Different, but Still Kindred Spirits

On the surface, Jodie Foster and Keith Gordon wouldn’t seem to have much in common: She’s a mainstream superstar, with major acting, directing and producing credits. He’s a former actor (“Jaws” in 1975, “Dressed to Kill” in 1980) turned director best known for smaller indie projects such as “A Midnight Clear” and “Mother Night.”

But the pair--who both started in the business as child actors--worked together on the new film “Waking the Dead,” which opens today. Foster’s Egg Pictures produced the film; Gordon directed it. Released by USA Films, the $8-million “Waking the Dead” is a romantic drama starring Billy Crudup and Jennifer Connelly.

The story, which combines supernatural and mystical elements with a political backdrop, seemed to strike the right balance for Foster, 38, and Gordon, 39, both of whom are attracted to offbeat films driven by human drama.

Gordon’s screenplay, which he adapted from Scott Spencer’s novel, sat in development at Gramercy (before it became USA Films) for nearly 10 years before Foster’s Egg Pictures stepped in to produce. Sitting down to a late breakfast, Foster and Gordon looked relaxed and casual.

Foster’s nearly translucent skin makes her deep blue eyes all the more intense. Gordon is a bit scruffier, with mussed black hair and a sparse goatee. But the pair have a synergy in thought and taste, often finishing each other’s sentences.

Question: How did you guys meet?

Gordon: I had sent Jodie’s company the script to “Mother Night” and they actually turned it down.

Foster: Stupid idiots that we are! I loved that film [released in 1996], and I didn’t get it when I read it. I thought it was too difficult to accomplish. But it’s just an extraordinary movie.

Gordon: Now I’m embarrassed. Well, Jodie came to a [“Mother Night”] screening early on in the process. But I don’t know how you got there because I didn’t know you well enough to invite you.

Foster: No, I was invited by a friend.

Gordon: And I got this note which said, “I was wrong and I wish I’d made the movie.” This was so cool because Jodie was this iconographic figure who I had grown up admiring but did not know. So that letter made my month! Out of that came us meeting and talking about what else we were going to do together.

Foster: We read [“Waking the Dead”] and loved it.

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Q: Both of you are filmmakers who had been child actors.

Gordon: I always jokingly say that I had, sort of, the off-Broadway version of Jodie’s career.

Foster (laughing): I’d never heard that!

Gordon: Well, that is something that struck me as I was thinking about the two of us. One of the things that I think is amazing is that she has managed to be very successful with the business in a major way without giving up her integrity while doing things of intelligence and depth. It’s funny that’s one of the issues of the film that draws both of us.

Foster: And it is a struggle. . . .

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Q (to Foster): How do you do it?

Foster: I think it’s a struggle for everybody--that is, to try to live your professional life in a way that you had hoped, which is with goodness and morality and to find your center. And yet we all want to be loved and adored and succeed and be a glint in our parents’ eyes. I think that struggle is really interesting because it is what partly shapes your work.

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Q: As child actors are there particular bonds and scars that you guys shared?

Gordon: We never sat around and talked about what it was like. It’s like if you’ve been through a war, you look at each other and say, “Oh yeah, you’ve been there too.” Though I started later than Jodie. I was 15.

Foster: I was 3 . . . but yes, we have some similarities. The personalities of actors who end up being directors are of someone who is an artist but also has a leadership/boss mentality. That means that when you were younger you were probably in conflict with that. I remember being in “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father” . . .

Gordon: Wow! I remember that well!

Foster: . . . I did one episode and the director was Bill Bixby, and it just blew me away. I think I was 6 or 7. I didn’t know that actors were allowed to be directors. And that was it! I said, “Someday that is what I’m going to do.” I distinctly remember thinking this is the job I want.

Gordon: My dad took me to see “2001: A Space Odyssey” the opening weekend when I was 7. He knew I liked rockets, and he didn’t know it was an existentialist film. And of course I didn’t understand it, but I understood that I didn’t understand. That alone was enough to obsess me and make me say, “OK, I want to do that.”

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Q: What appealed to you about doing “Waking the Dead”?

Gordon: For me, the love story. I read the book on a plane in 1991. I was going away from the woman who was then my girlfriend, now my wife, and I was in the process of falling more deeply in love with her. So reading a book about the meaning of love, the loss of love, how essential love is to fulfilling yourself as a human being but how vulnerable it makes you . . . and at the same time really discovering this in my own life, was truly powerful. I liked the issue of maintaining your integrity in a world where succeeding often means giving up integrity.

Foster: The reason I will never be a big producer is because I can only love and protect and support movies that somehow work into my personal issues in my life. I wish I could do a hanging-off-the-cliff action film but I just don’t know how. In some ways, when I read the script and the book, there is one part of it that is always the same in all of my movies. There is always a character who is formed by all of these tragedies and comedies around them and this person we come to love carries these people with them in their life.

Keith is attracted to movies that are morally ambivalent. And he finds a way to come to understand and make that struggle healthy. Whereas a lot of filmmakers just have everyone die and fall into a pit. Both of us are drawn to trying to figure out: “OK, we have these horrible things, but how can we make our lives healthy?” They are not movies that are about people who fall into a pit of nihilism. These people are trying to figure out how to get out of it.

Gordon: Yes, they are not dark in that nihilistic way. They are ultimately movies about trying to find a way through that.

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Q: Keith, what would have happened to the movie if Jodie didn’t get involved?

Gordon: I don’t know if it would have ever been made. With these more personal films, it usually takes a figure of some weight getting involved as cast or producer to get it over the top. What people don’t realize that in more personal films getting from nowhere to almost there is not what is difficult. Getting from almost there to “Here’s a check and go make your movie” is impossible. And that is where Jodie’s presence made all the difference.

Foster: And we bang our heads against a wall 24 hours a day on projects. The only thing you can count on is that the story is undeniably beautiful and no matter how many times people say, “Oh, it’ll be tough to market,” they can’t deny the script and the story is beautiful.

Gordon: One of the things I admired so much was watching her going through the process of salesmanship to the company. Without ever hyping, without ever saying the film was what it wasn’t, Jodie sold it as a film with artistic possibilities but also commercial possibilities.

Foster: Some of that is going through the process of figuring out what the film is. You have a script that has a form in your head and yet it’s about a lot of things. Sometimes you need to come in and say, “This is a love story.” It takes time to start shaving off all the other stuff and figuring out what the focus of the film is.

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Q: What about the film’s supernatural element? What attracted you to that?

Gordon: Well, one of the things I liked about Scott’s book is that it is a subtle form of supernatural. It’s not a ghost story at all. You can interpret her presence as just being in his head. I wanted to let people’s own religious and spiritual beliefs frame the story however they wanted to. But I have found that as I’ve gotten older, my openness to the mysteries of the universe seems bigger. We all do carry our ghosts with us.

Foster: In “Contact” the characters are asked to choose between the scientific explanation, the psychological explanation and the religious explanation. Why do we have to choose? Can’t we just say we had an experience? I think that is a very similar idea to this movie, which is: “I had an experience; the experience was real.” The interpretation of it is entirely beside the point.

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“I think it’s a struggle for everybody--that is, to try to live your professional life in a way that you had hoped, which is with goodness and morality and to find your center.”

JODIE FOSTER

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“I wanted to let people’s own religious and spiritual beliefs frame the story however they wanted to. But I have found that as I’ve gotten older, my openness to the mysteries of the universe seems bigger.”

KEITH GORDON