Cover Stories: A Screen Gem Turns Director

By RICHARD CORLISS

The rest of us have family albums to remind us of what we looked like in youth. Jodie Foster could have a movie library and a stack of press clippings. Because she has been an actress for 25 of her 28 years, she can screen the public record of her childhood. Anyone can. You can re-view her evolution from tadpole to tomboy and beyond: in the Coppertone commercial, the Disney pictures, the sitcoms, Taxi Driver, Bugsy Malone. And you can scan the interviews she gave to magazines from age 11 onward. Dear reader, we have in our possession a tape of a lunchroom chat you had in seventh grade. Care to hear what you said? Care to be held to it?

Foster could pass this test because she was always a bright young woman as well as a symbol of precocious girlhood. At seven, she had entered Los Angeles' Lycee Francais, where she would perfect her French and emerge as valedictorian before heading off to Yale. So the child star could be expected to have thoughts, and to turn thoughts into sentences. Even today her teen talk is worth attending to, as another kind of Jodie Foster retrospective.

On acting: "People assume I've been robbed of my childhood. I don't think that's true. I've gotten something extra. Most kids, all they have is school. That's why they get so mad when it's boring and feel so bad if they fail. I have my work; I know how to talk to adults and how to make a decision. Acting has spared me from being a regular everyday kid slob. I used to think of it as just a job, but now it's my whole life, it's all I want to do."

On sisterhood: "My friendships with girls usually don't last too long. I'm not interested in a lot of the things they are, I guess." On femininity: "I never had the gift of looking cute. I hate dresses and jewelry, and the only doll I played with was a G.I. Joe. And I've got this deep voice. That's why they call me Froggy at school."

On her mother Brandy, a single parent: "She always listened to me. She thought of me as her best friend. If it weren't for me, she wouldn't have anything, and if it weren't for her, I would be nothing." Being raised without a father was "the best thing that ever happened to me. I never realized there was any difference between men and women. It never occurred to me I would have to be a nurse and not a doctor."

On directing: "It would be great to be a director. They get to do anything! They have people killed, blow things up, make people cry and laugh. Directing ^ is just like creating life." "It is a very masculine thing to do; they all end up in the hospital after a picture. It's a hard job." She said she hoped to start with a small-budget film. "Something sensitive with two people." She was determined, though, not to appear in a film she also directed. "That is the biggest mistake, unless you're Woody Allen."

It's a wise child, or maybe a witch, who knows so precisely and presciently what she wants to do. Acting is Foster's life -- enough of it, at least, to have earned her an Oscar in 1989 for playing the raped party girl in The Accused, and to have won raves and huge audiences for her role as a dogged FBI trainee in The Silence of the Lambs, the third-highest grossing movie released this year. Next year she co-stars in . . . a Woody Allen picture. But right now she is a director, and a damned fine one, of a small-budget film. Little Man Tate is something sensitive with three people: a gifted child (Adam Hann- Byrd), his sympathetic teacher (Dianne Wiest) and the mother, a defiant single parent, torn between love and loss.

One part of Foster's teen prophesy proved timid. She directed herself as the mother. Destiny, if not autobiography, demanded it. Not that this is the Brandy and Jodie Foster story; that would be too simple. It is more aptly an emblem of the strength, intelligence and self-awareness Jodie Foster has applied to ensure that a perishable commodity (actor) becomes a lasting presence. The movie can stand as both an artful commentary on growing up strange and a calling-card film for a director who promises much and delivers most of it. Still, reverberations from Foster's extraordinary youth pulse through Scott Frank's script and inform the fierce care the director took in realizing it.

When he was a year old, Fred Tate could read the insignia on the back of a dish. At seven he is a displaced person, a brilliant adult mind imprisoned in second grade. In class he flummoxes his teacher with complex answers to simple questions. (Q. Which of the numbers one through nine can be divided by two? A. All of them.) On the schoolyard asphalt he draws elaborate Madonnas in colored chalk. But he can't catch a basketball without falling down, or fail to be oppressed by his genius. Seems Fred is a kid too, envying the boy's ease of one rowdy, popular classmate: "All I want is someone I can eat lunch with." He's a Mozart in awe of Bart Simpson.

