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‘My public persona isn’t much different than who I am, but it’s just one part of me,’ says director Jodie Foster.John Lamparski/Getty Images

Jodie Foster still takes it all personally. Her work, that is. She has to.

"I don't know how to do my job unless I'm moved," the actress and director says in a phone interview. "I'm never going to be that director who says, 'Scuba diving! That sounds like something I'd like to make a movie about!' I'm always going to have to download my personal fears and questions into my work."

So when she read the script for her latest directing gig, Money Monster (opening Friday after premiering out of competition in Cannes this week), she did what she always does: She saw "every side of myself in each one of the characters, and tried to weave them together in a beautiful, weird tapestry."

In Money Monster, brash host Lee Gates (George Clooney) is performing his usual routine, spewing investment advice on his financial cable-TV show, connected via earpiece to his producer, Patty Fenn (Julia Roberts) – until Kyle Budwell (Jack O'Connell), a working stiff who lost his nest egg by following Lee's advice, sidles onto the set with a gun and a suicide vest, demanding to know where his money went. The ensuing crisis unspools on live TV (captured by Patty's six TV-studio cameras) in near-real time.

Foster's a speed-talker, but an elegant, concise one, and you can feel her intelligence in every sentence. She says she's not political, then does a trenchant summary of the mood in the U.S.; she claims to know little about the financial world, then offers an acute analysis of its psychology.

"Right from our first phone call, we felt we had our director," says Lara Alameddine, Money Monster's co-producer, in a separate phone interview with fellow co-producer Dan Dubiecki. "She's Jodie Foster. She's an icon, and she's all the things you want an icon to be: smart, strong, generous with her time and ideas. A total professional. Dedicated."

Foster recognized that aspect of herself in Roberts's character, Patty, "the Jiminy Cricket figure who manages Lee and Kyle's relationship and produces their survival," she says. With Kyle, Foster related to "his rage, that rage of being the good son who does it all the right way, but gets screwed over. The unfairness of that."

But her deepest connection was to Lee. "He's a showman, a public person, and in some ways he's completely tainted by that experience," Foster says. "He doesn't know the difference between his persona and who he is. That's a theme in my life, and in my work."

Foster, who was born in Los Angeles and educated at Yale, has been a public figure for 50 of her 53 years, stretching from her first commercial (for Coppertone) through scores of TV shows and films, including Taxi Driver, The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs (she won best-actress Oscars for the latter two). In 1981, she experienced first-hand the unwitting power that comes with fame, when John Hinckley Jr. shot then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan to impress her. She was 18 years old.

She developed a "survival system" that she still uses, "that's allowed me to be fairly well-adjusted," she says. "My public persona isn't much different than who I am, but it's just one part of me. It's the part people who don't know me see. I'm bigger and richer than that." The private side includes her two sons, Charles and Christopher, from her former relationship with Cydney Bernard, and her wife, the actress and photographer Alexandra Hedison, whom she married in 2014.

"It's about being compartmentalized," Foster continues, "about saying, 'My work is here, my life is there, and the two do not meet.' The only area where it intersects is the work that goes on screen. I don't think there's anything that's more me than the work I do."

But even without fame, Foster insists that "we're all crippled by our public personas. It's your job as a fully functioning, fully conscious person to look hard at yourself, and to make people better and not worse. That's your attempt, to communicate, so we can all get better."

Money Monster examines what happens when people do the opposite. "The financial world is a reflection of our issues as humans," Foster says. "We're looking for value, to be meaningful, to become winners and more like computers in some ways. The financial world is almost a remedy for self-hatred: 'I get more money, that makes me a better person.'"

The leverage and borrowing that her film examines began as a positive thing, Foster continues – "a foundation for America and for Third World countries that allows, for example, people who have a small store to be able to send their kids to college. But it's been abused by entitled middlemen, who figured out a way to create a system that's completely mysterious, that only they have the keys to, and only they can benefit from."

Ironically, Money Monster's $27-million (U.S.) budget is the biggest Foster has had as director, but it still felt, she reports cheerfully, "like we didn't have enough money and I was choking." Figuring out how to match the shots from the six cameras that are shooting Lee's TV show with Foster's film cameras, so that no one in the crew inadvertently landed on screen, required full use of her math brain. "People will see the movie and have no idea how hard it was," Foster says.

"As much as the movie is a thriller, it never felt unattainable for Jodie," co-producer Dubiecki says. "She didn't waver for a second about what she was taking on. She's probably the most prepared person we've ever encountered. She's in touch with every department on every detail. People describe movie sets as battlegrounds, but she grew up on them. So she brings a sense of calm, security and comfort."

The personal nature of Foster's commitment also means that she disappears for long stretches between projects. "That's my way," she says. "I worked a lot more when I was a child. I like to live." Money Monster is only her fourth feature as a director, and her most recent one, The Beaver, came out five years ago (though in between she directed an episode of House of Cards and two of Orange Is the New Black for Netflix).

"I couldn't do it any sooner," Foster says. "I'm always looking. I never stop reading and developing, but I'm picky. Not because I'm so great, but because I'm specific about what moves me at what time."

So did this film whet Foster's appetite for bigger fare? "No! Absolutely not!" she says, audibly grinning. "I'm still interested in the same things I'm always interested in: the personal story, the humour in drama, and how each person affects other lives."

She has to feel it. She wouldn't have it any other way.

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