"Well, I certainly was exposed to and learned to appreciate the work of great directors early on. As a kid, my mother used to take me to see really interesting arty films in Los Angeles"
About this Quote
Taste, in Jodie Foster's telling, isn’t a lightning bolt of genius; it’s a habit formed in the dark. The quote is disarmingly plain, but the power sits in what it normalizes: artistic literacy as something handed down, practiced early, and quietly curated. “Exposed to” does a lot of work here. It frames cultural sophistication less as an innate gift and more as access - to time, to a city with repertory theaters, to a parent willing to treat “arty films” as nourishment rather than homework.
The mother is the stealth protagonist. Foster doesn’t mythologize herself as a precocious auteur-in-the-making; she points to a pipeline of influence that begins with someone else’s choices. That’s a subtle rebuke to the American fantasy of self-made taste. In Hollywood, where origin stories are often built on grit and luck, she foregrounds a different kind of advantage: a guided education in seeing.
Context matters: Foster is both a child actor and a director, someone who grew up inside the industry’s machinery while also developing an outside eye. “Really interesting” and “arty” are intentionally non-technical; she’s not gatekeeping with jargon, she’s marking a sensibility. The subtext is that seriousness about film doesn’t have to be dour. It can be maternal, local, even a little casual - a weekend outing that quietly sets a lifelong standard for what images, stories, and directors can do.
That’s why it lands: it’s a memory that doubles as a cultural argument about how taste gets made.
The mother is the stealth protagonist. Foster doesn’t mythologize herself as a precocious auteur-in-the-making; she points to a pipeline of influence that begins with someone else’s choices. That’s a subtle rebuke to the American fantasy of self-made taste. In Hollywood, where origin stories are often built on grit and luck, she foregrounds a different kind of advantage: a guided education in seeing.
Context matters: Foster is both a child actor and a director, someone who grew up inside the industry’s machinery while also developing an outside eye. “Really interesting” and “arty” are intentionally non-technical; she’s not gatekeeping with jargon, she’s marking a sensibility. The subtext is that seriousness about film doesn’t have to be dour. It can be maternal, local, even a little casual - a weekend outing that quietly sets a lifelong standard for what images, stories, and directors can do.
That’s why it lands: it’s a memory that doubles as a cultural argument about how taste gets made.
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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