Jodie Foster has told Robert Downey Jr. that he has “a big mouth and a crazy mind” and that he is the sort of person that she would like to be.
The two Oscar-winning actors took part in the ‘Actors on Actors’ series recently for Variety, where they shared their memories of working together, including on the 1995 Thanksgiving film Home For The Holidays, which Foster directed.
Recalling their collaboration, Foster said the filming process was “all perfect because of you.”
“You have a big mouth and a crazy mind that loves the freedom of being in the moment, which is not who I am, but who I wish to be – somebody that’s free like you,” she added.
Downey admitted that he was “pretty out of my mind” for the duration of the shooting of the film, and recalled his contribution being “one of the most relaxed performances in the history of cinema”.
Earlier this year, Downey was awarded the Best Supporting Actor award at the Oscars for his role in Oppenheimer, while Foster is a two-time winner in the Best Actress category, for 1988’s The Accused and 1991’s The Silence Of The Lambs.
In April, Foster spoke again about Home For The Holidays, during a time when Downey’s struggles with addiction and crime were prominent.
She told Esquire that she “took him to one side” before saying: “Look, I couldn’t be more grateful for what you’ve given in this film. But I’m scared of what happens to you next.”
She continued: “Right now you are incredibly good at balancing on the barstool. But it’s really precarious, and I’m not sure how that’s going to end.”
She was also effusive with praise for him, saying there was “more creativity in his little finger than I will ever have in my whole life”.
Foster has recently been critical of how frequently male screenwriters have incorporated sexual assault into the backstories of their female characters.
“For most of my career, I was always shocked that so many of the scripts that I read, the entire motivation for the female character was that she’d been traumatized by rape. That seemed to be the only motivation that male screenwriters could come up with for why women did things,” Foster said. “‘She’s kind of in a bad mood, yeah, there’s definitely some rape in her past.’”
“Rape or molestation seemed to be the one kind of lurid, big emotional backstory that they could understand in women. And I didn’t take it personally,” she said. “But once I was old enough, I think I did have a responsibility to come in and say, ‘You’re not always going to get the most perfectly fleshed-out female character, but maybe there’s an opportunity for us to work together and create something that way?’”