Fred is mature enough to have a child of his own, and in a way, he does: his mother Dede. Coarse and loving, she waits tables in a Chinese lounge to support herself and her son with no help, thank you, from the long-departed Mr. Tate. ("Dede says I don't have a dad," Fred notes in the film's narration. "She says I'm the Immaculate Conception. That's a pretty big responsibility for a little kid.") They are a sublime mismatch of the sort usually found only in marriages. Fred balances Mom's checkbook and, as a Mother's Day gift, writes her an opera. Dede brags, like a tough schoolkid, about how she aced out some fastidious jerk in her basement laundry. For her, chain letters are literature. The boy, a nonstop reader, also dotes on Van Gogh's flower studies. Sometimes, Fred says, "I wake up in his paintings."

He confides this to Jane Grierson, who runs a school for gifted kids. A former prodigy, Jane can appreciate what Fred has to give; she can empathize with his anguish, isolation, nightmares. She will protect him, nurture him -- mother him, if he and Dede give her half a chance. Thus begins a kind of custody battle between the two women, each offering part of what Fred needs. Dede is heart, Jane is mind; Dede is sense, Jane sensibility. Neither is a whole number: Dede spits out cherry pits faster than she does ideas, and Jane bakes a meat loaf that looks like a moon rock. The movie asks, How many mothers can divide a boy's loyalty? And the answer is, Both of them. But is there an answer? A child can't choose who cares for him.

In the wrong hands, this material could get pretty twee and reductive; give the kid a disease, and you have a TV movie of the week. And, in fact, the second half of Little Man Tate threatens to take sides, to turn Jane into an exploitative klutz, to provide a happy, even triumphant solution to the dilemma, full of hats and horns and two birthday cakes. But, really, that's just dessert to a film that offers much chewy food for thought. The comforting dream of communion at the end can't erase the picture's careful wit about good people in desperate situations or, especially, the wan isolation shadowing a boy who knows his genius has made him alien. Says French filmmaker Louis Malle: "Jodie's film is basically about the profound loneliness of childhood, and she's dealt with it head-on. I would be very happy and proud to have made the film that she did."

Foster would be happy and proud to hear that; Malle's Murmur of the Heart is among her favorite pictures and one of the inspirations for Little Man Tate. ; The perpetual film student, who at Yale wrote a paper on Francois Truffaut's Jules and Jim, still believes that French directors go "for the truth of a scene. This movie is my first statement, and I wanted a French film sense." That means not rushing or spoon-feeding the audience, not forcing easy moral judgments through camera effects or the placement of actors in the frame. This is not, in Foster's words, "a $20 million nightmare"; her directorial hand does not conceal a joy buzzer. She caresses each movie moment as if it were privileged.

Little Man Tate isn't all French. It speaks with a distinctly American accent; it saunters where a French film might slouch. Foster has worked for some superfine American directors -- among them Martin Scorsese (Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver), Jonathan Kaplan (The Accused), Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs) -- and this movie indicates that she paid attention. A pool-hall montage, all slow-mo and Saturn-ringed balls and electric-blue vectors, plays like a fast tribute to Scorsese's The Color of Money.

At heart, though, this movie isn't an homage to anybody. Foster has her own confident style, her own cinema craft to create a world that is both familiar and unique. The look is cool and bright for Jane's scenes (she's the perky techno-mom), and warmer but tarnished for Dede's. The apartment Dede and Fred live in is a domestic mess bathed in an autumnal glow -- as if they lived inside a jack-o'-lantern and its teeth were the boy's cage.

The movie screen is a cage too. Animal instincts are on display in there, prowling for our pleasure. Handsome creatures (the performers) assume the shapes of pretty beasts (the characters). Being observed through these gilded bars, in brutal or glamorous close-up, has to be confining for a film actor. The mixture of exhibitionism and vulnerability in any performer must be volatile, toxic. Even more so for an actress, since the history of movies, as has been said a million times, is the history of men looking at women. And most certainly for a child starlet who, at first, is utterly spontaneous, innocent, exposed -- often exploited and, perhaps, as isolated as Fred Tate.

