Jodie's Choice

by Sean M. Smith
Premiere, March 2002

A little more than two centuries ago, an Englishman named Jeremy Bentham designed the perfect prison and called it the Panopticon. It perplexed architects at the time because the building he envisioned was a circle. Four floors of cells faced a guard tower in the center. The back wall of each cell contained a window that allowed a view of the outside world. The genius of the design was in that window. Because the prisoner was always backlit, visible to the watchers in the tower, every second of his life became a public one. In the Panopticon, it wasn't darkness that held you captive. It was light.

The rain has stopped. As Jodie Foster climbs higher, the thin trees that shadow her fall away, and the trail broadens to 9y reveal a clear horizon. "Isn't that pretty?" she asks. Far below, the silver-blue track of west Los Angeles sprawls to the sea. She gestures toward it, affectionately, without breaking her stride. Lucy, a beautiful boxer with white-stocking feet, trots ahead of her but then stops, lifts her back paw, and waits for Foster to remove an off ending twig. "See how sweet she is?" Foster says. "She can be the scariest dog when there's another dog around. All she does is get them down and stand over them, but occasionally I just see that lawsuit walking up the hill. She'll be off the leash, and someone will have some sweet little lab, and she'll just take the sucker down." She laughs as Lucy sprints ahead, leashless.

Not so long ago, Foster was the most powerful actress in Hollywood. But at the apex of her influence, armed with two Oscars, a burgeoning directing career, and an active production com- pany, she made a decision that is anathema in the film industry:

She concluded that more is less. "For a lot of people in my business, every decision is predicated on fear," she says. "They're working all the time because they're scared that they're never going to get another job, or they think, 'I'd better do that action film, because if I don't, I will lose my clout in Hollywood.' I'm not in that anymore." A damp wind rises, sifts through her hair, and moves on. "I was always worried about the future — that I would never be able to support my family, or that I wouldn't succeed, or that no one would ever love me — and it's nice to come to a place where you've accomplished enough of the things that make you feel safe that you can afford to be more brave about your life."

That kind of braverv is hard won, though, because a safe place isn't something you just find; it's something you have to build.

In Panic Room, directed by David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club), Foster plays Meg Altman, a woman trapped in her own home. Meg, a recently single mother, buys a four-story brownstone in upper Manhattan, where she discovers a secret room hidden behind a full-length mirror in the master suite. The room is crafted of seven tons of poured concrete and one thousand feet of steel girder. It has its own ventilation system and is stocked with survival supplies. Its door, equipped with a motion-sensitive closing system, is secured by solid-core dead bolts. It is windowless and impenetrable. And Meg gets to try it out almost immediately, when three men (Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto, and Dwight Yoakam) break into the house.

From inside the panic room, Meg and her 11-year-old daughter (newcomer Kristen Stewart) can watch every move the intruders make via monitors connected to surveillance cameras. Meg can speak to the men via intercom, but when she tells them to leave, they refuse. What they want is in that room, and giving up is no longer an option. Those cameras are attached to video recorders — evidence of their crime. They are her prisoners, too. "My character has two choices: To go with her instincts or to follow reason," Foster says. "She chooses not to be reasonable. That's an issue of mine. Sometimes reason is not the safest way. Within five minutes, a reasonable person would have said, 'Look, I'm coming out. Whatever you want, just take it.' And then, of course, she'd be dead."

Because she has been famous for most of her life, Foster, 39, sees danger in places where other people don't. She can be reticent and seem, at times, unreasonable when asked questions that would elicit chatty responses from other actors. Three and a half years ago, Foster gave birth to her first son, Charles, and last September, to her second, Kit. In both cases, she declined to name the father, which shouldn't matter to anybody but seems to anyway. Those boys have become her primary focus, and she is never more beautiful than when she is talking about them. "There's something so pure about the way boys love you," she says. "I never thought that any of those gender-specific things were true. You know, I was raised playing with G.I. Joes and stuff, but then I realize that my G.I. Joes would, like, talkto each other and discuss what meal they were going to have." She laughs. "Raising them is so much more interesting than anything else I do." But then, it's as if some motion-sensitive closing system has been activated, and her smile fades. "I've always chosen not to talk about my personal life," she says. "It's not for big, mysterious reasons. It just kind of trivializes it when you see it in print. It's hard not to talk about them because it's the most important thing in your world, but you've got to have a little dis- cipline about it or you'll be eaten alive."

