Jodie Foster Says Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro Were Scared of Her on ‘Taxi Driver’ Set: “It Was a Little Awkward”
“I was 12. And they had to say things like, you know, ‘Can you pull his fly down?’” the Hollywood legend recalled while appearing on ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’
“I understand [that they were scared of me],” said Foster when asked about comments she has made in the past that she is again opening up about. She told host Jimmy Kimmel on his late night show Tuesday, “I was 12. And they had to say things like, you know, Can you pull his fly down?’ And it was a little awkward.”
In the 1976 classic film, Foster played teen prostitute Iris. De Niro played Travis Bickle, a lonely Vietnam vet, on the New York City film set.
What’s more, Foster, a child star who got her start in commercials at age 3, noted to Kimmel that she had made more movies than De Niro and Scorsese when Taxi Driver was shot in 1975. “So I was like, ‘Whatever. Just, move over,’” she said. “Yeah, they were a little scared, Scorsese especially, who kept giggling every time he talked to me. He’d start giggling and De Niro had to take over,” she recounted.
Now, 58 years after her first acting role, Foster appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to talk up the upcoming fourth season of HBO’s True Detective, in which she stars in as chief of local police Liz Danvers. And, despite being set in Alaska, the project was shot in Iceland for better production logistics.
She teased the latest supernatural side of the anthology series by saying executive producer and season one star Matthew McConaughey is “in there somewhere, in the mix” and the high Arctic by saying, “the environment is like nothing else that we usually come into contact with. It’s the Arctic in northern Alaska and with lots of women, so that makes it different, and I just love this one.”
She added that science stations in the Arctic are usually filled with men, but this cycle of True Detective had more women roles because “in this case, there’s men and they’re missing.”
Foster insisted the mostly dark days and nights in Iceland didn’t bother her, not least because the True Detective cast and crew got occasional sightings of the Northern Lights, or the aurora borealis, where dancing waves of light fill the surrounding darkness. “There would be moments when we were shooting on frozen lakes and stuff and then we’d all look up and suddenly the whole sky was green,” she recalled.
Foster also provided some context when asked about recent comments made to The Guardian about working with Gen Z, which included insisting: “They’re really annoying, especially in the workplace. 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?’”
“Yeah, I got some grief my sons for that one,” Foster admitted to Kimmel after conversations with her two sons, now in their 20s.
“You know, I’m older and you tend to do that, ‘In my day, we had to walk to school with crampons on.’ But the new generation, they’re lucky because they learned that they could say no, and we didn’t know that,” Foster added.
