When you turn 16, your career will be over," she was told. She is already 55.
"When you turn 16, your career will be over." How many times would Jodie Foster have heard the same gibberish... There was no interview in which the actress, then 14 years old, had to listen to her as if she were a maxim of destiny. She was either her interviewer or behind the scenes, while, for example, they touched up a peach makeup that had nothing to do with the one that was smeared on her during the movie... As if anyone cared about her future! Or rather, as if implicit in that prediction was also the desire that she, as a child prodigy that she was, she had to fail without remission at some point that she ventured close. And whoever says fail, says a 'what do I know' type of falling into drugs, drowning in alcohol, succumbing to the rude fingers of a porn producer once he's lost his freshness or gorging himself on barbiturates to appear one fine day drowned in a bathtub and, consequently, in some obituary of Variety… As that girl with electric blue eyes was already late, right? That she was past the expiration date of a child prodigy and she was enduring the challenges of her (short) age divinely.
That, looking back, she had been in front of the cameras since she was three years old when, holding hands with her mother, she accompanied her brother to a casting so that, in the end, the girl whose panties were bitten by a dog of the bikini on the steel deck of the Coppertone aftersun for the posterity without her. But nothing to see. She turned 14 and did so avoiding controversy thanks to an unusual interpretation in a girl. An Oscar-worthy performance. With a hat with a raised brim, mini shorts with a rapist zipper, a shirt tied at the navel, platforms and a green acrylic foster like the Titan Lux on the eyelid, he gave life to the 12-year-old prostitute for whom Travis Bickle, a taxi driver, Vietnam veteran, decides to become his avenging and righteous angel. A broken doll from the New York of the 70s that symbolized childhood stained by the vice of that great amoral, dangerous, wild and cruel city
A year earlier, Brooke Shields, or rather, her parents, because Andrè Agassi's ex would still be America's girlfriend for a long time, had been vilified for having allowed her to film The Little One. So Brandy Almond, Jodie's mother and manager, wasn't about to let her daughter, actually her, see her reputation tarnished. For years, she had successfully led her daughter's career, triumphing in auditions for the childish comedies of the Disney Factory and the cheesy Doris Day show, so that, now, everything was going to be ruined by the morbid whim of his little know-it-all girl to play a whore? No way.
What she didn't know was that this would be the beginning of the end of their mother-child-business relationship because Jodie was also precocious in this. Not in vain, the protagonist of The Silence of the Lambs had learned to read when she was 2 years old in order to learn her parliaments by heart to recite with grace and ingenuity in the multiple commercials that had paid for the family's mansion in Hollywood. In fact, she is part of the rumor mill that Foster is part of Mensa, that exclusive 1,100-member club made up of the gifted from around the world. But that would be later. Even under her mother's tutelage, she had to give up on at least one thing: she went to the casting in her school uniform... What the authoritarian mother didn't know was that that pleated miniskirt and tights that were knee-high they further increased the curiosity of the directors of the audition with the girl. At that time, Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader who made her girl read the sluttiest and most profane phrases of the script, because… two little legs for a bank were back then that she reeked of marijuana if not crack.
They were looking for the perfect actress, one who was capable of being crude and subtle, fresh and worn, puerile and stale, difficult to deal with and easy to get into bed, a child prostitute who would answer to the name of Iris Steensma, an orphan of the society who runs away from an unhappy family to dedicate himself to selling his body on 42nd Street and consuming it at the same time snorting cocaine and who, without knowing it, knocks on the doors of death on every date calling himself Easy. Exact. They were looking for the protagonist of Taxi Driver, the mythical contemporary American classic, although they still did not know it and they had already seen more than 200 girls after Tipi Hedren annulled the contract they had signed with her wayward daughter Melanie Griffith. Carrie Fisher, Mariel Hemingway, Kim Basinger, Geena Davis, Bo Derek, Kim Cattrall, Rosanna Arquette, Kristy McNichol, Michelle Pfeiffer, Debra Winger and even Brooke Shields... But none was like that Disney girl: Jodie Foster.
"Not even under the threat of hell," said her mother, but the future doctor from Yale with Cum Laude, rebelled. “I wonder if I missed something… I rebelled, but they were small rebellions. Why didn't I rebel more? Because she was responsible for others and she couldn't. She was always working”, said the Accused actress in an interview, as an adult, recalling the 30th anniversary of the 20th century film icon. And it was precisely to shoot this almost terrifying thriller the first big decision contrary to the dictates of the mother-manager.