And so, she says, the way to understand her is to look not at her life, but at her work. "The most true thing about me are the movies I make," she says. "They say so much about how I feel about things, and what I care about. That's how I communicate to the world in a way that feels safe to me."

That sounds like a deflection at first. But it turns out that the roles Foster has chosen since reaching adulthood are eerily consistent. They are not actually female roles, for one thing. Foster women are almost all modeled on the classic male hero: the lone warrior seeking justice or knowledge or freedom, whose ideals are paramount, who cannot abide compromise. Heroines, by contrast, are seldom given the luxury of being single-minded. They are constricted by the demands of others — lovers, children, friends — and their success is determined by how well they meet everyone else's needs. It is not enough, for instance, that Erin Brockovich can take down a corporate giant. She must be a good mother and girlfriend too. Imagine Clarice Starling running home to get dinner on the table, and you begin to get the picture. Finding those parts isn't just luck. In fact, says Foster's producing partner, Meg LeFauve, "one of the things I've done over the years is read scripts originally written for guys and see if we can flip it toa girl. Then you find a role that no woman has quite done before and who truly is the center of the story."

But there's something else, too. Almost all of Foster's characters are constrained from speaking the truth. In The Accused, Sarah Tobias, the role for which Foster won her first Oscar, isn't allowed to face her rapists in court, because her lawyer thinks she's too white trash to make a credible witness. Ellie Arroway, in Contact, longs to commune with the universe but must dodge questions about her atheism for a shot at the stars. Even in the comedy Mav- erick, Foster's sassy gambler must keep her motives tucked under her petticoat. And it's a psychological game of hide-and-seek that creates the central tension between Starling and Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. To save the woman in the well. Starling must disobey orders and divulge her deepest secret to the monster behind the glass.

Perhaps no actor in history has generated more ink for turning down a role than Foster did with Hannibal, for opting not to resurrect her Oscar-winning portrayal of the FBI agent. At the time, Foster said she had committed to directing Flora Plum, starring Claire Danes (and later, Russell Crowe), and would not be joining the feast. (Plum has yet to be made because Crowe, set to play a circus performer in the film, injured his shoulder.) Julianne Moore slapped on Starling's badge instead, and the film grossed $ 165 million.

But Foster's politic pass on the project — and the fact that Silence director Jonathan Demme and screenwriter Ted Tally also declined — didn't dissuade 82-year-old producer Dino De Lauren- tiis from making this brutal assessment: "Jodie Foster needed Hannibal more than we needed her. She came up with this picture, Anna and the King. It was a loser at the box office because there was no sex appeal there. As an audience, I see Julianne Moore and, 'Oh, I want to go in bed with her.' I see Jodie Foster, 'No way.'"

High on this trail above the city, with Lucy sniffing along beside her, Foster remains steadfast in both her decision and her diplomacy. "There's been so much weird blood about the film," she says, her blue eyes framed by sleek, no-nonsense glasses. "I wanted them to make their movie. I paid $7.50 to see it, and you know, go with God. None of us really commented on their parade, and no matter how much De Laurentiis commented on my parade, I wasn't going to start talking about him in the press." She walks awhile longer, but the topic tugs at her. "It's hard to come up with a character that would be Clarice ten years later," she continues. "The book [Hannibal] was clear aboutwho she had become, but I'm not sure I agreed with it. It's certainly Thomas Harris's invention, but — oh, I shouldn't go into this."

This happens a lot in conversation with Foster, Just as her brain revs up to racing velocity, something reminds her that speed is dangerous, that somebody could get hurt, and she hits the brakes. This time, though, she's already into the curve and ... "Silence is from the point of view of somebody whose whole identity and destiny is about saving people," she says. "Hannibal is about decadence and how our society has descended to the point where everything is about greed and avarice and lust, and that there are no pure heroes anymore. The closest person you can come to, for grace, is a cannibal. So the question that you probably want to ask, and that I shouldn't ask, is, Tf I hadn't had Flora Plum, would this have been the movie I would have made?'" The answer: "No."

