Jodie Foster booked her first acting gig at the age of six. It was a small part, in a largely forgotten television drama titled Mayberry R.F.D. The role, which on its own is little more than a footnote in history, would fundamentally change the life of that little girl who, truth be told, didn't even aspire to be an actor. "I thought it was kind of a dumb thing to do for a living," she recalls now.
Worse, the perfect storm of fame and fortune, coupled with being the breadwinner in her family at an age when most children are still learning to read, gave Foster a deep unease about money. "Just for me personally, when I grew up, I was always anxious about money," she says. "My mom was always hocking jewellery to buy Christmas presents. She was always worried. Maybe she didn't have to be worried, I don't know. Whatever it was, I got anxiety about it."
At the heart of her anxiety, she says, was a fear that if work dried up for her in Hollywood, she would be unable to keep her family going. "What if I never work again? And what if I can't support my family? And what if that movie bombs?" she remembers asking herself as a child.
"Of course, I had no idea who I was unless I was successful," she adds. "[And] I wasn't crazy when I thought that people would like me less if I was less successful. It was true. I mean, it is true."
It took a lot of work, Foster adds, to stay well-adjusted. "Some of it is making movies like this," she says, referring to her punchy new thriller, Money Monster, in which fast-talking financial commentator Lee Gates (George Clooney) is held hostage by a viewer live on television.
Directed by Foster, the film explores the disconnect between aspiration and entitlement. Gates, Foster observes, serves as a perfect metaphor for the modern Hollywood celebrity. "He's a tragic figure who has no faith in himself and who's lost touch with himself," she says. "He's lost. Yes, he's successful because lots of people know his face.
But yes, he's unsuccessful because he's just a TV bunny boy. He actually thinks that he's the one pulling the strings. He's not."
Precisely where that metaphor sits in Foster's own life is difficult to measure. It's certainly hard to believe she's not pulling her own strings. By reputation she's tough, but in person she's so gentle it's impossible not to be immediately charmed. She's guarded, but generous. Our conversation dances across a lot of supposedly taboo subjects, including her childhood and her own children.
In Hollywood - the town, and the business - Foster seems to have struck a successful compromise between fame and authenticity. She is mistress of her own destiny, tucked safely away from the bullshit in the postcard-perfect LA beach community of Malibu, where she is a mother to Charlie, now 18, and Kit, 15. And as her focus has slowly shifted away from acting, she has also blossomed into an accomplished director.
It seems, at first glance, like a profound loss. This is, after all, the woman who has delivered some of the silver screen's most luminous performances as the courageous rape victim Sarah Tobias in The Accused and as trainee FBI agent Clarice Starling, who enlists the help of one notorious serial killer to catch another in The Silence of the Lambs.
Foster has not, she insists, given up on her acting career. "If something came along that I really wanted to do ... but that may not happen, who knows?" she says. "I can't imagine ever quitting acting because I've done that my whole life."
The bigger challenge, curiously, came when many people warned her that by appearing less frequently on magazine covers, she would somehow matter less. Now, she says, laughing, she's embarrassed by the suggestion. "I was in a bubble, I didn't know any better," she says. "What did I know? That's who I'd always been my whole life."
After 2011's The Beaver, which Foster directed and starred in with Mel Gibson, she dabbled in television, directing episodes of the dramas Orange Is the New Black and House of Cards.
Money Monster, which also stars Julia Roberts, is a full-scale cinematic thriller. Plans for the film and Foster's involvement were announced back in 2012. The unusually long gestation of the project was necessary, says Foster.
"For me, it's always a long process because I really need to get the script right and to make it my own before I'll take one step further. We got the script right, we gave it to George Clooney, he said yes, and that was it."
It is not, Foster insists, a consciously political piece, though its larger themes - the overwhelming power of Wall Street and its devastating impact on ordinary Americans, and the disconnect between serious wealth and the common aspiration of "the American dream" - seem unusually resonant with the mood of the nation. It seems to tap a growing unease with a decade in which many have worked harder for little gain, or worse, lost ground.
