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Jodie Foster: The Brave One
Still on top after more than four decades in Hollywood, the two-time Oscar-winner takes a "monstrously existential journey" in Neil Jordan's The Brave One.
There aren’t many careers like Jodie Foster’s. Turning 45 in November and being in front of (and sometimes behind) the camera for more than four decades, she occasionally finds that vast experience comes back to haunt her.
“With TiVo, I can plug in my name and it’ll have stuff from when I was seven years old,” says Foster. One lazy day at home with her two kids, she came upon “Gunsmoke,” the long-running TV show in which she appeared as a child. “I guess I must’ve done this ‘Gunsmoke’ when I was six or something, so I watched it with my kids and we recorded it. There’s a big close-up of me and then it goes to a wider shot that I’m in, and there I am, just picking my nose so badly. Of course, the kids made me rewind it a thousand times—they were screaming laughing.”
Though her performance in that particular production seems to have been unintentionally hilarious, Foster, as everyone knows, is best known for her mostly stellar performances in some of the great film dramas of the last 30 years. Among the most acclaimed actors of her generation—she’s won two Academy Awards and been nominated for two more—Foster returns to the screen on September 14th with director Neil Jordan’s The Brave One.
Playing Erica Bain, a National Public Radio-style on-air personality, Foster found a much deeper character than people might initially surmise. In the midst of an after-dark stroll through Central Park, Erica’s life is thrown into chaos when she and her fiancé, David (Naveen Andrews of “Lost”), are attacked. David is murdered and Erica is left in a coma for several weeks. Upon awakening, Erica quickly realizes that life will never be the same.
Scarred on the inside and out—it takes all of her resolve to simply leave her apartment—Erica buys a pistol with the intention of defending herself from further danger. Soon, however, she develops a streak of anonymous vigilantism that is shocking to both herself and the tabloid press.
At the same time, Erica befriends a cop named Mercer (Terrence Howard), who’s tasked with solving the string of apparently connected shootings. A closet fan of Erica’s radio show, Mercer is flattered when she asks for an interview about the murders. But his suspicion is piqued when small but telling details raise the notion that Erica’s interest in the investigation might be more than purely journalistic.
The movie is a searing portrait of a broken woman who comes to learn more about herself and her city than any of us would bargain for. Foster, speaking from her home in Los Angeles, says she realized from the start that the story had the potential to deliver a heavy emotional punch.
It hit her “immediately,” she says, “when I first read the script years ago—when the script was not nearly anything like this. I think that’s what you do: You recognize that there’s some little piece in there that’s just so powerful that you can’t let it go. At that time the script was very different, there was another actress involved, and I kept saying: If she ever falls out give me a call, but I think it needs a really, really long and arduous rewrite. So they called me a year later and said: ‘Okay, well, she’s out and now we’d like to start shooting in six weeks.’ I said: ‘No, no, no, I don’t think so.’ So we spent another six to eight months working on the script with Cynthia Mort [one of the film’s three screenwriters, along with Roderick Taylor and Bruce A. Taylor] and then brought Neil Jordan aboard.
“Neil was really the final person who was able to appreciate that there was something poetic and beautiful and monstrous that drew you in,” notes Foster. “I think he was really able to turn that into something that speaks in the language of the movies that he makes.”
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This story was published in the Summer 2007 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Jodie Foster, Statistical Anomaly
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