To tell you the truth, there's a reason it's my image," she admits. "That's the side of me that I show journalists. So I don't think my image is erroneous. But what's funny is that I think my work on screen is actually becoming more emotionally accessible."

Right now, though, the role Foster is attacking with the greatest relish is off screen. Although Egg has several scripts in development in which she could star — a drama about actress Jean Seberg seems to have the most heat — Foster appears more eager to earn her stripes as a producer. PolyGram has just green-lighted Egg's first film, a $20 million 18th-century melodrama called Jonathan Wild, from director Neil Jordan (The Crying Game), which Foster's company will coproduce; she may or may not star. "To me, Jodie represents the best of what happens in Hollywood," says Jordan. "She's been around a long time — that's part of it — but she also never compromises herself. You can tell that just from the roles she takes."

"Of course she brings her intelligence to her work," says TriStar president Marc Platt, one of Foster's few close friends who works in the film business. "But it's her life experience that makes her so unique. Remember, this is a woman who took herself out of her career for four years to go to Yale. She loves the movie business, but she's not consumed by it — that's very rare."

The pact with Jordan also notifies skeptics that Foster's deal is more than a vanity perk or a time killer to keep her busy between roles. Over the next three years, Egg hopes to make six films, which will divide evenly between modestly budgeted pictures (Foster is particularly proud of having made Little Man Tate for under $10 million) and bigger movies; the company may also inherit some films that Foster had been developing at various studios. If all goes well, Egg could eventually become a major independent on the order of Rob Reiner's Castle Rock. "When we started talking about Egg," says Kleinman, "she was voracious in wanting to know about the financial aspects of independent film distribution. Now she goes to meetings and executives are in awe of her. It's almost as if she was sitting there on the set with Alan Parker and Martin Scorsese and Adrian Lyne as a child, camly watching and learning from their strengths and weaknesses, and absorbing everything. She hates to hear this, but there's really nobody like her."

When pressed, even Foster will shyly concede the point. "I realize that I'm in a really exquisite position," she says. "I forget how long I've been doing it, but sometimes it amazes me. Not too many people who have already worked for 25 years have as much energy as I do. Sometimes I can't believe how much I don't know, but sometimes I look around..." She falters, almost not wanting to let it out. And then her face broadens into a grin.

"I look around...and you know what I realize? I know a lot!"

Foster's staff meeting has ended, and she is briefly alone in her office. In a week, Egg will leave its current home in the corner of the old Orion building for more spacious accommodations. The Little Man Tate clock with her face on it and the cardboard cutout of Anthony Hopkins giving Foster his best "I ate his liver" look will soon be packed, and so will a tableful of bubble-wrapped statuettes, imposingly ugly crystal spikes, and gold hood ornaments that constitute her lesser awards. "The good ones [including Oscars I and II] I keep at home," she says. With Egg's staff dispersing for the weekend, Foster has a moment to herself, and moves happily back behind her desk. Through a half-closed door, she can be glimpsed signing letters, writing notes, organizing papers into neat little piles, shoving some leftover work and revised scripts into her valise. The end of a pen finds its way into her mouth. She hunches over a little. She looks fiercely focused. She looks right at home.