As Cary Grant never said: Jodie, Jodie, Jodie.
Here she is, star, producer, America's sweetheart, double Oscar winner, Yale honors grad, legendary object of a failed assassin's ardor, all of 32. How much intelligence, talent, power and beauty can be jammed into one small package? Surely, when you're approaching Jodie Foster, you're getting pretty close to the limit.
And it is a small package: lissome and dynamically intelligent, Foster is much less prepossessing in person than on screen, where the camera magically magnifies her presence and lovingly charts the delicate geometry of her bone structure. These pleasures are undiscovered when you meet her in person, where she is just a slip of a woman, even if those eerily flat, translucently blue eyes nail you when you approach. In a no-frills black pants suit, Foster, an intellectual, has come to Washington to explain why she chose to play Nell, not an intellectual.
The movie, called "Nell," features one of Foster's most showy performances. Her Nell was raised in the backwoods of Appalachia by a mother who feared men -- Nell's father was an unknown rapist -- and who suffered several strokes, which severely impaired her ability to speak normally. Thus, as the film would have it, Nell has never heard a human voice.
Other than the sheer acting pyrotechnics it offers, it does seem like an odd choice for an actor who is so completely at home in the worlds of words and concepts. Whatever she is, she's never wordless.
But as an actor, Foster has continually chosen to play almost polar opposites of herself: She's never played, in her adult career, a cosmopolitan, sophisticated character. In "Taxi Driver," she was a wild girl of the streets, a prostitute; in her first Oscar-winning role, for "The Accused," she was a tarty, working-class young woman who talked tough and shot pool; in "Little Man Tate," which she directed, another tough working-class mother; and in "Silence of the Lambs," a young FBI agent, unsure of herself and her craft, shy and retiring.
Why does she always play the opposite of what she is?
"My intellectual life has always been a given," says Foster. "I've alway been intellectual. That's been easy for me. That's what I was good at. That's why I got good grades. So naturally, I'm drawn to the opposite.
"But I also learned that language can stop you from communicating. Language, after all, represents the power of classification and analysis. It can give you the choreography of the dance, but not the dance. What makes you feel is what makes you grow. That's the great drama of my life: Can I be intellectual and feeling at once?"
Instinct and ideas
She points out that the French linguistic theoretician Claude Levi-Strauss made the point that it is a human tendency to put things into some kind of order. It was that tendency she was trying to combat.
Foster may be the only Hollywood actor who can quote Levi-Strauss -- oh, other than Sylvester Stallone, but you already knew that. She appears consumed with the basic issue of the film, which is the conflict between instinct and ideas.
"I often wonder: If I didn't think a lot, could I work on pure instinct and just find a raw line through the material? There's a beautiful kind of Zen purity you feel when you know you're excellent and you can lose contact with yourself and you'll always be safe."
It was the whole idea of language as "classification," and of a girl who existed outside its structures, that first drew Foster to the project that eventually became "Nell."
The film had its origins in a one-act played called "Idioglossia," by Mark Handley, which was discovered by Foster's partner, co-producer Renee Missel. The word of the title describes a private language of the sort, say, that identical twins invent for themselves. The Handley play was about a doctor trying to reach a young patient who communicated only in an idioglassic language.
Foster and Missel then commissioned the British playwright and screenwriter ("Shadowlands") William Nicholson to develop a screenplay from the original, with Fox, which has a development deal with Foster, picking up the tab.
'Show us, not tell us'
"Bill is a real English academic, not a Hollywood type," says Foster. "He had a different upbringing -- very literary. Our gift to him was this piece of literature. We worked with him on it for months, and kept telling him, 'You should show us, not tell us.' I love working with playwrights, because they come up with big, beautiful ideas. Screenwriters are just thinking about when the audience is going to clap!"
The pair chose another Englishman, Michael Apted, to direct. Like Nicholson, Apted began as a documentary filmmaker -- he )) has done the astonishing "Seven-Up," "Fourteen-Up," and onward, series of BBC documentaries on a group of English children and how they turned out over what amounts to a 28-year span.
"Michael respects the delicacy of people's lives," says Foster.
But this was of no help as she tried to find how to play her character in "Nell." The screenplay, which gave Nell no dialogue, was of no help. Foster had to build the character entirely out of movement and sound, not out of dialogue.
"The movement was approaching and I wondered what I would do and I thought: 'I don't have a clue. I don't know where to start.' "
Eventually she consulted some choreographers to try and develop a style of movement for Nell. The best of them said to her, "Don't do steps. People will see steps. Just be."
L And so in the end, she created Nell out of her own impulses.
"I decided I wouldn't learn any lines. I tried not to do any blocking for the camera. It was just a case of somehow letting it happen."
One suspects that on Oscar night in March, it'll happen again.