Jodie Foster on the dumbing down of Hollywood

Jodie Foster on her accidental career, the Hollywood “fear cabal” and cinema’s great dumbing down.

Jodie Foster, the double Oscar-winning star of 42 films, is an actress by accident.

“Totally by accident,” she says of that considerable glitch.

“Had I not been a child actor, I don’t think it’s what I would have ended up doing. I was three. My brother went to audition, but they couldn’t leave me in the car. I got the part. The fact that I wasn’t meant to be an actor, that it’s not natural to me, made my work different. I think that’s why I was different.”

She’s 53 now, in Manhattan to attend a 40th anniversary screening of Taxi Driver, the Martin Scorsese classic that made her famous at 13. “It’s how they keep you prisoner. They keep feeding you,” she jokes. The food talk is a metaphor for her career, too. After Taxi Driver, she was in The Accused, The Silence of the Lambs, Contact. Even actors who hate acting would want to be in those movies, but there aren’t many good roles for a woman of her age now.

Foster’s a fast talker. Google “Jodie Foster voice” and you will find people who hate her voice. It’s the depth of it, apparently; how she hits the beginning of words to really let you know they’re starting. It’s the naysayers’ loss. Her voice on screen has made her unique and authentic; in person it’s the same, adding weight to a slight frame (160cm) that, topped on the day we meet with a neat fringe and circular glasses, makes her look not unlike a librarian.

There’s an on-set photo from the new film she’s directed, Money Monster, of her with George Clooney. He’s mid-anecdote; she looks on admiringly, but at a remove. Foster is merely famous; her film’s two leads, Clooney and Julia Roberts, are movie stars. “It comes naturally to them,” she says, content. “It doesn’t to me. It is not in my personality to be a spokesman.” Which is why, perhaps, she stayed silent when hounded about her sexuality in the 1990s; why, to the surprise of nobody, she came out only in 2013. She doesn’t like to be front and centre. She is more interested in the way the world is run and, specifically, in the people it runs over.

Her latest film is a thriller about blue-collar Kyle (Jack O’Connell), who loses his savings when the host of a brash money show (Clooney) gives out poor advice on shares. Kyle holds him hostage live on air as the show’s producer, Patty (Julia Roberts), calmly oversees the proceedings. It has lines about how the bad guys are not Muslims, but governments and banks. Kyle has been screwed by the system. Audiences will barrack for him, I say.

“Except he is wielding a gun,” Foster begins, before flipping the script and sympathising. “But he has the right to be enraged. I mean, it’s not fair. He did everything right. He worked hard. Lots of people in America are saying the same thing. They’re pissed off, because much of this world is engineered specifically to keep them down.” I mention the US election. “Yes,” she says wearily. Kyle’s challenging of the status quo, however, echoes the appeal voters have found in Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Accidental timing or a statement?

“Well,” Foster says, “I’m not a political person at all.” You’re not? “I know, people are surprised. But I just make movies. It’s my way of expressing. It just happens that the movie is out in this political time. But all sides are represented ... “ There is more to this speech — the housing crisis of 2008, the crash of 1929, the bubbles and troughs that “some argue are engineered by banks” — but still she says she’s not good at making movies with a political point of view. She just makes movies, with a backdrop.

It’s all she’s ever known.

Foster was born in 1962 in LA, to a couple who didn’t work in showbiz. As an actor, she has been drawn to characters who are “going through fear to come out with a fuller understanding of who they are”. As a director, her picks are more nebulous.

It’s hard to draw a line from her 1991 debut, Little Man Tate (boy genius), to her last film, 2011’s The Beaver (mad Mel Gibson and puppet), but this is her priority now. Is she bored with acting?

“Well,” she admits, “I burn out every once in a while, then I find it again. But I can’t go from movie to movie, junket to junket. I compartmentalise real-life stuff and persona stuff, but damage from living in a persona for extended periods is too great.” Self-absorption, she calls it. “It’s not what a normal person should do. Look at Obama when he was on the campaign trail. Same words, what, 250,000 times? At some moment, he has to look at himself in the mirror and go, ‘You’re a phony!’ And if he doesn’t, there’s something wrong with him.”

