Al Weisel
All in a Day's Work: Jodi Foster
By Al Weisel
Premiere, November 2000
She's won two Oscars and played everything from a child prostitute to an FBI trainee, but Jodie Foster felt there was something missing from her repertoire. "I've always wanted to be a villain," she says. However, Sister Assumpta, the peg-legged, motorcycle-riding nun she plays in The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys (which she also co-produced with her company, Egg Pictures), "is a real person, not a James Bond villain," she hastens to add, reaching under her habit to rub her real leg, which is aching from the prosthesis she's been wearing to simulate having a fake one. Foster, 38, says her supporting role as a nun who terrorizes her students tapped a part of her that only the victims of her on-set jokes have seen before. ("Mel Gibson says I have this rabid-wolf quality," she cracks.) Based on the posthumous novel by Chris Fuhrman, Altar Boys is the story of two boys, played by Kieran Culkin and newcomer Emile Hirsch, who vow to wreak vengeance on Sister Assumpta after she takes away the comic book one of them is drawing. The film features animated sequences (conceived by Todd McFarlane, creator of Spawn) based on the boys' comic book and reflecting their fantasy lives as superheroes. Foster says that Altar Boys is just the kind of small, quirky, personal film she wants to concentrate on developing from now on. "The first three years, you want to do everything," she says. "I think you realize that you serve best as a producer by doing things that are your style, with your signature, and you can leave the other stuff to everybody else. Titanic, or something like that, I couldn't make."■
Al Weisel is the co-author, with Larry Frascella, of Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause, being published in October 2005.