She was fascinated by Scorsese, for whom she had worked on Alice Doesn't Live Here Two years earlier, and though the script would have petrified even the demon her mother summoned back in 1976, she wanted to do it even for free. She knew that she had to do it. In a premonitory way, something in her head told her that that crazy script was going to go down in history and her with it. And that, before turning 30, she would achieve it several more times being her, for example, the youngest actress who treasured two statuettes of Uncle Oscar.
“Mom didn't want to give me permission to work on Taxi Driver because I was a bit embarrassed… But we asked for a court order and in order to film it, my sister Connie, who was over 18 at the time, had to be my stunt double in any scene that made me feel uncomfortable or had any sexual connotation. I think there's a shot in the movie where she's on her back and you can see her head. That was it". The first person plural was made up of Foster, Scorsese, Schrader, and De Niro. Totally nothing. How could the nickname of Little Bossy Thing not be earned on the sets shortly after… (The little bossy thing).
And it is that until Taxi Driver did not come into her life, the cinema for her was something like bullshit. “To be honest, acting always seemed kind of silly to me. I couldn't believe someone would ask me to say the words someone else wrote. I grew up in Hollywood, not far from the strip where nothing worse could happen. And yes, okay, I knew I was playing a prostitute but I approached it in a way that was not complicated at all, instinctively. However, something very strange happened inside of me when I had my first contact with Robert De Niro. That's when I understood that I had never worked hard enough in the cinema before. It felt so good watching me that, at 14, I thought: I don't want to be the first female president of the US anymore. I want to be a serious actress."
Because the one from “Raging Bull” acted as a protective father and artistic guru of that outstanding student. Who knows if it was because he hated Cybill Shepard with all his might –after she rejected him– and it was the best way to shrug off the blonde star who was shoehorned into the set, or because he saw a kindred spirit in that brat, a an interpretive animal like him who only had to be freed from the chains, but the fact is that De Niro adopted her. And although Foster was obliged to attend daily sessions with a psychotherapist from the Department of Child Welfare, the same one who had taken care of Linda Blair during the filming of The Exorcist II: The Heretic, to tell him if she felt strange, humiliated or Outraged by muttering foul phrases smelling of mint gum, De Niro managed to "kidnap" her, taking her through the most depressed neighborhoods of that New York in moral and economic crisis 40 years ago and thus review the script and understand first-hand what that was told in that text he denounces, as stark as it is not very complacent, as controversial as today mythical, something that the Italian-American considered basic to build his characters and even improvise.
And so that young actress, on one of those anthropological safaris through the underworld, was able to learn from someone who, at one point, came up with one of the basic phrases in the history of cinema (you talkn' to me?) and get to know to the prostitute that Shrader had inspired to build the Iris of his script, Garht Avery, who at that time was the same age as her and a much more complicated life. In a single sentence she was aware of the responsibility and the sociological dimension of her work and she did it from the gut.
The film, which was about to be released in the worst open-air theaters in the South of the United States and with an S rating, would surprisingly be a box office success and its quality was endorsed on the other side of the Atlantic with the Festival's Palme d'Or of Cannes, as applauded as booed, it must be said. In fact, there were those who came to see it more than 15 times at a time, let's not forget, when there was neither Filmin nor Netflix nor even video stores, who became blindly obsessed with that childish and nympho character and fell in love to the point of wanting assassinate the President in a twist of fate that not even Schrader could have imagined. The boundaries between fact and fiction had become so blurred that in a sick mind the effect had been perverse.
In 1981, John Hinkley attempted assassination: to assassinate Ronald Reagan in order to impress Jodie Foster, whom he loved madly. And he almost made it, even without the almost, Reagan would be hurt, and Foster, too. Because the jury would declare Hinckley not guilty, considering relevant the allegation about mental illness made by the defense attorney, who managed to get the film to be shown at the trial hearing precisely to explain his client's lack of judgment due to the pernicious effect of the violence of the cinema, but Foster would never recover from that event.
After the trial, to which he did not attend but did testify, provoking Hinckley's uncontrollable anger upon hearing that he had not known him at all, Foster took refuge first in anonymity, then in the studios and, finally, in his star status to avoid , forget and erase the Hinckley affair, as if it had never happened when it was about to cost her career and her mental health because the murderer was about to kill her too. He wanted to settle it with an article that was published in this magazine in 1982 entitled Why me (Why me?) in which he declared himself the victim of an infinite and absurd nightmare: "I know that one day someone will approach me in the street and will ask: aren't you the girl who shot the president?" And although he didn't, although that belligerent Cowboy President died in his bed as an old man, although that madman's last name has never come out of his mouth, his life was marked forever for that 12-year-old prostitute girl, symbol of the unreason of a country where the American dream and the tragic nightmare coexist.