Much of the media coverage surrounding her decision not to return to the role speculated that Foster's real concern was commerce, not content. But that's not plausible, because balking at a movie over just money contradicts every decision Foster has made in recent years. "I'm in one of my clean-up periods where 1 go through my closets and throw everything out," she says. "And that extends to everything. As you get older, you learn who you are and who you aren't. You know you'll never be Miss America, so you just put the beauty pageant clothes away."

Since 1998, when Charlie was born, Foster has progressively simplified her life. Her work pace has slowed to one film every two years. Indeed, her appearance in Panic Room happened by chance. Nicole Kidman had been cast in the role and had already begun shooting when a recurring knee injury forced her to drop out. To replace her, Foster had to cancel her plans to head the jury at the Cannes film festival. And last November, weeks after giving birth to Kit, Foster folded Egg Pictures, her company of 12 years, which had produced, among others films, the Emmy-nom inated The Baby Dance and Waking the Dead, starring Jennifer Connelly. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, which premiered a" the Sundance Film Festival in January (and in which Foster has a small role as a one-legged nun), will be one of Egg's last official releases. "I think itwas time," she says. "I'm proud ofthe films we made, but I don't need to do it anymore. Producing other people's movies is just hard on your soul, and the only rea' reward is to make a ton of money." Her ambitions lie elsewhere.

"Some actors pay for someone to pick up their mail and walk their dog and pick up the kids from school," she says. "But that's your life. So you're paying someone else to live your life so you work more? I'd rather pay somebody to work for me." She laughs. "It's natural to want to excel. If you were an athlete, you'd want to get the gold medal. You can get on this treadmill of saying, 'I want to make the most money, and I want to get more applause, and I want to be the Sexiest Man Alive.' But if you've been in it long enough, you realize that you'd prefer to architect that success in some way — maybe not be the highest-paid actor in Hollywood, but the third-highest. You don't really need the extra $10 million, and you become a target for greed and excess and all that other stuff." She pauses. "I don't want to be Tom Cruise. Not that there's anything wrong with being Tom Cruise — he's talented, he's handsome, he's really successful — but I don't need to be Tom Cruise."

It's that philosophy that can frustrate people around her — her longtime agent, Joe Funicello, and LeFauve at Egg among them — Perhaps not. As funny as Foster's ' eye-rolling about her mother can be, it resonates with affection. "My mom is crazy," she says. "But her vicarious thrill in my career was to create the most well-respected Frankenstein monster that she could. For whatever reason, she didn't feel she had been taken seriously, so if there is one Gypsy Rose Lee moment, it's her wanting me to be the kind of Grace Kelly who didn't have to be the Princess of Monaco, who could do it on her own, who could matter. As obviously Freudian as it is, it has served me well."

But being a hero — someone who can do it on her own, someone who matters — can be lonely work. This may be why the films Foster directs — Little Man Tate, Home for the Holidays, and the still-simmering Flora Plum — are intimate tales about communion, connection, and family. They are ensemble rather than star vehicles. They are movies with heroines who must find ways to meet their goals and still get dinner on the table. "You get fascinated by the subtleties of everyday life, because you've had to fight to have those experiences," she says. "But you appreciate everyday life more than other people do, too. I've been in the public eye pretty much since I was conscious. I'm sure that makes me completely neurotic, but it also makes me protective in a way that a lot of actors who become famous when they're 30 aren't." They have decided that anonymity is overrated, but she has never had the luxury of that choice. "I would be lying if I said I don't resent it occasionally, but I also don't feel like it's someone else's fault. It's just..." Her voice trails off. "The thing I mourn the most is that it makes you very wary of people, and not able to connect the way you'd like. You want to meet somebody on the subway and have some flukey conversation and know that it's not because the person has a million preconceived ideas about who you are. I'd like to have purer experiences than I have."