The funny thing about Foster is that, for someone who admits to worries about quotes being turned into soundbites, she offers up superb soundbites. On the news: “Increasingly, news is pain ... I want some more pain!” On the tough rape thriller The Accused, the role she says she had to fight the most to shape: “They wanted to make [my character] attractive. There is something sick about that. ‘If she’s going to be raped, make sure she’s attractive!’” Who are “they”? “The fear cabal.”

She’s been around too long not to have big opinions, and perhaps misses the old days. She soared through the late 1970s in Taxi Driver, Bugsy Malone, as the then youngest host on TV’s Saturday Night Live. She drops Vietnam into the conversation as if it were yesterday: it’s hard to remove her from the decade that made her. She knows something like The Accused wouldn’t make it past script meetings these days. “It’s not the way it used to be. You used to have complicated conversations.”

This century, Hollywood’s output is little more than a never-ending superhero fight with occasional penis jokes by Seth Rogen. Foster blames the 2008 crash for cinema’s great dumbing-down.

It’s a convincing argument, about America’s culture becoming its main export: “The French make cheese. The US makes media.” As such, the film industry changed forever, smoothing the edges off difficult plots and characters to pander to the lowest common denominator.

Broadly, then, why are films such as Money Monster rare? “It’s entirely driven by the economy and a self-fulfilling prophecy by the studios. They became interested in getting a larger market share from one piece of material. They decided it was a better risk model to make one $200 million movie with superheroes than 25 films.”

She seems split between disappointment and anger. The former comes from that resigned side, the one that likes being at home and doesn’t want any hassle. The latter, though quiet, is what you take away from meeting her. Superheroes? She’s not keen. We talk about how none of those behemoths is directed by a woman, and her long response is by turns cocky and battling. “I have worked my entire life,” she starts. “I worked 50 years to get where I am, to become a director. It took me this long, and I’m going to make that movie? I don’t think so.”

Recent research showed that two of the biggest studios have no films by female directors out between now and 2018. Yet Foster slaps down the suggestion of quotas. “It’s a simplistic argument.

The quota thing’s not going to work. You can’t legislate art. People say, ‘We should have more women in mainstream movies.’ Well, yeah, but we don’t have any women in the system, so how do you expect executives to trust women if they’re not in the system already?

“I’ve done one movie with a female director.

When I was growing up, there were no women anywhere. Make-up, sometimes. We’ve come a long way — just not in that arena for mainstream movies. It’s not a plot, it’s neglect. Nobody was

thinking about it.” She pauses. “Why are women considered risks in Hollywood?” It is, thankfully, a rhetorical question. “Why is it a risk to take on a female director? Really, what’s the risk? Nobody in America knows who directs movies. If I go on the street and ask who directed Steve Jobs, they are not going to know. It’s not the public keeping women from directing movies. It’s some idea in the studio system at this highly competitive time that they don’t want any risks whatsoever. And they perceive women as risks.” They would be the fear cabal again. She’s saying that nothing is going to change for decades.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Foster is her love of video games. It stems from the two teenage boys, Charlie and Kit, she has with her ex-girlfriend Cydney Bernard (the boys’ biological father is a closely guarded secret), but it’s become professional, too. Her sons are gamers and, passionately, she says the most exciting work on screen happens in that industry right now.

“You go to those gaming conferences — you can’t believe the talent. The level of narrative understanding in my sons’ generation is much more complex than ours.”

The danger, I moot, is that if the biggest films remain as simple as they are, cinema could lose its brainy audience to consoles for good. She’s not convinced. There is still intelligent film out there if you look for it. She mentions Inception. “I got lost in five minutes,” she says. “And [my youngest] figured it out at age 12.” Fine. But at about that age, hadn’t she already been in Taxi Driver?

* Money Monster is in cinemas now