Why Jodie Foster says after ‘A Private Life’ she may not act for a while
In “A Private Life,” Jodie Foster plays Lilian Steiner, an American expatriate in France with a comfortable life as a psychoanalyst, a beautiful Parisian apartment, and an ex-husband who still loves her.
Then her longtime client Paula (Virginie Efira) dies, apparently a suicide, though Lilian isn’t so sure.
It’s there that the film takes off, as Lilian falls deeply into a mystery that may or may not be real.
“I think she starts out the movie and you think, ‘Oh, well, she’s just this classically well-educated character who doesn’t listen very well, and is not a very good psychoanalyst,’” Foster says on a recent video call. “And then she starts to unravel as she becomes obsessed with this mystery.
“The truth is that she does not accept that her patient committed suicide, because if she accepted that, she’d have to accept that she’s a terrible fraud,” she says. “Because how could she not know this person was suffering?
“So she goes on this quote-unquote detective route, which ultimately really ends up being an investigation of herself. Not what she anticipated, you know? She didn’t think she needed any help, and she didn’t think she needed to have any doors opened.
“And through what she thought was a mystery, she unraveled her own mystery,” Foster says. “She finds out that she’s a really – well, we knew it already, didn’t we? – an incredibly flawed person that has a lot of insecurities.”
“A Private Life,” which opens Friday, Jan. 16, is a French film in language, cast and cinematic style.
Foster, the only American in the film, delivers her lines like a native French speaker throughout, which also stars Daniel Auteuil as her ex-husband Gabriel and Mathieu Amalric as Simon, her late patient’s husband.
In an interview edited for clarity and length, Foster discussed her connection with writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski’s screenplay, how AI was used in a dream sequence in the film, and why, in her 60s, she’s enjoying her career like never before.
Q: I was curious about your French fluency so I googled, “How did Jodie Foster learn …” and it filled “learn French?”
A: I went to a French school [Lycée Français de Los Angeles]. I started when I was 9. My mom put me in there because she had never traveled anywhere in the world ever. She had gone to Tijuana once for a weekend, and she had also gone to Havana once for a weekend in the ’50s.
But then one day she went on a trip to France, one of those bus tours, and came back and said, “Right, you’re going to be a European actress. We’re going to put you in a French school, you’re going to learn French, and then we’re going to move there.” And that’s what happened.
Q: And this is your first French film in a while, I believe.
A: Yeah, I’ve done a few of them, but I’ve never had a lead like this, a big role like this. I’ve been looking for it for a long time – I had a bunch of boxes I wanted to check – and this was the first time I ever got a script that really was everything I wanted to try to do.
Q: What was it about Rebecca’s script that grabbed you?
A: It had a story, and there were twists here and there. There was a mystery to be unraveled. That being said, it was a small mystery and felt more like a Woody Allen movie, which was what I was hoping for.
I didn’t want to do some sort of overblown coproduction that’s a version of an American movie. I wanted to make an auteur film, and yet I really wanted that story to have a clear-cut momentum.
There’s a section in the film when she goes into hypnosis begrudgingly, because, of course, she has no respect for hypnotists. And she discovers some kind of interior life that is all the things she has not been willing to look at. I thought that was a real opportunity to inject cinema, using the lens of Freudian psychoanalysis, into this very everyday, bourgeois life of an expatriate living in France, and that was something that really excited me.
Q: I know you moved quickly to accept the role. Tell me about that.
A: We met on Zoom first, and then she said, “I’d really like to come meet with you.” I was like, “Well, can you come right away?” She said, “I can come in three days,” and she got on a plane.
I organized all this food for her because I thought, she’s French, and I don’t know what she’s going to want to eat, so I didn’t just get a bad sandwich or anything. Then she came over, and we got to working on the script and we never ate. [She laughs] Seven hours later, and we still hadn’t eaten.
Q: What was on the menu?
A: Oh, so many different things. I did a whole mezze thing because I was like, “What if she’s a vegetarian? I’m going to get all this vegetarian stuff.” Then I got roast chicken, and I got all these desserts because I was like, “What if she’s already eaten and she just wants dessert?”
Q: So what did you two do over the seven hours of work?
A: It was all really directly related to the script. We worked the way I like to work in a rehearsal. We acted through it. So she would read some lines, and I would read some dialogue. The,n as soon as we got into that one scene, we go back and say what is this saying? Is this working?
Mostly, I was just asking questions, and then that would send us off sometimes into bunny trails of different texts about psychoanalysis, or about what she had learned about a medical procedure, or any of the other things that were part of the research. It was everything you could want in a long conversation.
Q: Were there particular moments in the script that really grabbed you right away?
A: There are some things that I really love about the movie. You know, you’re waiting for this big denouement moment where something is revealed that has been burning inside of her the whole time. It happens a couple of times, but it happens once in a car, where there’s this pouring down rainstorm.
She’s just finished kind of uncovering all this mystery, but the car can’t go forward. So she has to smoke a cigarette with her ex-husband for 10 minutes, and finally asks him a question that she’s never asked, which is why did you leave me?
