Jodie Foster plans more French roles after ‘A Private Life’

After dozens of films over a storied six-decade career, Jodie Foster is trying something new, playing the lead role in a French film for the very first time.

There’s hardly a trace of an American accent in Foster’s turn as Parisian therapist Lilian Steiner in A Private Life (Vie privée) and she appears to be very much at home.

The character she plays is an American woman who built her career in France. So director Rebecca Zlotowski added some small asides — and swearing — in English because of Foster’s brisk and fluent French. “People suddenly were just completely confused that I wasn’t a French person,” the actress said.

All apparent ease aside, “I have a different personality in French than I do in English,” Foster told Morning Edition host Leila Fadel during a recent visit to NPR’s New York studios.

Her voice has a higher pitch in French, something she attributes to the French ladies who taught her at the private school she attended, Le Lycée Français de Los Angeles. Foster also had some smaller roles in three French films prior to A Private Life, including in 2004’s A Very Long Engagement.

“I’m just much more insecure and kind of vulnerable because I never know whether I’m communicating properly. And, you know, am I going to find that word at the last minute?” Foster said.

This frustration is also built into the script itself. When we first meet Steiner, she’s constantly frazzled, barely listening to her patients and hardly sparing a minute for her newborn grandson.

Then, her eyes start watering constantly, something someone more grounded would call crying, but not Steiner, who grows increasingly frustrated that water is coming out of her eyes.

It turns out to be especially fitting for someone who is a Freudian psychoanalyst. “In true Freudian fashion [she] is having a physical demonstration of a psychic ill,” Foster explains.

That psychic ill is caused by the death of a patient (the Franco-Belgian social drama star Virginie Efira), purportedly by suicide.

But Steiner suspects her patient has been murdered and launches her own — inconclusive, darkly comedic — investigation, enlisting help from her ex-husband (played by Daniel Auteuil, a mainstay of French cinema), and rekindling their old flame in the process.

All of those disparate plot lines play into the film’s French title, Vie privée, which Foster explains is a double entendre: “So private life, meaning everything that you think that would mean the opposite of a public life — an internal life. But private also means has been deprived of, so somebody who has been deprived of life, meaning somebody who’s died potentially.”

In her own life, Foster said she’s had to fight for privacy, ferociously. “I had to say I will go to Disneyland and I will not have a film crew following me… I will go to college and I will not give everything to the public eye, in order to make sure that I survived intact,” she explained.

After a frenetic pace of filming in her teens and twenties, Foster says she became more deliberate about the roles she accepted so that she could bring more depth to the screen. “I really was careful to make sure that I had real life and I worked more sporadically than most other actors,” she said.

Today, she’s especially excited about working with women directors. She also directs herself. Recounting that she only worked with one female director — Mary Lambert for 1987’s Siesta — in the first four decades of her career, Foster said she’s now working more with women.

“It’s been a shift that’s a long time coming… But it came very, very late,” she added, noting that the prevailing bias against women directors has only “recently” changed in mainstream cinema.

Foster also hopes to take part in more French movies, maybe even direct a film in France. “That’s something I’ve always wanted to do and something that would be a great challenge for me,” she said.

She urged American audiences to embrace learning to speak languages other than English.

“It’s surprising how Americans don’t hear other languages… how you can go your whole life without really hearing other languages spoken in your state,” she said. “We have to make an effort to connect to a wider world and understand that we’re all part of the same universe.”

The broadcast version was produced by Julie Depenbrock. The digital version was edited by Treye Green.