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From her commanding performances in everything from The Accused to The Silence of the Lambs to the upcoming True Detective Season 4, Jodie Foster has been a formidable presence onscreen for decades. And it’s not just audiences who are “intimidated” in the company of the Oscar winner, it’s acclaimed directors too. The actress-filmmaker revealed this while discussing her time making one of Martin Scorsese’s best movies, the 1976 masterpiece Taxi Driver, in which she portrayed child prostitute Iris Steensma opposite Robert DeNiro’s Travis Bickle at only 12 years old.
The former child actor would receive her first Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her work in the neo-noir. However, she revealed during an interview with W Magazine that the then-32-year-old director — with whom she had also worked on the 1974 dramedy Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore — and his team were “definitely scared” of her, given that she had already “made a lot more films than [he] had at that point”:
When I first worked with Martin Scorsese I was probably about 10, I think. I did Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and that was Marty’s maybe his third movie. And then by the time I got to do Taxi Driver when I was 12, I had made a lot more films than they had at that point. They were definitely scared of me. They didn’t know what to do with me. I don’t know that I was the smart one in the room, but they definitely were intimidated somehow. Like ‘What do I do with this 12-year-old?’
Overall, this fear from the director and his team simply came from Foster having more work experience than them. Between Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver, the actress worked on four more projects, bringing her total number of credits up to 35 by 1976. Meanwhile, Taxi Driver was Scorsese’s fifth film in the director’s chair.
The 61-year-old actress detailed to the outlet how she kicked off her critically acclaimed career as a child star at the age of 3 “in commercials and television” before segueing into movies at 6 years old. She became a tween star in the 1970s in Disney movies like Napoleon and Samantha, Freaky Friday and Candleshoe, and became the then-youngest host of Saturday Night Live at 14 years old in 1976.
One of the rare kid actors to go on to have a successful acting career as an adult in Hollywood, Foster followed up that pre-teen Scorsese work and a Yale college degree with two Academy Awards, three BAFTA Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award and three Golden Globe Awards, as well as the prestigious Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2013.
In the W Magazine interview, the performer noted how becoming an adult actor post-college was “the biggest transition” in her life:
The biggest transition was going from college and then becoming an adult actor, the work that I did between 16 and 22, I think. Usually, that is the most awkward place and most child actors don’t continue to be actors when they grow up. That was a rough one.
And, of course, Scorsese has been no slouch in the movie department either: the filmmaker would go on to direct 21 feature films after Taxi Driver, including Raging Bull, Goodfellas, The Wolf of Wall Street and this year’s “brilliant” Killers of the Flower Moon. The latter title has major Oscars buzz and has already racked up seven 2024 Golden Globe nominations, including Best Director for Martin Scorsese and Best Supporting Actor for his frequent collaborator, and Jodie Foster’s Taxi Driver co-star, Robert DeNiro.
Given that Foster is also a Golden Globes nominee this year in the Best Supporting Actress category for her work in the swimmer biopic Nyad, we might just be lucky enough to get a Taxi Driver reunion on the red carpet soon enough! Although, this time, I highly doubt there will be any perceived intimidation from any party involved.