Pure is a word that emerges again and again in conversation with Foster. Because she must always wonder whether people love her for herself or for her fame, because she cannot expect pure interactions with the outside world, she has had to create them. She doesn't have to question the motivations of her dog, Lucy, for example. And she never needs to worry that her sons love her for any reason other than for who she is. "It's just the most true experience you can have," she says, beaming. "Why do you think Mel Gibson has seven kids?" Gibson and Foster became friends while filming Maverick for director Richard Donner and have remained close ever since. From the moment they met, Donner says, "I knew I was going to be sitting in the back of the bus for the whole trip. They were just mesmerizing. Jodie is a female Mel, and Mel is a male Jodie." For one thing, they are not seduced by their own glamour. Stardom is, for them, just work. They don't take it home. "Being a public figure can keep you tremendously shallow," Foster says. "There's a life of ease that's offered you, where you never have to make plane reservations or know how much a quart of milk costs, and you can exist with a new friend every day and a different party every night. Or it can turn you into just the opposite, which is somebody who is fiercely grounded and responsible because that feels real to you. I guess I fall into that category."

By the time they met, the Lethal Weapon films had made Gibson into a major star, and he was finding it hard to adjust to the glare. "Nobody tells you that anybody can photograph you and write about you and there's nothing you can do about it," Gibson says. "So you go through a period where you're pretty angry. I'd often ask Jodie about that, and she'd give me little tips like, 'Call this guy. He's got a list of stuff you can do. It just takes a few of the bumps out of life.' And she was right."

Like what, exactly? "Well, like you never — hmm, maybe I shouldn't answer that," he says. "They're kind of trade secrets. But they're just practical things that buffer you against a lot of crap." Foster tends to be vague on this subject, too, for one obvious reason: If people know your hiding places, you're far more likely to be found. "I don't put my address on anything, because within a week, there will be somebody waiting for me outside my house," she says. "And there'd probably be somebody waiting there anyway, but why facilitate it?" Gibson adds. "There are people out there who have tremendous goodwill toward you, but there are people who display bad will, too. There is such a thing as the Evil Eye."

The sun is beginning to slip westward, turning the sky to slate, and Foster is talking about fear, and whistling occasionally at Lucy, who keep wandering too far downhill for comfort. "I'm one of those people who can go sky-diving as long as I know that I'm attached by a wire that's connected to a metal thing and that I've got all the papers about the insurance," she says, laughing. "That's why I play brave characters, because I'm really not." Lucy is, though. In fact, she has suddenly gone nose-to-nose with an unbound Irish setter, also off its leash.

The setter's owner, a pretty brunet, offers calmly, "She's friendly." But isn't so sure. She remains frozen, staring into the setter's eyes, her ears stick-straight. Foster suggests that the woman move uphill while she moves downhill. The dogs never flinch. Foster, now below the canine tableau, begins calling, and after a few seconds, Lucy breaks the standoff and heads toward Foster. "Good girl!" she yells. Too soon.

Lucy suddenly doubles back and pounces on the setter. The sound is like something out of hell, a snarling, yelping cacophony, with Foster shouting over and over, "Lucy, down! Down! Down!" But the whole scene lasts only a few seconds, with no blood drawn, and Lucy hurries back to Foster's side. "She just does that," Foster hollers up to the woman. "I'm sorry." The woman stares at her for a moment, and then says, as if scolding a child, "If your dog's aggressive, you should keep her on a leash."

Foster tries to explain, but the woman, ignoring her, climbs away in a huff.

"We almost got away with it," Foster says, laughing nervously, as she attaches Lucy's leash. "But once she knew I was safe, she went back. She just had to get in a last little..." She pauses, and then adds, a bit too cheerfully, "But see how sweet she is? She wouldn't bite anybody. She just needs to show em who's boss." Of course, it is not dogs that Lucy should be protecting her from. "I get picked on a little bit," Foster says. "But the guys have it harder than the girls do. I think audiences resent the men more than they do big female celebrities. Mel s one of the last great ones. but that s got to be hard being 'Mel Gibson. Sometimes I will go out with him. and people, total strangers, will say the meanest things to him."

"Yeah. that happens sometimes," Gibson says. "fodie has this really maternal, protective thing toward me." He laughs. 'I was in a situation once where she actually got between me and somebody else, and, oddly enough, it was another woman. I guess she couldn't stand it — the stupidities coming out of this woman's mouth — so she stood up and physically..." He laughs again- And it is a funny image: the five-feet-four Foster poised to defend the star of Braveheart. "Jodie didn't even get that vocal.' he says. still laughing. "It was more like a presence. It was interesting." But see how sweet she is? She wouldn't bite anybody. "I've managed to never have a bad enemy, ever," she says, and then deadpans, "even people I hate.

