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Friday, September 20, 2002

By Barbara Vancheri, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Even if she hadn't given birth to two sons, Jodie Foster could have played the mother in "Panic Room" ( ) but she knows she brings a little something extra to the table -- or thriller -- these days.

	Jodie Foster seeks to protect her daughter from intruders in "Panic Room."

As an actress, the 39-year-old Foster can put herself in the shoes of a newly divorced mother who must take refuge, with her daughter, in the panic room of their 1879 brownstone. Their first night in the home comes complete with burglars who, as it turns out, want to get into the very room where the petrified pair have taken refuge.

"There's something that happens to you, I think, when you have your own kid," Foster says. "There's a really intricate, implicit understanding of what you would do for him. Just that small detail of, you know, the first time your kid starts bleeding ... and the way your heart races."

She knows firsthand the way a mother places her children's safety and survival above her own.

"That clearly their lives are more important than yours," she says. "And that you forego your own life in some ways for theirs. Before, I think I understood that intellectually, and now it's just a much more emotional thing."

In "Panic Room," which arrived Tuesday on videocassette and DVD, Meg Altman's heart certainly is set racing when three intruders (Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto and Dwight Yoakam) break into their house. Meg's daughter, played by Kristen Stewart, has a medical condition that adds to the urgency of their situation.

To publicize this week's arrival of "Panic Room" and the Nov. 5 release of "The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys," Foster spent time on the phone Sept. 11 with reporters. She had seen some of the televised reading of the names of the dead and been moved by it but the actress intended to steer clear of the saturation.

Her older son, 4, watches cartoons occasionally and her other boy will turn 1 later this month. "I'm not ready to relive the plane in the building. I don't think any of us are, to tell you the truth. It's a funny thing how quickly a year comes."

Foster, who has two Best Actress Oscars to her credit and the ability to dub her movies in French or record the French dialogue for the DVD, says the primary reason she opted to do "Panic Room" was because of director David Fincher. One of the most fascinating elements of the movie is how he makes the camera snake around and through the brownstone.

"He's somebody that I've wanted to work with for a long time and have kept in touch with over the years to try and find something for us. I just learn so much from my experience with him, just watching him and his tenacity and his incredibly clear and authoritative vision."

Foster was pregnant during the making of "Panic Room," a mentally and physically grueling thriller where her expanding waistline only became a problem during the last weeks of filming. "And the last three weeks of shooting, we went back and did the beginning part of the movie. So that was all the stuff you saw with big coats" and bags designed to conceal her mid-section.

"Panic Room" was a spring success, eventually earning $95 million and proving that women can rule the box office. At one point, it was playing at the same time as "High Crimes" starring Ashley Judd and "Murder by Numbers" with Sandra Bullock. And then boys came back into town for the summer and women were once again relegated to girlfriends, wives or, in "Men in Black II," aliens.

Asked about this pattern, Foster says, "I'm no expert on marketing movies and release patterns, but I think some of that has to do with the post-Christmas, post-Oscar race slots. That they reserve those for movies that they see as 'riskier.' And risky sometimes translates to 'has female lead in it.'

"So I think that's probably why some of those movies came out at that time. But the sort of suspense genre, all that stuff has turned into a kind of February release thing." Started, perhaps, by "The Silence of the Lambs" in February 1991.

Foster, who long ago quit picking projects based on how the audience might react, says she's never forgotten the independent movies that made her want to be a filmmaker.

"Even though I liked 'Saturday Night Fever' and I liked 'Star Wars,' those weren't the movies that made me want to be a filmmaker. It was '400 Blows' or 'Hiroshima, Mon Amour,' just in some ways the outsider movies that stayed with me the rest of my life."

Foster has directed less than a handful of movies, including "Little Man Tate" and "Home for the Holidays" and may still get "Flora Plum," a Depression-era love story about a circus freak and penniless waif, to the screen.

Although Foster didn't direct "Dangerous Lives," she did produce it and stars as Sister Assumpta, a stern Catholic school teacher who becomes a motorcycle-riding nemesis in the comic-book drawings of her male students.

Questioned about the fairness of the portrayal of the church and school, she says, "I think it's a very true and fair depiction of what it was like in some ways to be 14 or 15 in the '70s. And Catholic schools in our film are certainly no different than other parochial schools. And I totally understand her point of view, the nun in the film. I think she's trying to keep them safe the best way that she knows how, which unfortunately is to sort of put her thumb over their egos and make them powerless, which as we know doesn't really work with young boys."

Despite its potentially salacious title, "Dangerous Lives" wasn't inspired by the sexual abuse controversy. "We came way before it -- at least we made the movie before it, and I think it's really the title that had people make the association."

She recalled, "A young producer brought us the book and we all developed it together, and we hired a writer on and in concert with this young director [Peter Care] who'd never made a movie before -- he'd just done documentaries and videos and stuff -- and we came up with this wonderful script."

The movie drops animated fantasy sequences into the live-action proceedings. Todd McFarlane, co-founder of Image comics and creator of "Spawn," was animation producer.

Foster knew the movie would be an indie production with three leads under the age of 15. In other words, a formula for not getting financing.

The challenge was finding an actor who would take no money, play one of the smaller parts and be mainstream enough to garner the necessary financing. "And so I just said, you know what, why don't I just do it?" She stars alongside youthful actors Kieran Culkin, Jena Malone and Emile Hirsch. Vincent D'Onofrio shows up as a priest.

To hear her tell it, the younger actors don't ask her for advice. "They're doing just fine. I do love working with them and I love seeing the opportunities that they have that I didn't have, in some ways, when I was younger. There really weren't any other kids that had made the transition to an adult actor.

"So, when I was young, I just thought, 'OK, when I'm 16, it'll all be over and I'll do something else.' And at least they know there's life after child stardom and there is creative work after child stardom."

And maybe, if you're talented enough, an Oscar. Or two.

Barbara Vancheri can be reached at bvancheri@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1632.