Go Ahead, Make Her Day.(Jodie Foster on 'The Brave One')(Interview)

Byline: Devin Gordon

Over the course of her new film, "The Brave One," Jodie Foster kills eight people. The two-time Oscar winner plays a public-radio host named Erica Bain who survives a brutal attack in New York's Central Park during which her fiance is killed. After she heals, she slowly transforms into a vigilante and puts herself on a collision course with the thugs who attacked her. Foster says the film, directed by Neil Jordan ("The Crying Game"), appealed to her not only for its resonance with "Taxi Driver," the nightmarish 1976 film that made the teen actress a star, but also for its exploration of living with fear in post-9/11 New York. She spoke with NEWSWEEK's Devin Gordon on the set last summer. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: To me, the lead character in this movie is New York. Was it always set there?

FOSTER: Originally, it was set in Anytown USA, meaning, wherever it would be cheaper to make--Toronto or something. But I just felt like you couldn't do this movie without talking about New York and how that has changed. We all love New York, but sometimes you hate it, too. [Erica's] somebody whose show is specifically about what she loves about New York and how that's disappearing.

But the New York portrayed in this movie is very different from the one experienced by those who live there. There's certainly plenty of crime, but we always hear how New York is the safest big city in the world.

It's true that she's a statistical anomaly, but go tell that to somebody who got their brains beat out. It doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I actually think there's something even more interesting about a story like this happening in a New York that everyone says has turned into a harmless Disneyland. That's her fear in the beginning: are we ruining the character of New York by making it overly sanitized? But her attitude toward New York changes when this specter of violence enters her life. And once that fear has touched you, you realize that it's been there all along, hiding beneath the surface of your everyday life. And she hates herself for it, because she knows it's not rational. She knows there isn't a bogeyman waiting behind every bush.

The character was a newspaper reporter first, right? But you changed it to a radio host.