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.

by Kevin Canfield | Published July 31, 2007

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In a sense, The Brave One is a story of limited scope—that of a woman who is tragically wronged and reacts with an outburst of violence. On the other hand, the movie deals with the sort of big themes—right versus wrong, living with fear—that mark it as a movie very much inspired by the post-9/11 era in which it was made. “Not just the time in which it’s made in America, but also specifically in New York,” Foster says. “I’ve never seen the movie as a revenge movie in any way,” Foster continues. “People kind of mention it and then [after seeing it] they go, ‘Yeah, I guess it really isn’t.’ It’s not really revenge; it’s a much deeper, monstrously existential journey.

“New York is not the same today as it was in the 1970s with Taxi Driver. That was a different time. The character of the city has changed, and of course 9/11 changed everybody. It is the safest city in the world, it really is. And if you are the one person out of a million who is violated in that way and feels powerless, does it make you feel any safer to know that you’re a statistical anomaly? But that fear/rage is very well put in the movie. Once you have encountered it, you realize that it’s been there all along, waiting.”

To prepare for the role, Foster hiked all over the city. “All in New York and almost all at night,” she says. “Most of my ‘research’ was just walking. I walked and walked for hours and hours. There’s something about that—about having your iPod in… or just listening to the sounds of the city with one of those new digital recorders. Going for hours and hours, there’s a kind of meditative, isolated quality to it.”

She also listened to a lot of radio. “I’m a big NPR fan,” she says. “I spend a huge amount of the day listening to the radio. Sometimes I just sit in my garage because I’m not ready to come into the house; I’ll spend 45 minutes in the car finishing up whatever it was I was listening to.

“I went to a lot of public radio stations. I saw everything, every kind of show… We kind of designed this idea of a radio show around the story of the movie and around this person who loves New York and is pulled in by the nostalgia of it. When this thing happens, suddenly her relationship with New York becomes completely different.”

Not surprisingly, given her studies as a literature student at Yale, Foster says the written word moves her like no other art form, which meant countless hours were spent with the script. “I sort of create a narrative in my head, I guess because I am very verbal and very language-oriented—that’s what moves me,” she says. “Somebody will put me in front of a gravestone and go, ‘Okay, that’s your grandfather. What are you feeling?’ And I’m like, ‘Uh, nothing?’ But if you give me a poem or you give me a beautiful sentence or lyrics to a song, that makes sense to me and touches me in the way that nothing else does. It’s this voice thing—this driving voice thing, this voice in your head.”

The work she puts in before a shoot even starts is a manifestation of Foster’s desire to continue her evolution as an actor. “I hope I’m different than I was 35 years ago,” she jokes. “I really do. Or 40 years ago, certainly.

“You know, it kind of takes what it takes, and every actor does different things in order to figure out how to get there and how to be inspired. I didn’t go to Juilliard, so I don’t really have that whole vocabulary—I don’t really know what you’re ‘supposed’ to do. And I don’t have any [preparation] exercises. But you come up with stuff as the years go on that makes you passionate. For me, I’m a real language person, so the text just means a lot to me, the script means a lot to me, the story that I’m trying to tell means a lot to me. I get kind of obsessed with that. Even though I can makes jokes and have dinner with my kids, it does change and inform your personality. It kind of makes you live with your heart on your sleeve a little bit during the shoot. I think as the years have gone on, I’m not so ashamed of that, and I’ve allowed myself to accept that a little bit, that I do get a little ‘actory’ when I’m shooting.”

The Brave One is Foster’s eighth film in 10 years. Though this is a respectable workload, Foster is not interested in churning out multiple movies each year, as some of her peers seem bent on doing. Asked if she’s become more particular about the parts she takes on, she says: “Definitely, yeah. Certainly in the last 15 years—10 years at least—I’ve been much, much choosier. A lot of it is just you get older and you have a different way of spending your time… You want to give it your all and you want to be able to go on location because the location’s right, but you also have to have a life. It’s very hard for me to compromise my life, so I have to really, really, really love it.”

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