AFTER spending decades in the film industry, Jodie Foster is finally seeing Hollywood move forward from archaic views when it comes to trusting female filmmakers more, particularly with the success of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie last year.
“I’ve had the beauty of being able to be in the business since the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s and so on. The progression or bettering of our audiences translates into a kind of new thinking about who our marginalised voices are,” Foster told Variety.
She further explains that in the “old days”, women were seen as a risk, though she is not able to ascertain why exactly it was that way. That perception has shifted, according to the actress.
“With a big success like Barbie, they gave Gerwig, who had made two mostly independent films, the keys to the kingdom and said ‘We’re going to give you our most important child’ and all the money to support it. That’s new for women. I hope that continues.”
Noting that 2023 saw more representation through film and television, it was not enough. Drawing an example with Native Americans, Foster says representation of community alone was not enough if the stories are not centred around them.
In a way, Foster is right. One of last year’s biggest and longest films was Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. The film focused on the murders of the Native American Osage women by greedy white men.
Though it heavily featured Natives, the narrative was from a third-person point of view. This was after Scorcese rehauled the original script, which was written from the perspective of the white FBI agents that were sent to investigate the alarming deaths.
“The person telling the story wasn’t the point of view. My show True Detective takes us to the next level of talking about Native issues from a Native perspective.”
Foster is currently leading the excellent fourth season of HBO’s True Detective, titled True Detective: Night Country.
The other lead is Kali Reis, a Native American, with the season focusing on Foster and Reis’ characters investigating the murder mystery of an Indigenous Alaskan woman.
