Jodie Foster claims Robert De Niro was ‘scared’ of her when she was 12 in 'Taxi Driver'
Jodie Foster has been making some bold comments recently.
The actress, 61, has been acting steadily since she was 3 years old. Because of this, she was something of a veteran by the time she filmed "Taxi Driver" with Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese.
Though she was only 12 years old when she made the movie, she says now her experience scared them.
"I first worked with Martin Scorsese when I was about 10 on ‘Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,'" she said in a new interview with W magazine. "By the time I was 12, I’d made a lot more films than De Niro or Scorsese.
"They were definitely scared of me. ‘What do we do with this 12-year-old?’ I was in my hot pants and corkies, or whatever those platform shoes were called."
Foster played a child prostitute in the 1976 drama. De Niro was 31 during filming, and he'd been acting for around a decade. Scorsese had directed seven full-length films and a number of shorts.
Although she has had a successful career from a young age, it struck many as odd that she'd say De Niro and Scorsese, who have been successful for decades, would be "scared" of her in that sense.
More comments she's made recently have been raising some eyebrows too. In an interview last week with The Guardian, she shared some critical thoughts about Gen Z.
"They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace," she complained. "They’re like, ‘Nah, I’m not feeling it today, I’m gonna come in at 10:30 a.m.’ Or, like, in emails, I’ll tell them this is all grammatically incorrect. Did you not check your spelling? And they’re like, ‘Why would I do that, isn’t that kind of limiting?’"
In an appearance on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" this week, she attempted to clarify that statement, saying, "I got some grief from my sons for that one. Yeah, you know, ‘cause you’re older, and you tend to do that, ‘Well in my day, we had to walk to school with crampons on,’ or something.
"But the new generation, you know, they’re lucky, because they learned that they could say no, and we didn’t know that. We didn’t have a kind of freedom, and there’s a double edge to that. There’s things you learn when you’re unfree and overly disciplined."
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Foster has two sons, Charles, 25, and Kit, 22. She spoke about them in her Guardian interview in yet another statement that caused some controversy.
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"My two don’t like sports," she explained. "They like to watch movies and sit at home, and they’re really into their female friends. They’re super feminist.
"And there was a moment with my older one when he was in high school, when, because he was raised by two women — three women — it was like he was trying to figure out what it was to be a boy. And he watched television and came to the conclusion, ‘Oh, I just need to be an a------. I understand! I need to be s----- to women, and act like I’m a f-----.’
"And I was like, no! That’s not what it is to be a man! That’s what our culture has been selling you for all this time," she remembered saying.
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After Foster said that this phase lasted for six months, she was asked if she let it play out.
"Yes and no," she responded. "I was like, ‘You won’t be talking to me like that.’"