Jodie Foster

My kids are young and my life with them is really stimulating and really full and significant.

I saw leaving college as an opportunity to do something different with my life. I always thought that becoming an academic was going to be my path.

If I make two movies my entire life, and they're two movies that - whether they make a lot of money or two people go to see them - they speak of me, then I consider them incredibly successful. I don't need to be Steven Spielberg.

I feel at various times in my life that I've been at a point where I had to choose between a death sentence and a life sentence. And I want to live. What do I do to live? What do I do to be vital? And the answer is always creativity. The answer is always art.

I make dark dramas, movies about people living in desperate fear who then overcome that fear and find a heroic side to themselves.

I don't know if I see myself as really an action hero, but I like doing physical movies and I like doing movies where the writing is very lean.

Acting just happens to be my skill, but I think I would probably be just as happy being a technician or entering into the film business in some other way.

But the reason I became, why I wanted to be in the business was because there was Midnight Cowboy.

As an actor, I'm attracted to drama; as a director, it's humor - because it's the story of my life, and I can't be that serious about it. Being alone is a big theme in all my movies, both as a director and as an actress.

Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock do romantic comedies. I do dark dramas. I do these movies well.

I wish that I spoke more languages. I speak a couple languages, but not well enough to really dub myself. French is really the only one, and it's a difficult thing.

As an actor, I'm always playing solitary characters. But as a director, I'm always making ensemble movies, which focus on lots of people's lives and how they intertwine.