Foster, a mother of two boys herself, plays Kyle Pratt, a grieving wife who is returning home to the United States with her young daughter, after a terrible accident has robbed them of a husband and father.
Then the unthinkable happens. After a brief sleep, Kyle wakes to discover that her daughter is no longer in the seat beside her. Assuming at first that the youngster has gone to explore the plane, or has met and is playing with other children, she casually wanders through the huge aircraft trying to find her.
Then panic begins to set in. There’s no sign of Julia (played by Marlene Lawston) and what’s worse, no one even remembers seeing her get on the plane. A nightmarish thriller, directed by Robert Schwentke, Flightplan plays on the terrible fear of every parent–losing a child.
Flightplan marks a welcome return to the screen for Foster. These days, she devotes much of her time to raising her boys, Charles, 6 and his three-year-old brother Kit, and admits it takes a powerful compelling script to tempt her back to work.
"You know, I worked for years and years and there were even a lot of times when I did three movies in a year and I don’t need to do that anymore," she explains. "And I get such a very specific pleasure from working on a film–it really is about the production and going and doing it–but if I do it too often I really resent that it takes me away from my real life."
Foster has been acting since she was a toddler; she was just two years old when she made her first commercial for a sun tan lotion. She has starred in some of modern cinema’s finest films–as a 12-year-old playing a child prostitute in Martin Scorsese’s ground breaking Taxi Driver and later, winning an Oscar for her searing performance as a rape victim in The Accused and a second Academy Award for her wonderful portrayal of FBI agent Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs.
She has also proved to be a talented director with Little Man Tate and Home For the Holidays. Foster lives in Los Angeles, where she was born and grew up.
Q: Does being a mother yourself help with a role like this?
A: Well, I did make a lot of movies where I played mums before I had kids, so clearly it is something that I think about. I must have been drawn to them before I had children, probably because I had such a close relationship with my mother and that was an important part of my life. But it’s hard to explain to people the weird lack of differentiation that you have with your children when you sort of don’t know where you start and they end. You may even be desensitised to feelings for yourself but the amount of empathy you have for your children is almost completely blinding. It’s a funny thing and it’s hard to explain.
Q: Did it happen to you? Did you ever lose sight of your boys or did your mother ever lose you?
A: Oh sure, we were four kids, we got lost all the time from my mum and I remember that horrible panic of just turning around and then not knowing what to do and crying. And if you ever watch your children go through that it is just the most horrible thing, because you just project all those terrible feelings that you have when you were a kid.
Yeah, I have lost my older one for less than a minute. He was probably two-and-a-half or something at the time and I could see him through this crowd, I could see his hair, you know a kid with blond hair through this crowd, but I couldn’t get to him. There were so many people in front of me and I was trying to get to him through this sea of people who were just spinning around and he was like crying ‘mummy!’ and crying and it was just horrible, horrible. Hopefully he’ll never remember that.
Q: It’s a theme–a parent and child in distress–that you’ve worked with before in Panic Room.
A: Right, it must be something that works on me, it must be something I think about. And of course once you have kids it is the most important significant thing that happens to you in your life.
But it’s a kind of primal thing–this fear of not being able to keep your children safe. It’s not anything as indelicate as like someone would abduct them; it’s something subtler than that. It’s just knowing that in life they will encounter these small and large injustices and that there is really nothing you can do about it. You are wired in every way to put them on the earth so that you can protect them and then you realise that you can’t.
Q: Is being a mother one of the reasons you don’t work quite as much as you used to?
A: Yeah, It’s a big reason. Also, I have worked for 40 years and I have never been a workaholic, I have been pretty judicious about what I did, when I was younger, even when I made two or three movies a year. So yeah, the kids are familiar with that. My life is really busy and it’s significant and I like it and it takes a lot to get me away from it. Maybe if the movie business wasn’t so all-encompassing, not just 12 to 16 hours a day when you are in production, but the junkets (to promote a film). that sort of thing. It is time consuming and it’s a lot of energy. It asks for a 100 per cent commitment and my family is a 100 per cent commitment so there’s a lot of tug between the two.
Q: You are shooting in confinded spaces on Flightplan and one would imagine it was a hard movie to make. What was the hardest sequence?
A: Yeah, it is a tough movie for me. For my part it is a hard movie and you realise it is hard when you see it all put together. I think the hardest and the most satisfying really was the scene with the therapist, played by Greta Scacci who I think is great and we were so lucky to have her in that scene. Because I don’t have any dialogue, I only have like two lines in the whole scene and yet you have to convey a lot of emotion.
Q: It’s all about your look, your face.
A: And responding to what she is saying. She has been worn down at that point and she has gone through so much and her grief and frustration and despair is so confusing that it doesn’t make sense. It’s so profound and so intense and so blinding that she has to wonder if it’s possible that she has lost her mind. All of the things that you go through in that scene are so beautiful and profound but I didn’t have a lot of dialogue so it’s challenging.
Q: I believe your role in Flightplan was originally written for a man, is that correct?
A: Yeah it was.
Q: Was it easy to adapt it for a woman?
A: For me yeah. In fact I think it made a lot less sense as a guy. There were a couple of things that just really didn’t work, that they were kind of trying to shoe in there. They had set it up as a man who had worked all his life as an engineer and his wife was the primary care giver so he didn’t know what kind of sandwiches his kid ate and he didn’t know what he was supposed to pack. And through the course of losing her he comes to assume a parental place he didn’t have before. But then he wonders if he has gone crazy –that doesn’t make any sense.
Q: Are you a good flyer?
A: Yeah.
Q: I ask because sometimes you see parents struggling with their kids. Has that made a difference when you travel?
A: It’s always hard flying with kids although they reach a certain age and they get into the DVDs. It’s the fact that you have to worry about three people; if you don’t tell them where to go they don’t know where to go, if I don’t tie their shoes, they don’t get tied.
Q: Does September 11th have any bearing on Flightplan?
A: I think the film takes that into consideration–that this is a post 9/11 world and in fact it talks about it. It’s a world where no matter how smudged our boundaries have gotten, the world has become international, you know global economics, we don’t need passports to travel in Europe anymore–all of these kind of, this international smoothing over –if you push someone against the wall though they still revert to this primal, bigoted self-protected place and it is a primal thing. And 9/11 really just brought that out more. What happens with the racial profiling of the Arab character on the plane is not dissimilar to how my character is profiled as an hysterical female.
Q: Is it true that you find acting more exhausting than directing?
A: Yeah, I think acting is way more exhausting than directing because you are always pleasing a third party. You have to be in the moment but you also to accommodate everyone else’s vision, whether it is the DP or the sound mixer or the director. You are always supposed to be spontaneous in the moment. I think when people first get into acting they think ‘I’m going to twirl around with a lamp shade on my head and yell...’ like it’s some big bold expressive thing. It is those things. However, doing all those things at once is like patting your head and rubbing your belly–it’s two very opposite things.
Flightplan opens in theaters across the Philippines on Nov. 9.