"I don't see it as a polemic at all and I'm not interested in that at all," Foster says. "I mean, it's a backdrop. It's an opportunity to talk about failure and about our own messed-up relationships with our own self-worth. Money is a really good symbol for how we try to figure out value: 'I am valuable because I just won $20 at the blackjack table, or because I invested in Netflix.' Then, 'I'm not valuable because I lost it all.' "
It's interesting, she says, and peculiarly American. "We don't have an aristocracy, so we have to reinvent ourself every generation. If you don't have money, what are you? What are you in America if you don't have money? Or fame? Or a trophy wife? The three men in this movie, they're men who don't know what to do with their own failure and so they've come up with this idea of how to vanquish their own failure."
Precisely how great directors extract great performances from actors is something of an imprecise science. Wrangling Clooney and Roberts, she says, was easier than it sounds.
"I feel like I'm just a border collie," she says. "Especially in this movie."
She is also cautious about crediting a director with an actor's finest performance, noting it is a confluence of elements, including script, direction, design and photography.
"Some of it is the weird, spiritual, chemical air of the text. In the case of The Silence of the Lambs that's true.
We signed on to that book. [The film's screenwriter] Ted Tally ... his first draft was the final draft. That's an unbelievable screenplay." Foster says that film, more than most, was built on powerful collaborations from star Anthony Hopkins to costume designer Colleen Atwood, composer Howard Shore and others. "That doesn't happen very often."
This appreciation for all the separate skills involved in filmmaking might also explain why this woman, whose very successful career has been built in the moving image, has a secret passion for still imagery, and keeps a collection of black-and-white photographs. When I bring it up, she smiles. For Foster, the still image and the moving image are powerfully connected.
"They work hand in hand," she says. "We work with all sorts of different vocabularies, like languages. There is the language of acting. There's the language of props. The language of cinematography. They all coalesce together to create this moving train that has different colours and we use each one of those languages differently. [Film] is a series of still images, they just go 20 frames per second."
Her own fame is something she is less certain about, either in understanding what it actually means, or understanding how it applies to her everyday existence: living far from the maddening ridiculousness of Hollywood's machinery. In her real life, Foster is an ordinary mum to two teenage boys.
Charlie and Kit, she says, were largely unaware their mother was an actor, let alone a famous one, while they were growing up. "They didn't even know what I did for a living until my oldest was maybe 10 or something," she says. "I forget. Somehow, I didn't want them to be coloured by other people's experience of me. I wanted them to just know me. I didn't want them to be coloured by my celebrity or by me in character or something. I don't know."
And the first film they saw from their mother's impressive list of credits was by no measure her best known, nor even her most commercially successful. But it is one which will elicit a smile from anyone who was charmed by its innocent brilliance: it was the 1976 kiddie mobster comedy Bugsy Malone, in which Foster, then 13, played Tallulah, a sultry chanteuse at Fat Sam Speakeasy.
"They'd never seen a gangster movie, so it didn't really make a lot of sense to them but they liked it," she recalls, smiling. "My kids have never been that interested in my movies. Bugsy Malone was probably the only movie they saw up until a few years ago. I don't know. It just didn't come around. Then, little by little, I've shown them my movies now."
Foster and her ex-partner Cydney Bernard were also conscious of letting the boys find their own way. For Foster, whose childhood was silver-lined by a great passion for books, that was reminding herself that reading was her thing. "And I cannot put my thing on them," she says, perhaps a little regretfully. "My younger son plays bass and plays drums and he has his own way.
"I think it's more about talking. Our house has always been about talking things through."
The result is that the boys have grown up in a very different kind of world to the one their mother knew at their age: booking gigs on television shows like The Doris Day Show and Nanny and the Professor. Reflecting on those days, Foster isn't displeased, but equally she's not so certain that that little girl was having such a spectacular time.
"I just didn't know anything else," she says. "I have asked myself that question: I wonder, if I knew that I could have said no, would I have said no? I don't think so, because it seemed to be what everybody wanted me to do, and it seemed easy enough.
It was sort of a family business, so I didn't really question it."
Back then, she recalls, she didn't even think acting would be a lasting career. "I feel like the real choice I made to become an actor happened when I was 19 or 20," she says. "As I got older, I realised that I hadn't really given it my whole. I hadn't lived up to the challenges because I hadn't accepted the challenges. Once I did that, I realised that I could say what I needed to say in performance." •
Money Monster opens in cinemas on June 2.
