A new spin on ‘taxi driver’

THERE is no denying the post-Sept. 11 resonance of Jodie Foster’s new movie, “Flight Plan.” “Terror in the skies” means something much different than it did back in the days of “Airport.” And the narrative takes full advantage of Homeland Security grace notes -- the air marshal played by Peter Sarsgaard, the hostility between a group of Arab men and their white seat mates and the various protocols discussed by the captain and crew.

But for all its modern trappings, “Flight Plan” is about a fear much more primitive -- that of a mother who has lost her child.

This is much of what drew Foster to “Flight Plan,” in which a woman heading back to bury her husband loses her young daughter midflight and discovers she will stop at nothing to find her, even when everyone else on the plane assures her the girl was not there to begin with and she begins to question her sanity.

“When you’re a mother,” she says, “your relationship with your child is unlike anything else. Your child is yourself, at least to a certain extent.” As a mother of two young sons, she knows a bit about this. Nothing, she says, prepared her for the emotional state of motherhood. “Oh, I’m afraid all the time,” she says. “I can’t get on an amusement park ride with them. But then, of course,” she adds, “I feel guilty that I’m teaching them to be afraid, so I do.”

Originally, the lead in “Flight Plan” was male, but Foster saw in the script a “flip” potential that would not only work but make the story stronger.

“Something about the lead being a man didn’t feel right,” she says. “I just didn’t think any man would question his sense of reality that way. Men tend to blame outward.”

Foster’s character, Kyle Pratt, is very together in the beginning but then unravels as fear sets in and no one seems able, or willing, to help her.

“But she’s hellbent on not letting anyone see that because then she knows they won’t help her,” Foster says. “No one likes dealing with a hysterical mother. Which again doesn’t work as well if it’s a man. Men,” she adds with a small smile, “are rarely considered ‘hysterical.’ ”

With her diminutive figure, tense mouth and a chin so sharp it could etch glass, Foster is not the template for an action hero. But the point of “Flight Plan,” she says, is that you do not want to mess with a mother fully roused. Even one who’s 5-foot-3. “There is something in the collective unconscious,” she says, “that just clicks in when it’s your child in danger.” As she speaks, the actress has one eye on her watch for kid-pickup purposes -- motherhood is a natural topic for her right now, partly because of the film but also because it is the beginning of the school year, a time in which every mother has to adjust to a new set of circadian rhythms and the reality that another year has somehow slipped past.

Awaiting substance

FOSTER, 42, who embodies that contradictory cliche “famously private,” has consciously, and fairly successfully, ratcheted down her career since she became a mother for the first time in 1998. Since then, she has made a movie every few years -- although she had a small role in last year’s “A Very Long Engagement,” it’s been three years since “Panic Room” -- while maintaining her stature as an A-list actress.

“For some reason I’m not moved by a lot of movies lately,” she says. “And it’s hard for me to rip myself away from a life of significance to do something that’s not significant.” She is also intent on giving her children the one thing she never had: a normal childhood.

“I grew up being very aware of being different,” she says. “And I have a psychological need for them to have a normal childhood.” Labor Day weekend, for example, was spent with friends who had rented an enormous waterslide. After playing on it all day, Foster’s boys were banged up, plastered with mud and utterly exhausted. “They loved it. I loved it. I didn’t have that kind of thing as a kid,” she says, adding with a laugh, “I was too busy working.” So she insists on being the one to take her oldest, now 7, to school, to pick out the new clothes and shoes, to be there for all the doctor appointments and school functions.

“I don’t believe in having kids who don’t go to school,” she says. “I don’t want to shuttle them around with tutors.” This puts her in a bit of a quandary at times given what it is she does for a living. She took her eldest on-set with her to make “Anna and the King,” but since then, she has stuck pretty close to home, insisting that “Flight Plan” be shot in Los Angeles.

“Two weeks is about the most I can be away from them,” she says. And the extremely emotional nature of the film -- she spends at least half of it in or near tears -- would have simply been too hard on her if she had been unable to return to her children each evening.

Not that there is anything like sustained comfort in motherhood. Seeing her sons through the typical mishaps of childhood -- the application of a cast, a tonsillectomy -- has taught the very precise and controlled Foster that at a certain point control means nothing and you have to rely on trust.

“I have been through a lot of things in my life,” she says, “a lot of painful things. But none of them compare to when my son had his tonsils out.” Coming out of anesthesia, she explains, her son, along with all the other tonsil patients in the recovery ward, experienced a psychotic reaction. “He didn’t remember it, of course,” she says. “So we’re leaving the hospital, he’s all smiles, and I need to go to a sanitarium.” The celebrity of her own childhood and early adulthood taught her to place a premium on privacy. But while it’s easy to learn where not to have lunch or dinner or which parties to skip if she doesn’t feel up to the paparazzi, in these days of Trader Joe’s stakeouts, it’s almost impossible to stay completely out of the glare.

“When I was younger, it was not quite the guerrilla warfare it is now,” she says. “And I try not to make [my kids] upset by showing how much it horrifies me. My son says, ‘Mom, why does it upset you?’ when there’s a photographer in the bushes and I can’t explain because he hasn’t lived my life, hasn’t been violated or lived in fear of being violated.” Foster is often called by young actors or their parents who want to know how to survive in a world built on magazine covers and opening weekends, but she isn’t sure how helpful she is.

“I have had a very singular career,” she says. “My mother had a very distinct vision of who I should be. I think she would even admit now there was a lot of vicarious living done. She didn’t want me to be a model, she wanted me to be taken seriously, I think because she wanted to be taken seriously.”

Maternal motivation

WHILE she thinks things worked out pretty well, Foster believes that had it not been for her mother, she probably would have never considered becoming an actor.

“I approach my work from a different perspective than other actors I know,” she says. “Almost like an academic. Most actors become actors because they need that moment, that emotional high. I can perform emotionally, but it’s not my favorite part. Part of me needs to be adored. My friends would definitely tell you I need to be adored, but performing isn’t in my blood.”

Which is why the compromises a working mother must inevitably make don’t feel like compromises at all to Foster. “Oh, I fall prey to it once in a while,” she says. “I hear my mother’s voice -- ‘Should you have walked away from that? Will you be able to take care of yourself and your kids? You’re getting old, it won’t last....’ But the choices are easily made. I’m not going to miss that Thanksgiving breakfast. I’m not going to let someone else pick out their shoes.”

The morning has ticked by and she glances at her watch. It’s time to pick up her son and so, in midsentence, Jodie Foster stands up to go.