"I have the goody-two-shoes person ality where I have to make everybody else happy," she says, the normal rasp of her rich alto turning light, playful. "It's the martyr thing, and it s not good, because I can be slightly passive-aggressive. I'm not clear about how people are supposed to treat me, and that's why I m always the person who's hanging from the building at three o'clock in the morning. It's the rotten complainer who gets all the attention, but that's a weak position, and I m not comfortable with that much vulnerability." She stops, and continues, with a verbal shrug:

"To an extreme it's not healthy, but moderately it makes for a very successful life. I think it's why people like to work with me, because I don't rock the boat."

Her work ethic is, in fact, legendary. Just ask around. "If you could computer-generate the perfect actor, it would be Jodie," says Rob Lowe, who starred oppo site Foster in The Hotel New Hampshire. "Her temperament is so wonderful. She's not a sweat act." Anthony Hopkins con tinues the theme. "She's very professional, terrific, all those things," he says. "There's no mystery to acting. She's pre pared; she knows her lines. She's one of those people who just make it easy." Most actors "are thoroughbreds," says Andy Tennant, who directed Anna and the King. "They are incredible to watch, but they're skittish, and they can be high-strung and volatile. Jodie is like one of those Budweiser horses — a Clydesdale. She looks like a thoroughbred, but she's built for strength." We could go on.

Silence director Jonathan Demme loves to tell the story about Foster's first dialogue scene in that film. On the first take, he noticed that Foster had elected not to give Starling a southern accent. Her reasoning was that Lecter should be the only one who can detect it. Demme thought the accent was essential, however, and asked her to create one. "She said, 'Okay. No problem,'" Demme says. "So take two, we roll, and there it comes, that whole Clarice Starling voice! It was phenomenal."

Donner learned firsthand how Foster's "no vulnerability" clause makes it almost impossible to have a laugh at her expense. On the set of Maverick, Donner and Gibson decided to play a practical joke on Foster for her birthday. Her scene that day had virtually no dialogue, but when she showed upon the set, Donner pulled her aside, told her the scene had been rewritten, and handed her a two-and-a-half-page soliloquy. "And she looked at me — she's too fucking bright — and I saw this little tremble in her eyes, like, 'Oh, really?'" he says, and starts to laugh. "She took the pages, walked away, was gone about three minutes, came back, and said, 'Okay. Let's shoot it.' And I'll be goddamned if she hadn't committed all that dialogue to memory. She turned it around on us!"

That level of control, that ability to endure anything without so much as a whimper, is a point of pride for Foster, but it goes far deeper than just job performance, and off the set, it's not always to her advantage. "I can basically put my emotions aside and go headfirst," she says. "But it's something I have to watch, because sometimes I don't know how I feel about things." Until later? "Until years later," she says, and laughs. "I am someone who experiences the world through my head, so my psyche's fight, my whole life, has been the head against the heart. That's what all my movies are about, too."

Her characters are, indeed, almost all women who think first and feel later. The exception is Nell. Produced by Foster and directed by Michael Apted, Nell is the storyof a woman who loves so purely that it is almost painful to watch. At the time, the film (and her performance) received a critical lashing that was, for Foster, the emotional equivalent of watching her child being beaten up on the playground but being unable to stop it. On some level, she's still trying to. "It was the most out there I've ever been — the most naked I could possibly be — and people thought I was just foolish," she says. "A lot of the criticism was that I was Oscar-pandering, that the performance was somehow dishonest. It was questioning my motives, and that just sent me to the sanitarium." More important, though, for the first time in Foster's long career, she could not "think" her way into a character. "I did research, but it didn't pan out," she says. "I went and did dance-movement stuff. A bust. I went through every reasonable thing I could think of. Even though I'd developed the goddamned script, I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do. So, finally, I decided to go to this acting coach, this guy in New York. I had never been to an acting coach in my life, and — Oh, God, I don't know if I can tell this story." Just when her brain revs up to racing velocity... "Okay, this is the part of the story that's for print: I go to this guy..." But it doesn't really matter what she says next. Sure, it's a charming narrative, brimming with her usual wit and self-deprecation. It's just not completely true. It's safe.

