Jodie Foster: interview outtakes

Photo: Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty Images; Photo illustration: Jamie DiVecchio Ramsay

Toward the end of my recent chat with Jodie Foster—after she noted the etymology of gypped—we had an interesting exchange that doesn't appear in our published Q&A with the director and star of The Beaver:

Like your character Meredith, you have two boys.

Well, I didn’t write the script.

But you were drawn to it.

I’m always drawn to it, and I will forever be drawn to little boys, for sure. Panic Room had a girl, but she kinda looked like a boy. [Laughs] I make personal movies, and I put my life in there.

About being in this business for 45 years, you said, “There’s no way you can do that and not be as nutty as a fruitcake.”
[Laughs] That’s true, that’s true.

Why is that true? Why this business in particular?

Well, it could’ve been another business. I mean, I could’ve been an ambassador’s child growing up in some rarefied way, and that would’ve made me crazy, too. This particular way of growing up is not quote-unquote the normal way to grow up, and it has really big demands psychologically, but I don’t think it’s impossible to be a well-adjusted person, and I think I’m a pretty well-adjusted person. I have my kookiness, like we all do, and neurotic points and things that I’ve had to overcome. And you know, maybe it’s a good thing to be given something that requires you to sink or swim so much. If you grow up in middle America in a perfectly fine house with perfectly fine two parents and a dog, maybe you aren’t challenged as much as a young person to find yourself and to hold so feverishly to an identity that means that you stand for something. I don’t think that the best comes of being sheltered from experience.