Foster says she directed the Little Man Tate script "because I understood it so much." How could she not? She was an exceptional child from the age of three, when she shot her first Coppertone commercial. She was in TV shows and movies at nine: a beautiful blond girl, her sad eyes overwhelming a toothsome * smile. She was Becky Thatcher, Tom Sawyer's muse of civility, and Addie Pray, beguiling con artist of the Paper Moon series, and a one-kid sorority of spunky Disney heroines. How many girls of the '70s wanted to be Jodie Foster? Movie stars are to fall in love with. Or, if they are children, to adopt. How many parents wanted to trade in their daughters for this one?

It takes a smart heart and the carapace of an armadillo to emerge sane, let alone healthy, from child celebrity. Jodie Foster somehow did it, and the somehow is her mother. Brandy, a former publicist, separated from Lucius Foster III, a real estate agent, before their fourth child, Alicia Christian (Jodie), was born in Los Angeles on Nov. 19, 1962. The atypical stage mother, Brandy won Jodie's loving respect because she urged and loved rather than pushed and shoved. "She'd seen a lot of wayward souls in Hollywood. She didn't want a cripple for a child; she wanted me to fly. She also wanted me to have a serious and heroic career. So she chose some risky, off-beat movies."

In any kind of movie, Jodie was off-beat because from girlhood she always seemed the older woman. Not yet 10, playing Becky Thatcher, she instructs the young truant in the meaning of the word philanderer. A year or so later, as wizened Audrey in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, she shows Alice's son how to steal guitar strings from a music store, asks him if he wants to get high on Ripple, and nonchalantly reveals that her "mom turns tricks in the Ramada Inn from 3 on in the afternoon." Not long after Alice, she was Tallulah, a sleek gun moll, in Bugsy Malone, Alan Parker's weird-but-it-works munchkin musical. The same year she played Iris, Taxi Driver's notorious pre-teen hooker -- rude talk and skimpy clothes ill-suiting a good girl stranded in hell. And with each new movie, it seemed as if Jodie had skipped another grade. Her intelligence gave her a precocious maturity; the Foster child was already a Foster parent.

Even for Jodie, so spookily poised on- and offscreen, growing pains appeared inevitable. Everyone passes through an awkward stage, and for many child stars that stage is adulthood. They seem like less perfect versions of their lost miniature selves. Their cuteness is shed, and with it their earning power. At 16 they can be obsolete. Many aging child actors, once sprung from the pampered captivity of, say, sitcom stardom, are as unready for real life as zoo pets suddenly released in the wild. They try, too quickly, to catch up on the rambunctious youth they missed, and wind up in the police blotter or on the cover of supermarket tabloids. They can spend their 20s torpid, discarded, in rehab from their early fame.

If any child star could escape the Hollywood hothouse and blossom, it would be Jodie Foster. And indeed she considers when she was 18 to 24, "the years I went off to college and had a life." She armored herself in friends, cocooned herself in the anonymity of a newly plump figure, tangled with the deconstructionist teachers in her comp-lit classes at Yale.

But someone else was flipping through her movie family album. On March 30, 1981, John Hinckley Jr. shot President Reagan and subsequently professed his love for Foster -- or, really, for Iris in Taxi Driver. (The film was based in part on the diary of Arthur Bremer, the would-be assassin of Governor George Wallace.) Hinckley won the prize any deranged, unrequited lover seeks: he would be forever linked with his unknowing inamorata.

Foster could speak eloquently of the rank underside of stargazing -- of fandom fanned into fanaticism. Understandably, she does not speak on the subject (just last week she canceled an appearance on the Today show because Hinckley was to be mentioned), or on other aspects of her personal life. She knows that Hollywood movies are all about the marketing of emotion, and that it is difficult for actors, the onscreen vessels of emotion, to keep their lives sensible and their sensations private. Nonetheless, Foster is determined to separate public persona from private person.

She hopes that moviegoers will do the same. "My work is my work," she says. "It has always been a way to express myself, and to be things I'm not. My character precedes my job. I was who I was before I became an actress. I became an actress because I like to act, not to get my picture in the paper and have people wonder what color socks I wear -- not to be able to get the best table at the Polo Lounge or to be good friends with Barry Diller."

Foster graduated (cum laude) from Yale in 1985. But at that time Diller, chairman of 20th Century Fox, was probably not much interested in being good friends with her, or casting her in a movie. She wasn't box-office poison; she was box-office invisible. Another actress's hope was her fear: that she might end up as a regular on The Bold Ones. "My career was at a low point when I graduated," she notes, "but I couldn't let it go without a real push. Then it struck me that I wasn't going to do dreck," and she took roles in some eccentric good films (Siesta, Five Corners) and at least one ordinary bad one (Stealing Home). Then The Accused came along. Or rather, she stormed after it. The part got her the Oscar and a place on the actresses' A list. Only fitting: A is the grade she has earned all her life, in class and onscreen.

