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Jodie Foster Quotes

Actress & Director
Born On
1962-11-19
Birth Place
Los Angeles, California, United States
Birth Sign
scorpio
Father
Lucius Fisher Foster III
Mother
Evelyn Ella Almond
Spouse
Alexandra Hedison (m. 2014)
Nationality
American
Education
Le Lycee Francais, Los Angeles, CA (1980), BA Literature, Yale University (1985),

I do almost all my movies in French. I dub them.

Movies
Jodie Foster

I don't know if I see myself as really an action hero, but I like doing physical movies and I like doing movies where the writing is very lean.

Jodie Foster

I think an artist's responsibility is more complex than people realize.

Jodie Foster

Every movie that I've had to really knock down the door for has been an enormous success for me. Not just like a financial success but a real personal success.

Jodie Foster

It's an interesting combination: Having a great fear of being alone, and having a desperate need for solitude and the solitary experience. That's always been a tug of war for me.

Jodie Foster

My definition of a friend is somebody who adores you even though they know the things you're most ashamed of.

Jodie Foster

Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from.

Jodie Foster

I like to nap. I do like to sleep. Sometimes I sleep in between takes.

Jodie Foster

I think 'destiny' is just a fancy word for a psychological pattern.

Jodie Foster

People are always surprised when I say that I'm an atheist.

Jodie Foster

I think anybody over 30 plays parents because it happens in your thirties and so that's kind of a natural progression. But I'm definitely drawn to it. It's probably the most intense, passionate thing that happens to you as you get older.

Jodie Foster

Acting just happens to be my skill, but I think I would probably be just as happy being a technician or entering into the film business in some other way.

Jodie Foster

You develop a third eye where you kind of know where they are in a room at all times but no matter how vigilant you are as a parent, at some point, you'll look around a room and can't find them and there's a searing pain that goes through your body.

Jodie Foster

I wish that I spoke more languages. I speak a couple languages, but not well enough to really dub myself. French is really the only one, and it's a difficult thing.

Jodie Foster

I don't know why people think child actresses in particular are screwed up. I see kids everywhere who are totally bored. I've never been bored a day in my life.

Jodie Foster

Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable.

Jodie Foster

I guess I've played a lot of victims, but that's what a lot of the history of women is about.

Jodie Foster

With 'Taxi Driver,' I had this eureka moment. I realized that acting could be much more than what I had been doing. I had to build a character that wasn't me.

Jodie Foster

Any actor working a long time should know how a shot is set up, where to place themselves, how to handle the lines. I'm a member of the crew, like the best boy, the electrician. What I'm good at is making eyes at the camera.

Jodie Foster

My mom was always late. It drove me crazy as a child. So I'm always on time - or early.

Jodie Foster

I feel at various times in my life that I've been at a point where I had to choose between a death sentence and a life sentence. And I want to live. What do I do to live? What do I do to be vital? And the answer is always creativity. The answer is always art.

Jodie Foster

I don't see anyone walking around with a puppet on his hand in real life. Puppet therapy is very common for children. It's not something that adults take on.

Jodie Foster

'Taxi Driver' was the best thing that ever happened to me, and I didn't become a weirdo and squawk like a chicken.

Jodie Foster

I think I'm drawn to films more as a director with a directorial mind even as an actor. I make movies to make the films, not to act.

Mind Movies
Jodie Foster

The best reason to make a film is that you feel passionately about it.

Jodie Foster

I'm kind of a chatterbox and I talk really fast.

Jodie Foster

The movies I made when I was 14 or 15, I have a hard time looking at those. Those were the awkward years. I don't know if anybody can look at something they did when they were 14 and not wince.

Jodie Foster

I had a prodigious life, living in a grown-up world when I was a child. But I think my abilities were about perceptiveness, and they were about examining psychology and examining people and relationships.

Jodie Foster

I'm a technician. I don't go for the get-into-the-role stuff. I read the lines and play the scenes.

Jodie Foster

Adolescence is a tough one to be a child actor.

Jodie Foster

But now I really don't want to work unless I really, really care about a project.

