Jodie Foster, 61, says male screenwriters often use rape trauma as the 'entire motivation' for their female characters... almost 40 years after she played a gang rape victim in The Accused
Jodie Foster has said she frequently saw male screenwriters fall back on rape trauma as the 'entire motivation' for their female characters.
The 61-year-old earned her first Oscar nomination for playing an abused child prostitute in Martin Scorsese's 1976 film Taxi Driver.
She drew further acclaim for her turn as a gang rape victim in the 1988 movie The Accused, winning the Academy Award for best actress.
Now she has expressed her disquiet about how often she was offered roles that were not fully developed beyond a 'backstory' of sexual violence.
'For most of my career, I was always shocked that so many of the scripts that I read, the entire motivation for the female character was that she’d been traumatized by rape,' she said at The Hollywood Reporter Drama Actress Roundtable.
Jodie Foster has said she frequently saw male screenwriters fall back on rape trauma as the 'entire motivation' for their female characters
She was joined in the group interview by Jennifer Aniston, Nicole Kidman, Naomi Watts, Sofia Vergara, Brie Larson and Anna Sawai.
Jodie argued that rape 'seemed to be the only motivation that male screenwriters could come up with for why women did things.'
She summed up their purported attitude to the subject as: 'She’s kind of in a bad mood, yeah, there’s definitely some rape in her past.'
Taxi Driver was written by Paul Schrader while The Accused, which was based on a real case, had a screenplay by Tom Topor.
Jodie maintained that for many male screenwriters, 'rape or molestation seemed to be the one kind of lurid, big emotional backstory that they could understand in women. And I didn’t take it personally.'
The two-time Oscar winner shared: 'But once I was old enough, I think I did have a responsibility to come in and say: "You’re not always going to get the most perfectly fleshed-out female character, but maybe there’s an opportunity for us to work together and create something that way?"'
Nicole added: 'Which is why I think now we’re all working hard to put women at the helm because the viewpoint suddenly becomes very different.'
Jodie made a similar point at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016, sharing: 'One of my biggest pet peeves as an actor, whenever a male writer was searching for motivation for a woman they would always just go to rape. It was ridiculous.'
She was joined in the group interview by (from left) Sofia Vergara, Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Aniston, Naomi Watts, Anna Sawai and Brie Larson
The 61-year-old earned her first Oscar nomination for playing an abused child prostitute in Martin Scorsese 's 1976 film Taxi Driver (pictured)
She drew further acclaim for her turn as a gang rape victim in the 1988 movie The Accused (pictured), winning the Academy Award for best actress in a lead role
Taxi Driver, in which Jodie is pictured with Robert De Niro, was written by Paul Schrader, while The Accused, which was based on a real case, had a screenplay by Tom Topor
She slated the writers for being 'uninterested in complexity,' adding that they 'were unable to make the transition' to empathize with a female character.
'I think it’s the male directors that have the problem,' she said at a Variety and Kering talk. 'Women are used to putting themselves in other people’s bodies.'
However, while she has helmed multiple films herself and hopes for more women to get major directing jobs, she clarified that she was not in favor of hardline quotas.
'I’m worried about quotas in terms of art,' she said. 'We’re not talking about junior executives. We’re talking about an art form.'
She explained that she also harbored concerns that a quota system would 'set back the ideas that we’re hoping for of inclusivity.'
