The only director Jodie Foster tracked down for a role: “I’d like to be in one of your films”
You’d think that Hollywood stars wouldn’t have to do much work on their end to land a role with their dream director, but even Oscar-winning stars have admitted to going out of their way to secure a part in a movie, like Jodie Foster.
The actor began her career as a child, first appearing on screens when she was just three years old in a TV commercial, from where she moved between child-friendly roles like Disney’s Freaky Friday to more controversial titles such as Taxi Driver, earning an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of a prostitute.
By the early 1990s, Foster was officially an Academy Award winner, having bagged the prize for her role as Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, one of the first horror movies to sweep the Oscars, with her portrayal of the trainee FBI agent never paling in spite of her frequent shared screen time with Anthony Hopkins as the terrifying Hannibal Lecter.
Both actors delivered incredible performances, launching the former to even greater acclaim, such that, over the coming years, she took on various roles both on and off screen, making her debut as a director in 1991 with Little Man Tate. Then, in the early 2000s, her legacy as an icon firmly fixed, Foster still took an active role in getting the parts she wanted, and in this instance, she found herself desperate to offer her talents to a certain French filmmaker.
Talking to Total Film, Foster revealed how her desire to collaborate with a director she admired took her on an active search for him in Paris. “I’d made a couple movies in France when I was young, and I’d been dying to make a French film for years. So I was in Paris, and I knew Jean-Pierre Jeunet was here and I tracked him down,” she explained.
The filmmaker made his first two movies, the hilariously dark comedy Delicatessen and the visual feast The City of Lost Children, with Marc Caro, before hitting the mainstream with Alien Resurrection. However, it was Amélie that really secured his success, earning various Academy Award nominations, including ‘Best Foreign Language Film’.
Led by Audrey Tautou, the film is a charming tale of a quiet young woman who decides to do good for others while ignoring her own happiness. It was a hit and remains one of the most celebrated French movies ever made, offering up a captivating and whimsical vision of Paris, steeped in nostalgia and gentle humour, something that of course caught Foster’s attention.
She was desperate to work with Jeunet, so she did all that she could to make this dream a reality. “I said, ‘I really want to make a French movie, and I’d like to be in one of your films, so if you have a part in a movie you’re doing, you know, a small part, a big one, whatever, just call me up’. And that’s how it worked out,” the actor explained.
Soon enough, she found herself playing Élodie Gordes in A Very Long Engagement, which starred Tautou in the leading role, and while it might not have been as successful as Amélie, Foster had achieved exactly what she had set out to do, clearly proving, if you want something in Hollywood, you really have to go out and get it.
