The actress has already won a Golden Globe for playing a lawyer fighting for a Guantanamo detainee.
Jodie Foster is sitting in her pyjamas. We will miss Zoom interviews when they go. Abstract art fills her wall and she is energetic, welcoming — the word FRIEND is emblazoned across her brown nightwear. It is tricky to close the distance inherent in video calls, but Foster manages it. "I didn't realise I had anything today," she says with a laugh. "I was going on a hike! Then I went, 'Wow! A bunch of people are calling?' Weird! I haven't quite brushed my hair."
A few weeks after we spoke she was back on Zoom for the Golden Globes, winning best supporting actress for her role as the real-life lawyer Nancy Hollander in The Mauritanian. Again, relaxed. Foster and her wife, Alexandra Hedison, sat, kissing, on the sofa with their dog. The Mauritanian deserves the attention. Directed with gritty style and surprising warmth by Kevin Macdonald (maker of the Oscar-winning documentary One Day in September and The Last King of Scotland), it tells the story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi (played by Tahar Rahim), who was held in Guantanamo Bay from 2002 until 2016. He was never charged. Hollander is the lawyer who battled to free him and Foster plays her with the requisite poise and pluck. It is the first time of note the double-Oscar winner has been on screen in a decade.
Which is still a lot, given that when we met five years ago Foster said acting is "not what a normal person should do". She laughs. "Did I?!" She did. (Back then, she had just directed a film.) Yet seeing her in films makes you realise what is missed when she is not in them — that humanity; a knack for being convivial and intense at the same time. It is an unlearnable talent but then she became an actor by accident when she was 3 and landed a part her brother was going for. She never had time to learn. Nearly 50 films followed, though recently not so many.
Has she become pickier? "Well, I've always been pretty picky," she says quickly, words come with a rattle and rasp — she would sound terrific reading beat poetry. "But things changed as I got older. I want to express myself differently and directing is a priority for me, as are other things in my life. I always thought movies were the only meaningful thing in the world. There was no other way of having purpose. More important than being a soldier or a doctor. But when I turned 50 I realised there are other things. I realised I just wanted to act when it felt right."
Foster is 58, born and brought up in Los Angeles. Had she been to an acting school like Juilliard, she thinks maybe she would throw herself into more roles she cares less about. "But that's not my personality. Or how I started." It is less a job for her — more the only existence she has ever known.
"Well, movies changed my life," she says smiling. It's a fond memory of being alone with her mother, Evelyn, decades ago. "From a young age, that was my place. My mum was a single mum and all my brothers and sisters much older. They were out of the house by the time I was 10, so our whole life was my mum handling her feelings, whether depression, anxiety or fear, by taking me to the movies every day. Then we'd have deep conversations, whether about the world or her life.
"Meaning was all channelled through movies. So if you ask my feelings about, I don't know, John F. Kennedy, I'm going to refer to the Oliver Stone movie. If you ask me how I feel about the Second World War, I go to Fassbinder. It was only as I got older that I realised there are other ways."
That said, she likes Anthony Hopkins' The Father because it tackles dementia, which her mother suffered from. Can films still help people to work through their life? "They can," she says. "When a film has resonance for you and you ask yourself really complicated questions, it means it has the opportunity to do that with other people too."
Which was something The Accused did in 1988, dealing with the rape of Foster's character and a lack of repercussions. It felt ahead of its time and dealt with a topic that has resurfaced this past year, in real life and on screen, in I May Destroy You and Promising Young Woman. "Well yes, but with a new voice," Foster says. "And a new power and understanding. Optimistically — and you can tell I'm an optimist — I believe we are moving towards getting better instead of worse, and I've always hoped films can be a part of that. I know movies have made me a better person instead of a worse person. They forced me to have a reckoning about things I've said or done. Forced me to grow up. And I want to be a part of that change, because it's the tool I have. I don't know how to do many other things."
So difficult films can be educational? "Yes," she says. "Honestly, that's why ..." She pauses a little, which is rare for a motormouth. "Well, people have said to me, 'Why don't you do comedies? You never even did a romantic comedy.' And I say, 'I've done Maverick.' But there are a number of reasons why I don't do comedies. I like them but they don't give me the same feeling of significance and, even as an actor doing them, I think they can be kind of fun for a week, then you start getting hungry for feeling like you should be doing something more important."
Which leads us to The Mauritanian. Foster is not a huge fan of political films. "Sometimes the writing is lazy and all facts, which doesn't interest me." What she does like is politics told through a character, where the latter is the point, not the conduit. Macdonald's film is that — we live with Rahim's Slahi from the moment he is wrongfully arrested, accused of being an al-Qaeda sympathiser, to when he is rightfully released, via torture in Guantanamo Bay. The real man had seen one of Foster's films. "Maverick!" she says, laughing.