Jodie Foster

It's very hard for me to get a new car. It's really hard for me to get a new house. It's really hard for me to move on from the things that give me stability.

Jodie Foster

I am the luckiest filmmaker I know.

Jodie Foster

But the reason I became, why I wanted to be in the business was because there was Midnight Cowboy.

Jodie Foster

I think Anna and the King is a look at Asia from the Asian perspective, reflecting the Asian experience, which is very rare.

Jodie Foster

Otherness is a big thing for me. I'm always drawn to characters that live lives that I couldn't lead.

Jodie Foster

I love more than anything looking at a movie scene by scene and seeing the intention behind it. It allows you to really appreciate the hand of the filmmaker.

Jodie Foster

By the first week of shooting, you know exactly where your film is heading based on the psychology of your director.

Jodie Foster

I had to take my makeup off at work every night. I wasn't allowed to do it at home because my mom said that when your work day is done, you're done with work.

Jodie Foster

I was never the ingenue or the pretty girlfriend of Tom Cruise in a movie. I didn't have that career, so I don't have to compete on that level.

Jodie Foster

I didn't have any ambition to produce big mainstream popcorn movies.

Movies
Jodie Foster

I spent a lot of time not in school, so I didn't have deep relationships with kids my own age.

Jodie Foster

Knowing what paint a painter uses or having an understanding of where he was in the history of where he came from doesn't hurt your appreciation of the painting.

Jodie Foster

I want to be inspiring to myself, to my kids, my family, and my friends.

Jodie Foster

I have, in some ways, saved characters that have been marginalized by society by playing them - and having them still have dignity and still survive, still get through it.

Jodie Foster

I love European movies and I kind of grew up on European films.

Love Movies
Jodie Foster

I've always had this idea that I wanted movies to make people better not worse.

People Movies
Jodie Foster

I fantasize about having a manual job where I can come home at night, read a book and not feel responsible for what will happen the next day.

Jodie Foster

I wish people could get over the hang-up of subtitles, although at the same time, you know, that's kind of why I'm kind of pro dubbing.

Jodie Foster

I love more than anything looking at a movie scene by scene and seeing the intention behind it.

Jodie Foster

Well, I certainly was exposed to and learned to appreciate the work of great directors early on. As a kid, my mother used to take me to see really interesting arty films in Los Angeles.

Jodie Foster

Being understood is not the most essential thing in life.

Jodie Foster

Part of me longs to do a job where there's not a gray area.

Jodie Foster

My kids are young and my life with them is really stimulating and really full and significant.

Jodie Foster

I read more than I do anything else, probably. I read about three books a week.

Jodie Foster

I prefer to commit 100 per cent to a movie and make fewer films, because it takes over your life.

Jodie Foster

I'd like to be Dakota Fanning when I get young.

Jodie Foster

Acting, for me, is exhausting. I'm always more energized by directing. It's more intense to direct. I can pop in and express myself, then pop out again. It's a huge passion for me.

Jodie Foster

I'm interested in directing movies about situations that I've lived, so they are almost a personal essay about what I've come to believe in.

Movies
Jodie Foster

So, yes, there's nothing I love more than listening to directors talk about their movies.

Love Nothing Movies
Jodie Foster

As I've said before, and I still hold to, I truly am the most boring person alive. And if there was a great investigation to be found at the end of the resume, it would be, the most boring person alive.

Jodie Foster

I don't like it when reviews aren't about the movie. When they're about how much money somebody made, or who they're sleeping with, or if they got the job via some connection, or about how Fox is putting X amount of dollars into it.

Jodie Foster

I like dramas. I've always liked dramas. And I'm a pretty light person. I don't consider myself a very dramatic person. But I do like doing that onscreen.

Jodie Foster

It's hard to get personal films off the ground, and it's hard developing them.

Jodie Foster

Every movie changes you. The process of making a film changes you.

Jodie Foster

I don't direct so that I can have an identity and so I can go on to CGI movies. I had a big identity as an actor, and that's not what I'm looking for from directing. Directing is a whole different goal.

