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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Face of strength


Denzel Washington matches wits with Jodie Foster in
Story Todd Hill Newhouse News Service

Forty years in show business have given Jodie Foster the opportunity to play just about every kind of female character out there. “I’ve played dumb blondes, I’ve played morally bankrupt women, I’ve played good girls, I’ve played strait-laced straight arrows, I’ve played wild women,” she says. “Yet they’re always strong.”

Foster, one of the most respected actresses in Hollywood, a woman who won two Oscars before the age of 30, sees that as her one great failing as a performer – she can really only play strong women.

“I feel that’s my Achilles’ heel as an actress,” says Foster, 43. “I don’t really know how to play weak characters. If I played a weak character, I don’t think you’d believe me.”

In “Inside Man,” the new heist movie by Spike Lee that opens today, she plays Madeline White, a mysterious broker for the wealthy and powerful – and a very strong woman.

“As a kind of fixer figure, she’s been in these dangerous situations where you have two dead hookers and a mayor,” says Foster.

“She’s somebody who doesn’t judge, and most of the time that’s a good thing. At the same time she’s sort of neutral in the way Switzerland is, and it does make her morally wrong because she’s negotiating between evils. So I do consider her a bad guy.”

The other “guys” in “Inside Man” – about the robbery of a bank in Manhattan’s Financial District – are played by Denzel Washington, a Hollywood heavy hitter who’s working here on his fourth movie with director Spike Lee, and Clive Owen, the rapidly rising British star.

In the midst of this very male environment, Foster’s character more than holds her own.

“I like the fact that in this world of macho guys who are very powerful and say things like, ‘I’m going to shove that up your head,’ that there’s this kind of breezy, very feminine presence who has all the power that they do but doesn’t raise her voice, always smiles, always says please and thank you, and has time for fake tans and extensions and high heels,” Foster says.

Yet she believes the character could just as easily have been written as a man – another reason she was attracted to the part.

“I love playing parts that could’ve been a guy or a girl, I tend to do that over and over again,” Foster says.

“That’s true of ‘Flightplan,’ which was written for a man. It’s true of `Silence of the Lambs’ – could’ve just as easily been a man, it really didn’t matter at all that she was a woman.

“However, when you put a different gender in this circumstance it changes everything, and fuels it with a completely different feeling and a different sense of history.”

“Inside Man” gave Foster the chance, finally, to work with two men she’s always admired: Washington and Lee.

“He is truly the best actor I’ve ever worked with,” Foster says of Washington.

“I’ve been wanting to work with Denzel for 20 years, and for whatever reason we never could find ourselves in the same movie, and that happens with leading actors,” she adds. “You never get to work with another leading actor because they only have the room in the budget for one leading actor so you’re always by yourself, or you’re with somebody new or who’s coming up.”

She had never been right for a Spike Lee film before, she says, but “here was an opportunity to mostly just stand behind his shoulder and see how he sees it. For me that’s the impulse to make films now as an actress, to really watch the directors and see what they’re doing.”

Foster is an established film director in her own right (“Little Man Tate,” “Home for the Holidays”). while she’s just weeks away from shooting another New York City-based film in which she’ll star (“The Brave One,” with Terrence Howard), she’s also busy preparing for her next directorial effort, “Sugarland.”

The film about immigrant Jamaican sugar cane workers in south Florida, which Foster will direct as well as perform in, will star Robert De Niro. Production is slated for early next year.

Foster purposely avoids working too much, however. She prefers to do one movie every three years, rather than three movies every year, and not just because she’s raising two young children (with Cydney Bernard, her companion since 1993).

“The problem with any profession that you choose to be excellent in is that it takes 100 percent, and it means your hard drive has to be full of details of what that profession is, and by definition it means that there’s a whole bunch of stuff that you’re not doing,” she says.

“If I made three movies a year I can guarantee you I would have no idea what’s going in the New York Times, I wouldn’t have listened to a record for an entire year, I wouldn’t have gotten my own coffee for a whole year, I wouldn’t have traveled.

“As an actor you have to be somebody in order to play someone, so you have to be able to have time where you’re not an actor or celebrity so that you can actually be a person of substance.”

Foster – who in her first acting gig, at age 3, lost her swimming trunks in a TV commercial for Coppertone tanning lotion – learned this lesson very early on.

“My life has always been very important to me, and I realized that by the time I was 5 or 6, instead of waiting until I was 25,” she says. “That was clear to me at a very young age, that I had to fight for my life and that I had to put my foot down.”

Her career really got going when she played a hooker as a 13-year-old in the 1976 film “Taxi Driver,” while at the same time “going to a private school where I wore uniforms, I wore knee socks and Peter Pan collars and a blazer every day.”

Though that led to the weird business in the early 1980s with John Hinckley – who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, purportedly to impress her – Foster says she has “never had a celebrity career, nobody has ever wanted to rip my clothes off in the street.

“There really isn’t one good part of fame,” she says, “and I think you have to, despite the fact that you accept it, figure out how to organize your life so that it doesn’t eat you up.”