The real story isn't. It's about a moment of lucid self-awareness, a story that she can't tell without her voice breaking. It is about longing and loss and a door opening. But it is intimate — pure, even — so she will only talk about it when the tape recorder is off, when she is certain only one person is listening. That maybe perplexing (or irritating), but it's a near-perfect solution to Fster's dilemma regarding public life: how to reveal yourself without risk. "There's a side of you that wants people to know who you really are," she says. "Then there's the side of you that says, 'Isn't that sort of an invasion?' People will continually misunderstand you, and they're going to project onto you anyway, whether you're airing your most true self or not."

Evening light brushes against the black hood of the car as it glides along a narrow, winding road. Lucy, weary from her day bullying the unsuspecting dogs of Franklin Canyon, lies against the leather of the backseat, panting softly. Foster steers with one hand, casually contrasting her life to Greta Garbo's reclusive one. But she quickly pulls herself short. "Maybe I shouldn't be making that analogy, because I don't know anything about Greta Garbo," she says, and then, sensing the irony, laughs. "See? There you go."

After 36 years in the public eye, Foster is perhaps the only movie star alive who can make this claim: We cannot name a single person she has ever dated. Not only do we not know whom she has loved, we do not even know if she has, or does. After Charlie was born, she stated that she planned to raise him as "a single mother." But when asked if she prefers being single, she replies, "Well, I won't talk about it." Even the most benign bits of information, it seems, are no longer when they are pushed into the light for mass con sumption. "See, the problem with having a child is that it's a public moment," she explains. "It's the same thing about getting married. It means you're a bull's-eye for everything everyone thinks. I remember going to one of those baby-yoga classes and people were coming up to me. I never had anything in my life be so public, and itreally bothered me the first two weeks because I thought it was weird that people I didn't know could be commenting on something so personal to me.

"I'm just not confessional, and a lot of Americans are," she continues. "Sometimes I get into an elevator and within minutes somebody's telling me about how much money he makes, or how he's cheating on his wife, and I think, 'How can you confess all this stuff to me? You don't even know me!'" But of course he knows her, or thinks he does. We all do. And this is an odd quirk of fame: It inverts the norms of human interaction. We can divulge intimate things to strangers because their judgment cannot hurt us. But if you are famous, you are a stranger to no one, and your elevator confession can easily end up on Extra. We enjoy getting married because the wedding is public — our one, brief, trembling moment of fame. For public figures, a wedding is, as Foster puts it, "just another premiere." So if we understand why we desire to love openly, is it that bizarre if they — if she — prefer to love secretly?

In this context, her statement that she does not "want to be Tom Cruise" be comes more than a snappy metaphor. In her world, celebrating your romantic success in public also means the public will celebrate your romantic failure. Regardless of what we may think of Cruise's marriage to Nicole Kidman, it was still a ten-year union that could not have ended without pain. Still, the legal termination of their relationship was reduced to a scorecard and a cover line: "Who Got What." Big deal, right? They chose that life and understand the costs. So does Foster, and that is a price she is not willing to pay, even if it means she must, instead, endure the whispers about her sexuality, rumors about the paternity of her children, and theories that she has issues with her own father, who left the family before she was born.

"I think speculation and people wanting to know things is pretty natural," she says. "But it makes me feel like the most sacred and significant parts of my life are fodder for objectification, that they belong to someone else. So why would I give it to them? It's easy for people to assume that just because you don't talk about something in the press, that must mean you are closed-off. or that you're not okay about it. but that doesn't mean I don't talk about it with my friends and that I'm not an open person."

It can be tempting to cast Foster as an isolated hero, to see her as someone locked away with her ideals. But what she has built for herself is, in fact, a heroine's life. She does not have the luxury of being single-minded, because her success is now determined by how well she meets the needs of others — children, friends, lovers — and how well she protects them. The only time she has to be a hero, now, is at her own gate. "When we were working together." Gibson says, "she said. You know what? I m going to have children. I didn't expect her to say that. But Jodie does what she says, she says what she means, and she's a very loyal person.' He pauses, and then adds gently, "Underneath the outer shell that she's had to grow to survive is a very soft and vulnerable and beautiful woman. In her soul. In every way. And how can you not admire that?'