Speaking of real life, Hollander — the lawyer Foster plays — pops up on the Zoom. The two women have a great rapport. On Slahi, Foster says he is a whole load of contradictions.
"Like Nancy," she says with a smile, looking at Hollander. "Nancy will tell you she loves to race cars, has red lipstick and all of that — yet is this centred, focused ...." Foster stops. "Yes, you've got it!" Hollander is wearing the lipstick. A very cool and searingly intelligent woman of 77, she represented Chelsea Manning when the former soldier was accused of espionage.
Hollander has distressing stories about Guantanamo Bay, "Gitmo". How trying to sort a phone call with her client, about either the case or his brother dying, took days. About the McDonald's that a lawyer could stop at to buy something for a prisoner's breakfast. There is also a gift shop. The film shows all this but what can cinema not convey? Is it a touch? A smell?
"It's not a smell for me," Hollander says of the film's limits. "It's the loneliness and remoteness. The hard part for me was leaving. Every time, I had no idea if he would get out. We would hug and I'd do everything I could to hold back tears."
Very few of the 775 detainees brought in shackles to Guantanamo were ever charged, yet representing them — especially after 9/11 — was met with animosity. Hollander just insists everybody deserves a decent lawyer. "My issue is a fair trial," she says. "And you've got to believe your own s***. If you figure out a defence, you've got to believe it."
This year is the 20th anniversary of 9/11. "I was on bed rest, about to have a baby," Foster recalls. "My wife shoved me and said: 'Turn on the TV.' But it was also the first day of my 3-year-old's preschool, so we decided to have a news-free house. It was this strange feeling of knowing there was this whole thing lurking on the other side I wasn't allowed to look at, because of the children." Hollander was at home and got a call telling her to put the TV on. "I asked, 'What channel?' And they said: 'It doesn't matter.'"
What do they remember thinking in the weeks immediately after the attack?
"I needed to get to New York," Foster jumps in. "I felt really bereft and needed to connect with people I knew there. I bought a place there soon after, because I felt I had lost touch with the people I loved. And I saw it as an opportunity for all of us to find our humanity. I was super-optimistic! It felt like we had been the victims of something and would somehow connect with the world and, instead of being the global bully, be embraced again internationally."
She sighs and, with great timing, adds: "And I was really wrong."
Hollander says they blew it completely. "But that's to be expected in this country. It made a difference when representing Muslims. It made it almost impossible to get past a jury or a judge. I don't think we've learnt anything. When I signed a contract for this film in 2015, I wanted it to get Mohamedou out. That was my focus. This might help him. Now, I just hope it gets the other 40 out."
Back to make-believe. Thirty years on from playing Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, Foster is once again walking into a jail to meet a prisoner. Did she think of Hannibal Lecter? "I thought about it when they set up the shot," she admits. "And could see they were doing the shadow thing on Tahar. I thought, 'Gosh, I hope people don't make that reference.'" Ah, sorry. "But it's hard not to. It's women walking into a jail with a man who has a possible life sentence. You're going to make that association."
She and Hopkins, who played Lecter, are sweet together. They recently met to discuss the anniversary of Jonathan Demme's masterpiece and, as they wound up the chat, he called her "Clarice" as she said: "Bye, Dr Lecter!" However, as with everything, the thriller is considered problematic by some. Largely because of the portrayal of the villain Buffalo Bill as a transsexual character.
How does Foster think the film holds up? "Well, it's extraordinary," she says. "But 30 years old. So we've changed. And it's good for film-makers, for people to come to us and for us to examine what they say and look to do better. Jonathan was incredibly socially conscious. I think he was really crushed by the controversy after Silence of the Lambs. At the time, we felt we were honouring the book — and, if you look, [Bill] is not a transsexual. This is a person who hates himself and wants to change. But I think Jonathan was able to say that if he were able to do it again, there are ways of doing better and, 30 years on, you know, I feel we've grown as a culture."
That culture is changing. From the ways people create and discuss art, to how viewers watch it, usually at home. Foster says the latter has been coming for a long time but she is fine with that. Yes, as someone who has loved sitting in a cinema since she was very young, discovering eastern European movies, hanging with her mother, the imminent end of that part of social history is sad. But we move on. And whether at a cinema or on a phone, she does not mind where her work is watched, so long as the work is good.
Streaming opens up the past to future generations at a press of a button. Which of her films would she most like people to see forever? "I mean, Taxi Driver is the best movie I've made," she says. "Then Silence of the Lambs. But there's a movie I didn't even make, that I helped release in the US, called La Haine. It's one I'm the most proud of, even if I had nothing to do with how wonderful it is."
She means the incendiary Mathieu Kassovitz classic, about riots and class in the Parisian suburbs, and how typical of her to pick as her best work a film that this actor — one of the finest of her generation — does not even act in. But then movies for her have always been about more than just the star.
The Mauritanian is available on Amazon Prime Video now.
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London