Jodie Foster has revealed her first impression of Robert De Niro was that the iconic actor was “really uninteresting”— but it was all due to his method acting.
The Silence of the Lambs star recently opened up about meeting De Niro on the set of Martin Scorsese’s 1976 movie Taxi Driver when she was just 12 years old. She recalled how the Goodfellas actor was already an established actor at 32, but nonetheless “took [her] under his wing” so the pair could familiarize themselves as co-stars.
“We’d run the lines and run the lines a second and third time,” Foster, now 63, recounted in an on-stage conversation Sunday at the Marrakech Film Festival after winning a tribute award.
“And I’m sure maybe some of you have been here when Robert De Niro was here. One of our greatest American actors, so proud to have worked with him — not the most interesting person on earth,” she said.
“At that time, he was very much in character, the way he was in those days. So he was really uninteresting and I remember having these lunches with him and being like, ‘What is happening? When can I go home?’”
Foster said that when the actors went out to lunch together, she would talk to waiters and other diners at restaurants because the duo had nothing to talk about while De Niro was in character as his Taxi Driver role, a veteran with declining mental health.
However, Foster and De Niro’s relationship had a breakthrough when he spoke to her about his process as a method actor.
“He finally walked me through improvisation by the time we had our third lunch together, and it opened my eyes to what acting could be,” Foster said. “And I realized at 12, ‘Oh, it’s my fault because I haven’t brought enough to the table.’ I’ve just been saying lines and waiting for my next line and acting naturally, but building a character is something different.”
She added: “And I remember how excited I was, I remember being kind of sweaty and excited and giggly and coming back up into the hotel room to meet my mom and saying, ‘I’ve had this epiphany.’ And I think from there, everything changed.”
This is not the first time that Foster has opened up about her experience playing the controversial role of a child sex worker in Scorsese’s acclaimed movie. In an interview last year, she recalled De Niro and Scorsese being intimidated by her young age on set.
“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 told late night host Jimmy Kimmel at the time.
