Which movies has actor Jodie Foster directed?
Jodie Foster’s career has followed an unusual path. Her first major role was as a teenage sex worker who forms a bond with Robert De Niro’s vigilante anarchist Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. But by then, at the tender age of 12, she had already been acting professionally for close to a decade.
Given how young she was at the time of filming, her appearance in the film has been a long-standing topic of debate and it also led to a bizarre incident of global import. In 1981, John Hinckley, Jr became obsessed with her character and attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan in a bid to impress her.
This would be enough for anyone to quit the business for good, but Foster stuck with her profession and became one of her generation’s most respected and awarded actors. She’s won two Oscars, three Baftas, three Golden Globes, and an Emmy. She’s played powerful, complex characters throughout her career, from Iris in Taxi Driver to the iconic FBI agent Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs to a no-nonsense police chief in True Detective: Night Country.
Since the 1980s, however, Foster has also shown her aptitude for directing. After contributing to an anthology adaptation of Stephen King stories in 1985, she began helming feature films as well.
So, which movies has Jodie Foster directed?
Little Man Tate (1991)
Foster’s first foray into directing was the 1991 feel-good drama Little Man Tate, in which Adam Hann-Byrd stars as a child prodigy struggling to adjust to the disappointingly banal world around him. Foster co-stars as the boy’s loving mother.
Critics were quick to point out that Foster herself had been a child prodigy and must have found personal parallels with the story. The film wasn’t a box office smash, but it received largely favourable reviews and made it clear that directing was not just a vanity project for the star.
Home for the Holidays (1995)
Four years after Little Man Tate, Foster went behind the camera again, this time without having to work double time as an actor. The film stars Holly Hunter as a woman who hits rock bottom in her professional and personal life and decides to spend the holidays with her dysfunctional family. It features a stacked supporting cast, including Robert Downey Jr, Claire Danes, and Anne Bancroft.
It’s standard holiday fare that turned out to be a disappointment at the box office due in large part to a shaky script.
The Beaver (2011)
It took Foster 15 years to return to directing, and the film she opted for was a tough sell. Controversial star Mel Gibson plays a man who, in response to work and marital woes, acquires a beaver puppet that he uses as his exclusive form of communication.
For such a bizarre premise, the movie received decent reviews, but Gibson’s personal controversies overshadowed its rollout, and there was nothing particularly redeeming about the film’s execution to compensate for it.
Money Monster (2016)
Five years after The Beaver bombed at the box office, Foster helmed a taut 100-minute thriller about a talk show host and his crew who get taken hostage live on air by a disgruntled viewer. Starring George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Dominic West, and Jack O’Connell as the hostage-taker, it turned out to be Foster’s most successful directing venture to date, pulling in $93million at the box office against a budget of $27m.
Of all the movies that Foster has directed, Money Monster is by far the most crowd-pleasing and exactly the kind of well-paced thriller to watch if you’re scrolling through streaming platforms on a weeknight.
