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Jodie Foster’s new movie features her first fully French-speaking performance, and she spent extra time in France in order to make sure she got it right.
When the star, 62, appeared at the New York Film Festival on Sunday, Oct. 5 for the premiere of A Private Life, she admitted she was nervous about the challenge.
“I’ve made a few French films, but never with this much dialogue and in a starring role. So it’s something that I’ve been looking for for years, and then I finally found the right role, the right script, and the right director. That all came together,” she said during a Q&A session after the premiere with director Rebecca Zlotowski.
“I was nervous. I was scared a little bit. I kept telling [Zlotowski], ‘I’m a little scared,’ ” Foster added. “So I came three weeks ahead of time just to be in the city and not talk to any American friends and only speak to French people, and I think that was helpful. We had a wonderful dialogue coach as well. But Rebecca had to put in a few little Anglicisms, a little American things here and there, f—, s— and stuff like that.”
Foster’s director Zlotowski, 45, said in response that she needed to add those curse words because Foster would have come across “like a French person, and people would be like, ‘This is weird,’ ” without those details.
Sony Pictures
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In A Private Life, Foster plays an American psychoanalyst living in France “whose tightly knit world begins to unravel after the sudden death of a patient,” per a New York Film Festival synopsis.
“It was a wonderful experience,” Foster said. “Obviously it’s different working on a French set than it is an American set, but we’re all making movies, we all wear the same jeans, and it feels like a global family.”
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Among those “few differences,” as Foster put it, included smaller crew sizes that saw “people overlap and do lots of jobs.”
“That’s not something we do in America,” she noted. “In America, even on a tiny movie, on a small movie, pretty much everybody has kind of a job that they do.”
When PEOPLE asked Foster at the premiere’s red carpet what other movie roles are on her bucket list, the two-time Oscar winner said she feels she has been able to “embrace new kinds of characters that I wasn’t able to do before” turning 60.
“So I’m really enjoying just seeing what comes up and who I can support. Maybe more of an opportunity to do more character-driven stuff than I’ve done before,” she added.
A Private Life is in theaters Jan. 16.
