'The Brave One' Q&A: Jodie Foster

'The Brave One' Q&A: Jodie Foster
The Oscar winner takes a break from walking the mean streets to discuss revenge, morality, and New York's state of mind.

The vigilante picture gets a new twist in The Brave One, the first collaboration between director Neil Jordan (Mona Lisa, Interview With The Vampire, The Crying Game) and star Jodie Foster. In the film, Foster plays Erica, a New York City radio personality whose life is upended in a vicious urban crime. This lover of "old" New York, frustrated by her perception of the police's inability to achieve justice, sets out on her own to exact retribution and finds herself on a journey that takes her further than she ever imagined. Terrence Howard (Hustle & Flow, Crash) plays the police detective who initially tries to solace Erica, and then finds he may have to stop her.

While the setup sounds like a conventional thriller, Foster and Jordan sought to delve into a deeper story.

PREMIERE: Is it true you were involved with this before director Neil Jordan was? How did you and he get together?
JODIE FOSTER: I read the script a long, long time ago. It was very different, and I waited to see what they were going to do with it. And I did that for a year, after having said I felt like it needed a lot of work. I had been trying to work on it for a while, and then, honestly, Neil was the first director we went after. We really didn't go out for anybody else. I've just been a big fan of his for a long time. He brings such a kind of primal character quality to this kind of material. And he has this really interesting improvisational way of working where the things that need to be planned are planned; but he actually gets there and he really feels the space, he feels the people and changes things. And he will add dialogue, lose dialogue, come up with totally different things.

It seems that you two would make a good pair because in your films you tend to explore similar things: morality and how what's right is not always on the right side of the law.
Yeah. And he's interested in the details, you know, in this kind of understated way. He doesn't really want to just follow the rules of conventional cinema, which is nice. I think it's because he comes from being a writer, and he comes from, I think, a much more profound place where the truth of the characters and the truth of the text — whatever it is, whether it's a script or novel — really is in the people and the situation, it's not like, "How can I make them laugh or how can I make them cry?" He really asked the right questions, and it's surprising how rare that is these days.

So how did the script change from the first time you got it until now?
It went through a lot of changes before it came to Neil. I think it wouldn't have been something Neil necessarily would have been interested in. It started out as — and I don't denigrate it at all, but it started out as being sort of a conventional vigilante genre movie that just changed the name to a woman's name. Well, you have to change it quite a bit, because of course women aren't men. And there are different things that happen to them; they react to situations differently. And especially with something like this, it's not the same rules that apply. And you're looking at a situation where this is not a statistical norm; women don't lash out when confronted with this. They tend to become alcoholics, or they kill their children. Faced with violence and faced with abuse, women go inside. And so you had to ask yourself that question: Who is this woman and why is she like this? So clearly something was wrong with her before this situation presented itself. And, beyond that, the question is how does somebody go from being one person to being another. And what's the process of becoming another person that you wouldn't even recognize? In answering these questions, it became, honestly, more of an existential movie than a genre movie. And, of course, Neil also took it beyond there, too.

So it wasn't ever written for a man then.
No.

The fact that your character's a NYC radio host is intriguing. You rarely see people like that in movies.
She's a voice. She's not a body. In some ways she walks through the city like a ghost. Somebody who's just a voice in the night. In a strange way, she loses her body as time goes on, more and more, after the attack. And it's funny, the revenge element was probably one of the first things that we thought of in the film, but as time's gone on, it's interesting that the word "revenge" seems not to pertain to the movie at all. Because it's more about an act of deliberation — it's not a conscious act; it's something she can't help. She puts herself in situations where she's continually ritualizing and magically going back to the same situation she was in before. It's as if she's reenacting what happened, saying, would he come back? Will my boyfriend be back? I know that sounds crazy but she's crazy.

You think she is?
Well yeah, I don't think she's right. Yeah. I don't think she's right in her mind. No, I don't.

And yet she's may be doing "right" things…
I don't think she's doing right things.

You don't?
No. Perpetrators certainly deserve trials. Her first killing is self-defense. The second killing changes a bit more. The third killing changes a bit more. The fourth killing changes — this one is the most interesting because he's not somebody that's done anything to her; she seeks him out.

Who is the person she seeks out?
It's someone pointed out to her by the police detective who she has, in some way, befriended, because they had a connection. While she profiles the detective for her radio show, he tells her about this individual who is one of those people who got away with a crime. Who's done all of these things, and can't be pinned down because he's got the best lawyers. And she goes after him. It's pretty fucked up.

You've played victims, and you've played warriors, and you've played both in the same film — this seems to be one of those.
Yeah. I think this is, too. She becomes a victim in the situation the way anybody who's dropped into it becomes a victim. You're one of many million, and people say to you, "Yeah, but it's one of the safest cities in the world," but to the person who's one in that million who becomes victimized, that statistic has no reassurance anymore. And this is going to resonate with a lot of New Yorkers. It's interesting. I was reading a bunch of op-ed pieces that have been so fascinating, about the impact of 9/11 and how it raised a kind of strange fear consciousness in New York that doesn't necessarily relate to reality. It's not like there's a terrorist on every corner, and it's not like there actually has been an anthrax attack. It's not like anyone has gassed the subway. And yet now we have this ongoing fear that pretty much sits on top of you every minute — especially if you have children. It's something that isn't necessarily borne out by reality. So it's the fear in some ways that's the bad thing. It feeds on people. It turns people against people. Panic Room has a very similar message.

They have similar themes, but while Panic Room is constrained to a single spot, this is a film in which you take a journey through the city.
Yes. Erica's a walker. She's somebody who walks and who witnesses. She doesn't necessarily take part. That's why I keep making this sort of voice-body assimilation.

What did you do to research the role?
Going to the radio stations was really the best. I'm a radio junkie. I listen to it non-stop, morning and night. And there was something really just about that character, not about the facts of what radio people do, but just about the personality of somebody who will never be a face, somebody who always has to express themselves through their voice, and who experiences the world through voice and through sound. In this case, she's a sound engineer as well as a host; she does soundscapes, so she will take the Brooklyn Bridge with the cars going by, and then she'll meld them on top of each other, with monologues about the city over them. Talking about the Plaza being torn down; or talking about Weegee, the great New York photographer; or parts of the city that are going away, that don't exist anymore. The theme for her in the beginning of the movie is about this New York that she loves that's fading away, that's disappearing. And she's the one who's there to kind of be a witness.