As an actress-director, she knows her subject. She could teach Hollywood to moguls; they might learn something. "This is not a business that is kind to women, but it needs them," she says. "The female pioneers have to be 10 times better than a man. Maybe someday there will be an old-girl network. But I'm not interested in alienating the audience. I believe in the system. I'm acutely conscious of the business in this town and how I organize my career. As an actor you must have self-knowledge and an understanding of your limits. I know I can't play a Chicano gang leader, but I could play Queen Victoria. I'm also a structure hound. If the choices are too great, I'm paralyzed."

She is never paralyzed; she is always prepared, whether playing a scene or carrying a film. The ferocious focus has always been there. When she was 13, she directed a short "tone poem," Hands of Time, a series of shots of hands that depict life from cradle to old age: a baby, a couple getting married, a man cocking a rifle, a man's hand on a pregnant woman's stomach, and an old man holding hands with a little kid. In one day, she had to write the treatment for it, select the cast, direct the crew, and decide on the editing order. Foster remembers the film as "lyrical, very pretty."

As director of Tate, she amassed storyboard details on each scene -- not just the camera blocking but the underlying emotions of each character. "Films are too important not to have a drawn road map," she says. "I won't wing it. When I come into a shot, I always have an idea." She has an idea too of the field-marshalry of directing a movie. "You must learn to lead, to be a benevolent king. You try to communicate your vision and monitor those who don't get it. I feel safe there. I can be vulnerable. The code is, they'll catch you if you fall down. I have camaraderie with these people. It's like going through a war together."

By all accounts, there was no war between the Tates. Foster made sure it was a happy set; everybody watched the rushes; the young boss won new acolytes, none stronger than screenwriter Frank, who had hoped to direct the movie. "There's no one in this town like her," says Frank. "She seems small and sad; you want to protect her. Then you find she's a pretty and intelligent woman who knows kick boxing. She's one of the few people who's not tongue- lashed in the business. This town is the biggest collection of dips, dopes and dunderheads. Most are illiterate; their entire vocabulary can be summed up in MTV. But Jodie's resourceful. She knows movies, but she knows more than movies. She's unpretentious -- 99% of the time she dresses in sweats. And she's maternal; she eats healthy and tells you how to eat."

What she told the actors is a collegial secret, except for her instructions to young Adam Hann-Byrd. "Adam is a very realistic kid, very aware," she says. "I wouldn't know how to direct a kid to be that way. So I'd load him up with a lot of technical things -- kids usually connect with the technical -- and then he would just relax. Or I'd say, 'Make your eyebrows like you're scared,' and that would make him a little nervous. And then I'd get what I wanted."

Adam, a Manhattan nine-year-old who greets a reporter with a plastic fly on his outstretched tongue, remembers it differently. The parts he remembers, that is. (He's a little fuzzy on the audition: "That was a year and a half ago," he patiently explains.) Adam thought the work was "all fun," except for one scene where he had to wear leg braces, another where he rides a pony, and a few others where he was supposed to cry. Could Fred be someone Adam might know? "No, he's too smart for me." Could he exist somewhere? "It could be possible. It's true that some people are like that. Yeah, maybe in Cincinnati." They shot the movie in Cincinnati.

We promise not to reprint this quote 20 years from now in a cover story on Adam Hann-Byrd, world-famed entomologist. But chances are good that Adam, who doesn't plan a lifelong career as a little-boy actor, will evade the ravages of celebrity. Whether he wants to or not. Most people go through graceful, productive phases, and they pass with the same inexorability as the awkward ones. Not many people shine in or on every stage. Not many people are Jodie Foster.

But think of this: as the child performer was to the adult actress, so the tyro director may be to the mature auteur. Little Man Tate, for all its acuity of craft and gallantry toward its characters, could be simply the first step: the Coppertone commercial of filmmaker Foster. If this is the larva, imagine the butterflies to come.

With reporting by Martha Smilgis/Los Angeles and Linda Williams/New York