Scare tactics

>> In David Fincher’s Panic Room, Jodie Foster plays a mother besieged by money-hungry murderous thugs

by MATTHEW HAYS

Jodie Foster must be one of the least pretentious people to ever attain star status. She enters a room at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons looking confident, but entirely unassuming and without any airs. She wears no makeup. She seems perfectly centred, someone who enjoys her various roles within show business, but could take or leave Tinseltown on a dime, without an afterthought.
Hard to believe, considering the laundry list of other stars who grew up under the scrutiny of Hollywood limelight only to end up seriously washed up, starved for attention and in and out of the Betty Ford. Not Jodie. After star turns in films like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver, Foster established herself as a talented teenager. After taking leave for four years to get an honours degree in English at Yale (where she was stalked by the Taxi Driver-obsessed John Hinckley before he attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan), Foster defied the odds and created a solid adult acting career for herself, winning Best Actress Oscars for both Silence of the Lambs and The Accused.

The protofeminist superstar then went about directing her own movies, including the critically acclaimed Little Man Tate and the less critically acclaimed Home for the Holidays. Over the past few years, Foster has become far more involved with parenting, having a son five years ago and another five months ago. Her last two films, the sci-fi epic Contact and the period movie Anna and the King, have been less than successful, leaving legions of Foster fans eager to see her in the right movie. The biggest headlines she’s generated recently came as a result of her refusal to reprise her role as Clarice Starling in the Silence of the Lambs sequel Hannibal (which, with Julianne Moore sitting in for Foster, played to mixed reviews but boffo box office).

House of horrors

Foster’s latest, Panic Room, will almost certainly please her fan base while catapulting her back to the top of the box office charts. David Fincher, the man behind Fight Club but perhaps most famous for his suspense thriller Seven, directs Foster (along with Forest Whitaker and Dwight Yoakam) in Panic Room, a taut and thrilling suspense movie about a woman and her teenage daughter trapped in a small room, besieged by a trio of criminals desperate to get in.

The film opens with Foster, recently divorced from a multimillionaire, moving into a three-storey house in a tony district of Manhattan. (As the film opens, we know we’re in a smart Fincher movie; the credit sequence, one of the best in years, has the credits protruding out from noteworthy works of Manhattan architecture, as if they were actual extensions of the buildings.) As it turns out, the house Foster and offspring (Kristen Stewart) are moving into was previously owned by a Howard-Hughes-like multimillionaire paranoiac. He had carefully created a “panic room,” a small place in which he could hide in case of intruders, complete with emergency food and water supply, reinforced steel walls and a separate phone line and ventilation system.

Enter Whitaker, Yoakam and Jared Leto, who know of a secret hidden booty in the panic room, but didn’t expect to find new tenants living in the house so soon. Foster and Stewart make it into the room, barely, and then begins a game of cat and mouse, where the three baddies attempt to smoke out the two desperate women.

It’s almost impossible to believe after watching Panic Room, but Foster was not the first choice for the lead. In fact, Nicole Kidman had shot several weeks of the film, but was forced to pull out after suffering a hairline fracture in her foot. Foster was asked to take over, and said yes right away, “on the basis of the script,” she says now. “Actually, it’s not very hard to decide about what films to make. I only make one every year and a half or two years. Good and great scripts are so rare. I read this and knew immediately I wanted to do it. It’s a great script and I wanted to work with Fincher—I knew our styles would mesh.”

Acting maternal

For Foster, Panic Room would seem a logical step. A move back to horror and suspense, something she’s known a thing or two about (The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, The Silence of the Lambs) and a role that plays on the public’s knowledge of her off-screen motherhood. “I’ve played mothers before, even before I had a kid. I’ve always been a very maternal person. It’s hard to explain. There’s a switch that goes on inside you, in terms of protection—there’s a very visceral feeling you have.” (Visceral, indeed. Foster was pregnant with her second son, now five months old, throughout the Panic Room shoot.) And then there was working with Stewart, the teen who looks remarkably like Foster and who, Foster reports, acts a lot like her too. “She definitely reminds me of me at that age,” says Foster.
Which raises the question: when Foster looks back on her early acting days, in particular her turn as an underage hooker in the extremely controversial bit of casting in Taxi Driver, does she see herself or someone else? “It was such a different part of my life. I think whenever we look back on our childhood it’s a bit like looking at someone else. But I was so lucky to be around in the ’70s. So many great filmmakers were working then, I think it was the most exciting time in American cinema. I learned a lot from the best in the business.
“I never really had an ambition to be in big mainstream movies. Those weren’t the films that moved me as a kid. I’ll hear people say, ‘The reason I got into acting is because of Star Wars.’ Which is great. That was a great movie. But the reason I wanted to be in the business was 400 Blows, 8 1/2, Midnight Cowboy…”

Having worked in the ’70s, Foster has seen the industry change. Now, films have to leap into the action right away to sate non-existent attention spans (as Panic Room does). Does that frustrate an actor like her, who’d like to build on character development?
“I would beg to differ about Panic Room because if you look at a film like [Polanski’s] Knife in the Water, it’s one of the best films ever written. It’s a lot like Panic Room—you get right into the action and then learn things about character as the film goes along. He [Panic Room screenwriter David Koepp] stays within the drama and the backstories reveal themselves later. What people are upset about is the lack of dimension some characters themselves have. And the fact that there are more bad scripts out there than good ones.”

On missing Hannibal

Speaking of questionable scripts, did Foster finally see Hannibal? Hollywood lore has it Sir Anthony Hopkins ventured to Foster’s mansion and literally begged her to reconsider her declining of the role. “Yeah, I caught it.” Did you like it? “I wouldn’t comment on that, I don’t know that that would be fair. I had no regrets turning it down.”

Then, of course, there’s the bizarre issue of Foster’s sexuality. It is the great unspoken thing. No journalist will dare to ask her, despite the fact others in the business—including John Travolta and Tom Cruise—have been asked point blank by the press, and denied the rumours. Perhaps it’s her sheer likeability, but something about Foster makes her seem out of bounds on the question. She exudes a distinct openness in person while also a solid aura of privacy. And yet it’s something everyone knows about; Foster’s sexual orientation is almost as well kept a Hollywood secret as William Shatner’s hair transplants.

One of the new methods of dealing with such gay baggage for actors has been to “neither proclaim nor pretend,” as W.H. Auden once put it—or Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, in Clintonspeak. Thus rumours and innuendo ultimately reach a critical mass, and then the coming out is simply not the least bit surprising any more (witness Nathan Lane and Rosie O’Donnell—was anyone actually surprised by their “revelations”?).

But it’s something that, being a semi-self-respecting gay journalist, I don’t feel I can avoid. In the name of subtlety, it seemed fair to ask Foster about a point where her sexual orientation and her career did collide. In ’94, Foster coproduced the marvellous short film Trevor, about a teenager’s suicide attempt after realizing he’s gay. (Believe it or not, the film was uplifting). The film went on to win an Oscar for Best Short. Thus it seemed fair to ask: do you feel any specific commitment to the gay and lesbian community?

Foster pauses. And then answers with a response that feels as rehearsed as it does non-committal: “I feel a commitment to all humanitarian causes and organizations. I’m very proud of Trevor.” :

Panic Room opens Friday, March 29