Jodie Foster Brings 'A Private Life' & Warm Hamptons Memories to HIFF

Jodie Foster is speaking French to me. I asked her to. She’s describing the plot of her new film A Private Life which had such a run on tickets the Hamptons International Film Festival (HIFF) scheduled a second screening Tuesday night in East Hampton. When I confess I was kicked out of high school French class for talking like Pepé Le Pew, she laughs and translates.

“It’s about a psychiatrist,” she explains. “Her patient commits suicide and for a number of reasons she doesn’t believe it was suicide. She thinks somehow it was a murder.”

Mrs. McCuddy is at home watching Dateline as I’m having this conversation. She will be first in line when the film opens nationally November 26. “So my character heads up an investigation,” Foster continues, “That takes her to hypnosis, every psychiatrist’s least favorite thing.”

There’s a twist and several reveals, one about Foster’s character herself she tells me. So did they do a “ride along” with real shrinks and their patients? “We did actually, psychiatrists but no patients. The director did some psychotherapy and hypnosis and some Freudian psychoanalysis, which is very common in France. We don’t do it here anymore because it got kind of cancelled for us.”

The film was shot in Paris and Normandy, and costars Daniel Auteuil and Mathieu Amalric. Foster is fluent in French and speaks it throughout the film. Fun Fact: She’s dubbed herself in the past for films that get French distribution.

Local Southampton resident Glenn Bradford and his wife Sharyn were in the audience for the first screening. She told me they thought the film was “amazing,” and during the Q&A afterwards found Foster “so interesting and gracious.”  The film gets one more showing Saturday afternoon at 2:15 p.m. in Guild Hall.

Foster is gracious to me back on the red carpet. She has warm feelings for the Hamptons. “It’s my first time at this festival,” she says with a big smile. Her Nyad played in 2023 and she couldn’t attend because of the actors strike that year. But she has East End history. “I had a house in the Hamptons that I loved in Water Mill and so I have all these memories of my kids growing up, never getting out of our bathing suits and shucking corn and catching fireflies, kayaking so that’s really my love of the Hamptons. I love the nature of it.”

Bon! (I think that’s French for “good” but don’t quote me.)

Bill McCuddy is an “irregular regular” contributor to Dan’s Papers. He cohosts a national PBS/AllArts movie criticism show “Talking Pictures” and has a monthly NPR/WLIW-FM show called “Air Hamptons.” He lives in Bridgehampton with a 100 inch TV that now, thankfully “Has two remotes. My marriage is saved.”