"Part of me loves that. It's something that I have that they can't have. It's all mine. It's special and creative and completes me in a way nothing else does, and part of it is terrifying. It's terrifyingly lonely. There is a creative life that you lead that is at once horrible and shameful."
But why is acting shameful?
"What you think about and who you become," she said. The word 'shame' crops up over and over in the conversation.
"I never met somebody who was so willing to go where the material demands that you go. I think she found it quite thrilling," said Jordan. "Every scene is seen through her eyes. There is a theme in her films -- I was worried -- where she is horrendously beaten, and horrendously abused, and she suffers it." He reels off "Taxi Driver," "The Accused," "Silence of the Lambs." " I did say to her at one stage, 'You're not a bit scared?' Here [in this movie] you could be a target for gun freaks. Something in her wants to put herself in that dilemma." Foster thrashes her demons in movie after movie after movie.
Anger underlies more than a few of the performances, but Foster insists her road map to making her character credible was not vengeance, but grief. And the magical thinking that accompanies great loss. Foster explained how the attack has rendered her character invisible in a way, defiled her so deeply that it's taken away her corporeal nature.
"She is somebody who has no body," says Foster. "She has this voice left, and she goes walking the streets at night. There's a formlessness to her. A kind of invisibility. But the second she puts that gun in her pocket, the second she squeezes it, it materializes her for a moment."
Her character's choice is simple, existential. She wants to live, so her opponent -- the criminal -- must die. "I want to live. You die. It's a continual choice for life," says Foster. Moreover, Foster's screen alter ego lives in the fantasy that maybe if she re-creates the moment her boyfriend is killed, "this time the ending is different. Maybe he'll come back. Every time that she shoots, she has him back for a minute. It's this sick, twisted life affirmation."
As Foster talks her voice grows more urgent. Her eyes turn watery; she becomes caught up in the spell she's consciously weaving. But then just as suddenly, the show's over. Foster becomes self-conscious about how her thought process might sound in the cold, rational daylight. She recomposes herself, subtly shifting back into her everyday mode.
The raw Jodie Foster she saves for the screen.
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rachel.abramowitz@latimes.com
