Jodie Foster is a very calm and self-possessed person, the opposite of what one might expect from a Hollywood legend, with two Oscars for Best Actress and unanimous respect as a director, screenwriter, and producer. She has more than 100 film credits to her name – she started out as a child actress – and even without ever using the celebrity card or having a presence on social media, she keeps her interest in her life and career intact. Her authenticity may be the secret to a healthy life.

The only moment in which her personal life surpassed the attention of her professional one was when she was named as the “inspiration” for the assassination attempt on President Reagan, in the 1980s, precisely because it was the story of Taxi Driver a few years earlier. At that time, studying at Yale, Jodie spent a long period away from the United States, recording in Europe (she speaks French fluently) and only returning in the 1990s, when she won her Oscars and debuted as a director.

Today over 60 years old, she is still active in front of and behind the camera and is the main name in the revival of the True Detective franchise, one of the most praised on HBO Max, marking her “debut” on platforms and TV. And it was to promote the series that the actress was at CCXP São Paulo at the end of 2023, talking excitedly about the experience.

MISCELANA: This is the first season of True Detective that is directed, produced, and written by more women. What impact did this have on you as an actress and director?
JODIE: We’re excited that there are more women in Hollywood. When I was a child making films, from the 60s onwards there were no women. There was whoever the lady was playing my mother and possibly a makeup artist or script supervisor. So I grew up thinking that I couldn’t be a film director because I didn’t see any women. Eventually, my mom kept telling me “You have to write. They will never let you drive unless you write.” The few women who emerged helped other women who emerged, and great strides were made. We’re happy that HBO MAX is at the forefront of interest in new voices, different voices, different stories, centering women’s experiences in ways that haven’t happened before.

MISCELANA: How would you describe your True Detective character in comparison to your other iconic characters?
JODIE: Well, I love Liz Danvers. I love this character because she’s honest and that means she’s also an idiot. [laughs] She’s often not awake. I think she is quite unaware of her own motivations. She doesn’t know how she affects people. She thinks things are funny when they aren’t funny. She has love in her heart, but the world has changed in ways she doesn’t understand and she has to keep up, I think like the rest of us. But honestly, for me, the most interesting part of doing True Detective was supporting the new voice, a new voice that is the character of Kali Reis, Detective Navarro. And I think even when we started talking about the series with [director] Issa López, we kind of felt like I reverse-engineered it: instead of thinking about Liz Danvers, I was asking, ‘What’s Navarro going to do? Let’s have Liz do the opposite. And we kind of flipped it so that really the voice of the series is the character of Kali, the soldier Navarro. Sorry, but I only call her that. [laughter]

MISCELANA: How do you define the essence of the True Detective series?
JODIE: While I was making Silence of the Lambs I understood that plots are just excuses for characters to reveal themselves to each other and that their psyche is the point of the film. For me that’s the particular genre and the reason you find the killer: you delve into the love, the loss, the beauty, the disappointments of these characters. What these detectives do is delve into themselves when they find a killer or people who have been killed. Therefore, it is through this understanding of the world that they come to understand themselves. And I wasn’t as excited about something as I was about True Detective because it was all very intentional, it was all in Issa Lopez‘s head, but at the same time, there were so many truths that could be discovered through the process of understanding the film series that it felt like one of the experiences richest of my life.

MISCELANA: And compared to previous seasons?
JODIE: Being a fan of the True Detective series says you like some kind of unpredictability. It’s very unpredictable on the surface. They may seem like good detectives and organized, but there is one of them who is perhaps more detective than the others, a little loose cannon, but when they put the two personalities together they have an incredible chemistry, which that simply works. It probably wouldn’t work in a friendship, but it works in an investigation. It’s like a bad relationship that just works. It’s the dance of unpredictability. Two very deep characters with their own lives who come together for a common goal.

MISCELANA: What was the most difficult moment during filming?
JODIE: Well, where do I start? [laughs] Oh no, it was the easiest thing. Being so comfortable! [more laughter because they recorded in isolated, snowy locations]. I mean, the cold, it was cold. If it felt cold, it was cold. There’s not much acting there. But I would say I think the biggest challenge was it wasn’t that cold and we had to be cold. That was the most challenging because there were so many other things to worry about. [laughs] Kali had a lot more outside scenes than I did and she froze. There were days when we had to leave at midnight because there was a big storm coming, but for some reason, I was lucky. There were only about 8 or 10 days where I was sick and lost my voice. And those were the worst days of recording. But I loved working with the team, I loved working with Issa, my favorite director I’ve ever worked with, and look, I’ve worked with a lot of directors and some of them aren’t bad [laughs].

MISCELANA: True Detective has a tendency to feature opposing protagonists, as you mentioned. How do these Denver and Navarro act in this sense?
JODIE: We hated each other at first, but there’s always respect. This is also a true feature of True Detective: no matter how much they hate each other and how much they roll their eyes at each other, they have complete respect for who the other person is as a detective. Because the other one is just as obsessed as they are. The other is just as damaged as they are. And I think that’s their connection. I feel like the two characters have a lot to learn from each other, and Issa did a really smart thing by making their journeys, in some ways, kind of a dark journey. My character is, you know, waking up, and Navarro’s character is learning to manage the fear around how awake she is. And so they’re like linked journeys.

MISCELANA: You have experience working with monsters on screen. What’s the most challenging thing about telling these kinds of stories?
JODIE: I love them. I love drama and I love going to the deepest, darkest parts of the soul. That’s why I make films. That’s why I go watch films to inhabit that space. So yeah, dealing with monsters. One of the best things about The Silence of the Lambs is that in the relationship between Lecter and Clarice, she doesn’t think of him as a monster. She wants to understand him, and sees him as entirely human, while the other characters have placed him in a box of a monstrous person, who doesn’t deserve to live. She wants to meet him to solve the crime, and I feel like that’s true for anyone great as a detective: she has to respect the killer and understand his motivations. Only by understanding and respecting people as human beings will you be able to understand and put an end to crime, asking the right questions.

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