![Jodie Foster Talks “Cruel” Child Stardom, Uninteresting De Niro Lunches & Fighting For Women Directors [Marrakech]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/01134404/IMG_6679-1.jpg "Jodie Foster Talks “Cruel” Child Stardom, Uninteresting De Niro Lunches & Fighting For Women Directors [Marrakech]")
Jodie Foster didn’t romanticize her career when she spoke in front of a packed audience at the 22nd Marrakech International Film Festival. In an intimate onstage conversation, she looked back on six decades in front of the camera and admitted she never would have chosen the profession that defined her life.
She told the crowd that acting was never her dream in the first place. “I would never have chosen to be an actor; I don’t have the personality of an actor. I’m not somebody that wants to dance on a table and, you know, sing songs for people,” Foster said. “It’s actually just a cruel job that was chosen for me as a young person, that I don’t remember starting. So right there, it makes my work a little bit different because I am not interested in acting just for the sake of acting. If I were on a desert island, I think probably the last thing I would ever do is act. So I was just trying to survive.”
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Even so, she explained that she always knew exactly what kind of parts she wanted. “I didn’t want to be the sister of, the wife of, the daughter of, the girlfriend of. I just wanted the movie to be about me,” she said, adding that she was “reacting to a second-wave feminist interest of saying, ‘I want to matter. I want to make movies that matter.’”
Foster also credited her mother and former manager with steering those early choices. She said her mother enrolled her in a French school in Los Angeles and made key decisions about which projects she took. When “Taxi Driver” first took her to Cannes, she remembered that “nobody wanted to bring me because they didn’t want to spend money on me.”
“My mom said, ‘No, it’s really important. She speaks French. This is Cannes!’” Foster recalled. “And so we paid for our own flights.”
Once they were there, she said the film’s team — Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, and Martin Scorsese — panicked over rumors that the movie was too violent and might get an X rating. “We all did the press conference together, but then after the press conference, they all got too scared, and they wouldn’t leave their rooms at the Hotel du Cap,” Foster said. “So I ended up doing all the interviews in French for the entire team of ‘Taxi Driver’!”
Talking about working opposite De Niro at age 12, Foster stayed as blunt as ever. “We’d run the lines and run the lines a second and third time. And I’m sure maybe some of you have been here when Robert De Niro was here. One of our greatest American actors, so proud to have worked with him — not the most interesting person on earth,” she said. “And at that time, he was very much in character, the way he was in those days. So he was really uninteresting, and I remember having these lunches with him and being like, ‘What is happening? When can I go home?’ And he wouldn’t really be able to talk to me, so that I would talk to the waiters and the people in the restaurants.”
Foster then widened the lens to discuss the industry and the women behind the camera. “I mean, really, up until 15 years ago, when you look at the list for mainstream movies, and you go down the director’s list, I never saw a female name,” she said. She pointed to the invisible ceiling facing women who wanted bigger-budget projects. “If you’re making a movie that has a certain risk attached to it … they would say, ‘Wow, there’s no woman that’s directed a movie that cost $125 million.’”
For her, the problem was baked into the system. “The idea was not to give women these huge mega movies if they had not had any experience. How about giving women the experience first?” she said. While she noted that she barely worked with women directors for much of her career, she added, “Then in the last four films, they’ve all been women!”
On shifting from acting to directing, Foster said that was where she felt the most ownership. “As a director, you’re shaping the entire conversation,” she remarked. “It’s a different kind of responsibility, but it’s where I feel most connected to storytelling.”
She reminded the audience that she never really knew a life outside of sets. “I grew up on sets, so cinema has always been part of how I understand the world,” she said. “You can’t stay frozen in one moment. You have to keep learning, and you have to stay curious.”
Foster also said Marrakech itself had left a mark. “It’s my first time in Marrakech but not my last,” she told the crowd, describing the festival atmosphere as aligned with what she valued about cinema and community.
Looking ahead, she said she planned to stay committed to French-language work, especially after her role in Rebecca Zlotowski’s “A Private Life.” “Of course, because I do feel like it’s a part of my personality that I just never get to use, and half my culture, because I went to a French school,” Foster said. “I love the global family of making films. It feels like they’re the same people wearing the same jeans and complaining about coffee at 3 in the morning. But it also allows me to open up and learn a new culture, too.”
Foster closed the night by making it clear she had no plans to slow down. “I’ll be making films until I die,” she said proudly. “You can’t get rid of me that fast.” She added that her mother once assumed her career would be over at 18 and then again at 40 — and she clearly enjoyed proving those predictions wrong.
