Wunderkind

by Arion Berger
Harper's Bazaar (November 1991)

In a Hollywood where power is gauged by muscle and millions, Jodie Foster is an anomaly. In the 23 of her 28 years she's spent on screen and in the public eye, the strong-boned, blue-eyed blonde has never taken the role of somebody's patient girlfriend, never appeared in a summer blockbuster, never made headlines for a post-detox comeback. Yet she's managed to grow from twinkly Disney child star to brave, iconoclastic actor to industry player. Her latest coup is a very sweet contract with Orion Pictures — a first-look non-exclusive development deal for directing and producing, the option to take any project elsewhere if Orion rejects it, and the license to act for any other studio she chooses. Foster has built her own little Vatican City, as it were, within the surrounding decadence of Hollywood's Rome.

"That's really the only way to do it," she says, matter-of-factly.

Foster has just finished directing her first picture, Little Man Tate, and has discovered that the work is far from over. She calmly enumerates her responsibilities as a director: photography shoots, marketing meetings, dead-end development talks, searching for the next script (nothing so far).

They're starting work on the Tate trailer now. Pulling in an audience, apparently, is something she hasn't had to really worry about before.

"It's quite stressful, actually," Foster says in her trademark croak. "The idea of now seeing your movie in terms of, 'Will couples go see it on a Saturday night?'"

Little Man Tate, based on an original screenplay by Scott Frank (Dead Again), is the story of boy genius Fred Tate (Adam Hann-Byrd), an imperfect prodigy whose most important influence is his free-spirited working-class mother, Dede (Foster). This subject is one close to Foster's heart, and not only because it's easy to make the parallel from one bright single-parent kid with extraordinary gifts to another.

"I don't see it as very autobiographical. Well, okay, I was an actor and I was young and I was pretty good at it, but I don't consider myself some kind of prodigy," says Foster.

Citing directors Francois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol, Foster places the character of Fred within the tradition of rites-of-passage movies. "There's something provocative about the idea of the young boy in films," she says. But Fred is also another film staple — an outcast — although not the brand of misfit that's become as stock as any other movie type. He isn't a loner by choice; he wants to be a "normal" kid among children with half his brain power. And he rebels only when he needs to reassert control over his life and mind. For a director who is at once an industry power-player and an unapologetically smart, independent woman, there are obvious affinities with "a misfit who's handicapped by exception."

"Fred has all the characteristics he's gonna have when he becomes the next Miles Davis or Francis Bacon," Foster claims. "Art is born of controversy, and the conflict between two things. That's the place where art lives."

This sounds a bit rich coming from a woman who's been a success since the age of five. Her only notable brush with scandal — when she made headlines for unknowingly inspiring John Hinckley's assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan — happened more around her than to her. As hideous as this attention must have been, Foster isn't the type to crumble when faced with the underside of fame. True, Little Man Tate doesn't plumb Dostoyevskian depths, but where exactly is the conflict in being young, beautiful, wealthy and powerful?

She gives a deep laugh. "Well, I am the luckiest girl alive. That's true. I have not had a tragic life. But I was not raised normally, I did not grow up in a quote-unquote normal environment. And I came up with ways to cope that were right for me, but that have created a character who is immature in a lot of areas, overly wise in others and stupid about stuff that everybody else can seem to do. There's a whole way of being that I've never experienced because of being a public person."

Foster has played by her own rules as much as a young woman in Hollywood can, and not always with success. Until she won a Best Actress Oscar for The Accused (an honor she could very well enjoy again for The Silence of the Lambs), admiring talk about Jodie Foster had less to do witth the quality of her movies than the feeling of concordance she inspires in her audience. Remember Siesta?

"I would rather commit heinous errors in filmmaking by doing [risk-taking projects] for small amounts of money than do the buddy-cop movie," she admits. "So I can be more famous? Who cares! Then there was the John Hughes phenomenon [Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink] around 1982. I was gonna take a semester off [from Yale] so I could play a virgin?"

"I want to be one of those excellent people you look up to," she adds earnestly. "I don't want to be 40, doing Toyota ads."

At this point, there's little chance that Foster will be hawking anything at 40 but her own movies. While Little Man Tate isn't earth-shaking, what makes it special is that it doesn't try to be. It's a moving story, directed with polish and acted with charm, which reveals Foster's unique sensitivity to the problems and attractions of fragmented modern home life.

"It's kind of the Everything-I-Believe-In movie," she says. "Orion was even concerned with my happy ending. I love it and I fought for it. The end has to be about the resolution of that conflict between head and heart. It's about creating a sort of misfit family that will have its own four walls, its own strengths and weaknesses. Where the foundation that brings these people together is that they are different and there's no place for them out there. This family is a kind of a prodigy for a new age. And I refused to say. 'If you're smart, you'll be unhappy but at least you'll have your mom.' But people will disagree with that. I mean, they spent, like, years talking about the ending of Thelma & Louise" — Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis sailing over a cliff in a convertible.

What would you have done?

Foster glides one slender, extended hand skyward. "I woulda jumped."