Honored at the Marrakech International Film Festival (FIFM 2025) for her forty-year career, American actress and director Jodie Foster reflects on the major challenges, past and future, facing cinema, as well as the questions that have shaped her journey in front of and behind the camera. Interview. During the tribute dedicated to you at FIFM 2025, you highlighted that throughout your career, you've witnessed cinema evolve, from the golden age of studios to the rise of streaming platforms and now AI. In your view, what has most transformed the industry? And how do you choose your film projects in this ever-changing landscape? I believe the two things that changed everything are, first, the digital revolution. For everyone, for you, for me, for cinema as a whole, everything shifted because of that. But also the fact that, when I was very young, there were simply no women in cinema. At three years old, at six, I never saw another woman. And certainly never anyone from another ethnicity. We didn't think about that at the time. But now, looking back, I ask myself: How is it that with more than 40 films over my career, I only made one with a woman director? Just one in 40 years. And yet my last four films were all made with women. That's interesting. Your 1988 film The Accused addressed the mechanics of rape and the culture of complicity long before the Me Too movement. What impact did it have on American society and the West more broadly? Cinema has enormous power to show us who we are as human beings, the worst and the best. I can't say it was the very beginning, because films about rape did exist before The Accused, but it marked a new moment in the United States in terms of public debate. It forced people to ask: Can a woman ever «deserve» rape? At the time, that was an absolutely revolutionary question, because most people said yes. If a woman dressed a certain way, spoke too loudly, had too much power, was too charming, too seductive, too this, too that… And the film firmly took on the task of confronting that question and offering an answer: no woman, or more broadly no person, ever deserves violence. That person simply does not exist. I was twenty-five or twenty-six when I made the film, and I wasn't fully aware of the scope of the issue. I knew I wanted to make the movie; I wasn't sure why. I didn't do much research. I read the script twice before starting. Maybe I was afraid to ask too many questions before doing it. It was only after seeing the film that I felt overwhelmed by the experience, by this character who speaks too loudly, who is all those things that even for me were unsettling. When I first saw it, I thought I was awful! I thought my career in cinema was over, that I'd go back to school and become a teacher because I was convinced I was terrible! (Laughs) In your opinion, what is the role of the artist when freedom of expression is under threat? What part can they play? Ah! That's a difficult question. I don't know if I'm truly an expert on it, I've lived relatively freely. I've been able to make the films I wanted to make, express the obsessions and interests that drive me. My main challenge has always been finding the funding to express those things. The real battle is being supported in that expression. And in the United States, that's going to be an even bigger challenge in the years ahead.
