Jodie Foster Names the Best Director She’s Ever Worked With
Jodie Foster has worked with some of the most famous directors in the world over her long career. She started acting as a young child and has been in the industry for six decades. Because she has seen so much, her opinion on who is the best at the job carries a lot of weight.
In an interview with author Robert J Emery, Foster shared that Robert Zemeckis is the most impressive director she has ever worked with when it comes to the technical side of filmmaking. The two worked together on the 1997 science fiction movie Contact. She was amazed by how he could come up with brand new ideas every single day on the set.
Foster described his talent by saying, Well, I think everybody knows, and I certainly found this out, that Bob Zemeckis is probably the greatest technician director that I’ve ever worked with, ever. He walks onto the set every single day and invents something new and people scurry around trying to figure out how to make it. He just has one of those amazing brains that he really can translate the storytelling of the movie into a very epic, very technical, very visual sense, very visual style.
Zemeckis is famous for using new technology to change how movies look. He made Who Framed Roger Rabbit which mixed cartoons with real actors and used special effects to put Tom Hanks into old historical footage for Forrest Gump. He has also made massive hits like Back to the Future and Cast Away. His movies have made about 4.5 billion dollars at the box office over the years.
Before working with Zemeckis, Foster had already worked with legends like Martin Scorsese. She was only 14 years old when she was nominated for an Oscar for her role in Taxi Driver. Since then, she has worked with directors like Spike Lee and David Fincher. She is still very active today and recently won a Golden Globe for her role in the show True Detective.
Last year she was praised for her work in a French thriller called A Private Life. She also earned an Oscar nomination for the movie Nyad, which tells the true story of a swimmer trying to cross the Florida Straits. Even though she has been acting since the late 1960s, she continues to find success in major projects.
It is interesting to hear a great actress like Jodie Foster give so much credit to the technical side of directing. Most people think about directors just telling actors what to do, but her comments show that building the visual world is just as important. It makes sense that she would appreciate someone who can invent new ways to tell a story on screen.
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