That question is a primordial, primitive question that animates many of us our whole lives without realizing it. It’s a question we just don’t want to ask. For me, that’s more interesting than the mystery of who killed Paula or any of that other stuff.
Q: Yeah, that’s a very strong scene. Very touching that they find a place to connect.
A: That’s what French movies can do, I suppose, that big, bloated American movies can’t. We have to be marketed in such a way that large audiences already know by the trailer exactly what they’re going to see.
But in French films, you can meander, and you start off [watching] a film thinking that’s going to be a mystery, but then it ends up kind of being a thriller, but then it’s sort of romantic and kind of a comedy and also a family drama. You can do all of those things to have a full experience.
Q: Let’s talk about the hypnosis scene, one of the most cinematic moments in the movie. I’m sure a lot of that was added later, but as far as acting –
A: – No, all of that was done in-camera, which is interesting. It’s the kind of technology we use when we do car scenes, kind of a circular room with projection around you. But they added this mirrored floor, so the whole thing is reflected. Whatever happens in the top of the screen is reflected on the bottom of the screen as well.
The character is floating in this color, and all of that was happening in-camera. None of that’s CGI.
Q: And some of it used AI?
A: She brought in AI in order to create some of the images by just saying sort of almost hypnotic keywords about what [Lilian] was thinking about. And AI delivered something that is unhuman in some ways and then particularly emotional.
For instance, [Lilian sees} those walking figures, but they’re walking wrong. Their feet are the wrong direction and they’re kind of in reverse. There’s something messed up about the whole thing, and [director Rebecca Zlotowski] allowed all of the mistakes to be on screen to give you a more unconscious feeling.
If AI is going to be part of our life, which it is, we should dominate it. We shouldn’t just say, “What would you like AI to do?” You should dominate it and try to figure that out.
Q: Dreams are significant in Freudian psychoanalysis, of course. Did you do research into that?
A: Yeah, you know, we don’t do Freudian psychoanalysis here in the States. We kind of discarded Freud a long time ago, with good reason, because he’s a terrible misogynist and did a lot of harm to a lot of people. But France really still has a big tradition for psychoanalysis, and lots of people [in France], everybody that I knew, had done psychoanalysis.
I loved Freudian psychoanalysis for literature and for movies. If you love Hitchcock, you love that lens. So it’s a reference, a cinematic reference as well, it’s not just Freud himself.
But we did meet with a lot of psychoanalytic therapists in Paris, and we asked them a bunch of questions. Saw where people laid down in the room and what they were looking at. How they structure the meetings. [Asked] have you ever had a patient who committed suicide?
Q: In terms of Hitchcock and Freud, are there particular moments or films where you see that influence?
A: All of them, really. “Vertigo,” “Rebecca.” There’s the idea of the unconscious. The staircases. Those cuts to interstitial inserts that are not meaningful in themselves but have to do with human impulses toward death. All that stuff was very important for Hitchcock.
Q: With Virginie as Paula, it’s mostly scenes of her talking on the couch and you listening. I’m assuming you were in the same room for that, but –
A: – No, we weren’t. Or I was very far away because the camera is very close to her, so she wouldn’t be in contact with me. But, you know, this is the miracle of moviemaking. I was talking a couple of minutes ago about “The Silence of the Lambs,” and all of those early scenes with Anthony Hopkins, we’re using that Hitchcock technique where you’re looking into the camera lens.
Many of those scenes, I could never see Anthony Hopkins. He was almost in another room, and he was behind the camera. I could hear him, but I couldn’t see him, and vice versa.
Q: I want to ask you about your strong run of recent roles. “True Detective: Night Country” was great, but also “Nyad” and “The Mauritanian.” How do you choose what to do?
A: In those last five or six years, I really felt like acting. And I probably won’t work again as an actor for a while. I’ll go back to directing. I tend to do that in chunks. I’ve learned that if I don’t prioritize the directing and push the acting off the table, I won’t ever direct again.
So I just wanted to do [acting] stuff and I had some bucket list stuff of people I really wanted to play. Bonnie Stoll, who I played in “Nyad,” is somebody I knew. I knew both of them from Christmas parties and barbecues and stuff in L.A., and I would watch them interact. Their banter and how funny they are together, and I thought, “Oh, I want to play her.” So it was kind of a no-brainer.
I’m finding that turning 60 was just the best thing in the world – even late 50s – to be able to say I can have a different kind of career now that it’s not about having a “career” career. That it’s just about doing good work and telling stories. Helping to tell stories where my character isn’t necessarily central. That’s been a real freedom for me.
Q: And “True Detective”? That’s your first TV acting role in a little bit.
A: Spending seven months in Iceland and having an adventure like that, being stuck with those great people doing this hard thing. There’s been very few times in my life, but I’ve had two or three times, where everything feels like it’s the best work that any of us have ever done.
I think the second that Issa [López] wrote “True Detective,” and it came out of her typewriter – and honestly, the second that she understood that she had to listen to the Native stories and that they would tell the story – something magical happened. We all did the best work of our life.
I’ve had that so few times in my life. I just don’t know if I’ll ever have that experience again.