Jodie Foster

I don't find acting and directing schizophrenic in any way. I find it completely easy to move between the two.

Jodie Foster

I love the way L A. leaves you alone. I can go home, read all day, and nobody bugs me.

Jodie Foster

I'd always need a creative outlet. But sometimes, I do fantasize what my life would be like if I weren't famous.

Jodie Foster

I don't make movies because I love to act. I make movies because I like to make movies, and I like to be a part of that process.

Love Movies
Jodie Foster

Boys are easy. I mean, there are just a lot of bruises when they're young. With boys, you get a lot of accidental jabs in the eye and stepping on your feet, and those tantrums they cause when they don't want to leave the toy store.

Jodie Foster

As an actor, I'm attracted to drama; as a director, it's humor - because it's the story of my life, and I can't be that serious about it. Being alone is a big theme in all my movies, both as a director and as an actress.

Jodie Foster

I had a certain career as an actor that I think was quite personal as well, and had a lot of integrity, but I wasn't writing my own things or directing my own movies.

Jodie Foster

'Silence Of The Lambs' was not something people expected me to do.

Jodie Foster

I saw leaving college as an opportunity to do something different with my life. I always thought that becoming an academic was going to be my path.

Jodie Foster

As an actor, I'm always playing solitary characters. But as a director, I'm always making ensemble movies, which focus on lots of people's lives and how they intertwine.

People Focus Movies
Jodie Foster

I was one of those avid moviegoers as a kid, and we didn't have video, so we went to see everything five times. I went to see every foreign film playing in my town. As times went on, I watched a lot less films. I have a different film school now. My film school now is my life experience.

Jodie Foster

If I make two movies my entire life, and they're two movies that - whether they make a lot of money or two people go to see them - they speak of me, then I consider them incredibly successful. I don't need to be Steven Spielberg.

Jodie Foster

I make dark dramas, movies about people living in desperate fear who then overcome that fear and find a heroic side to themselves.

Jodie Foster

My earliest memories are doing commercials and TV.

Jodie Foster

I just want to make movies. I really love movies. I want to be involved with them.

Love Movies
Jodie Foster

I'm really not a clothes person. To me, that's just work. It's the thing I hate to do the most. I don't want to be judged in that way.

Jodie Foster

Most actors don't really have a director's sensibility. They have an actor's sensibility.

Jodie Foster

I never know what's going to move me. I'm always surprised. And it's always a mystery to the people who work with me.

Jodie Foster

I think every movie changes me and is life changing, especially movies you direct.

Jodie Foster

There are conscious reasons and unconscious reasons why I pick something. You know, I have to be moved by the story and usually that means it has to touch me in some kind of personal place.

Jodie Foster

Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock do romantic comedies. I do dark dramas. I do these movies well.

Romance Movies
Jodie Foster

In a weird way, that's the beauty of being an actor. You get to live out things that you're afraid of, and you get to say, 'Well, maybe I can get to the end of it and survive it intact and I can be the hero of my own story.' It's kind of a way of exorcising fear.

Jodie Foster

I like to be in a different place when I make a movie so that I can't really focus on anything else, and that is your world.

Jodie Foster

I don't like the outside world to intrude when I'm making a film. I like to either see my family or work, but I don't like to go out.

Jodie Foster

I will always love psychology, and the basis of psychology is family.

Jodie Foster

I don't have a burning desire to act, strangely enough. I don't know that if I hadn't been an actor as a young person, I don't know that I ever would have chosen this because it's not really my personality.

Jodie Foster

All the movies that I make in some ways have to be the story of my life. There are different chapters in my life.

Life Movies
Jodie Foster

Everybody reads for me. I was never weird about that. I never minded coming in and reading. They should know if I'm the right person, and I should know if I want to do a movie.

Jodie Foster

The world is littered with movies about people that are depressed that either did not come out or are not successful.

People World Movies
Jodie Foster

I make movies about people in spiritual crisis because it's a way for me to spend the time, the energy, the focus and the obsession to come to terms with my own spiritual crisis.

Jodie Foster

Casting is a long process for me. I take a lot of time.

Jodie Foster