JODIE FOSTER DECIDED TO, FIRST, BE A PERSON

Jodie Foster presents Mel Gibson with the Golden Globe for best director, for Braveheart, 1996.

by Jack Tewksbury

For forty years the HFPA has recorded interviews with famous and celebrated actors, actresses and filmmakers. The world’s largest collection of its kind — over 10,000 interviews — is now in the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Library. The audios are fascinating. Below is an excerpt: two-time Golden Globe winner and 2012 Cecil B. de Mille recipient Jodie Foster recalls how important it was, for her, to take a break from acting in the early 1980s, dedicating most of her time and attention to her studies at Yale—and becoming, in the process, a better actor and a fully grounded person.

“When  I  first  went  to  Yale, I was  on  an  acting –  is-not-enough  path. I thought  it  wasn’t  stimulating enough. At  the  end  I  realized  it  was  me  who  wasn’t  allowing  it  to be.

The ages  between  seventeen  and  twenty  two are so seminal  for  everybody.  You  learn  to  know  how  you  feel  about things,  you  get  involved  with  people  and issues  you  would never  have  known. I  don’t  know  who  I  would  have  been had  I  stayed  only  in  the  film  industry.

I had  never  been  around  people  my  own age,  people  my own  age  doing  fascinating  and  stimulating  things.  I  was  so  inspired  by  humanitarianism.  We  were  fighting  for  all sorts  of  causes. If  you  were a caring  person,  you  were  involved  on  looking  at  the  wrongs  and  injustices  of  the  world.  It  was  an era  when  humanitarian  values  were  upheld.  The  cool  people  were  humanistic.  I  don’t  think  that’s  as  apparent these  days.

I  don’t  believe  in  this  idea  of  a  feminine  sensibility,  best  suited  for  smallish,  rosy – colored  sepia  movies, where people  say  “I  love  you”  all  the  time.  I  believe  in  a  human  sensibility. The  issue  is  storytelling.  A  man  is  entitled to  my  feminine  sensibility  just  as  much  as  I  am.  I  have had  twenty–five  years  of  relationships  without  gender.  I think  those  barriers  are  changing.

I  made  a  decision  at  a  very  young  age  that  I  would try  to  live  the  same  life  even  if  my  career  had  its  ups and  downs.  I  didn’t  want  to  be  one  of  those  actors  with a  seven  zillion  dollars  house  in  Beverly  Hills  and  a  huge mortgage,  who  has  to  do  the  Towering  Inferno.

I  don’t  believe  fluctuations  with  your  money  should have  anything  to  do  with  your  personality.  I  will  always drop  off  my  letters  at  the  post  office,  pick  up  my  dry   cleaning,  drive  my  own  car, because  that’s  what  living  is. If  I  stopped  living,  then  what’s  the  point?  Just  so  I  can make  a  few  more  phone  calls?

Maybe  this  is  the  dumbest  thing  in the  word,  but what  I  would  want  to  be  remembered  for  is  that  I   made  a  really  mean  leek  vinaigrette  or  that  I  really  loved  Miles  Davis’s  trumpet.  I  want  to  be  remembered   by  the  details  of  my  life  that  are  ordinary,  but  spectacular  to  me.

My  favorite  days  involve  sitting  in  my  house,  listening  to  my  records,  cooking  things  for  people,  laughing  hysterically  at  very,  very  bad  television. I’d  rather  be  remembered  for  those  than  any  sort  of  bigger  stuff  that  I’ve done.”