Name: Jodie Foster Doesn’t Know Why Her Voice Is Higher In French | Conan O'Brien Needs A Friend
Uploaded: 2026-01-24T17:05:05.000Z
Duration: 9 min 39 s
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The superlative

The people I'm always most impressed with are the people that keep challenging themselves, regardless of what they've achieved in the past.

You have made this film A Private Life, which is in French.

And your character is speaking, you know, fluent French the entire time in the movie.

And I'm not gonna take on that challenge if you don't mind.

I'd be there listening to what's the who is It?

And you have said, I didn't realize that this was a part of your career.

You have been really immersing yourself in French culture for a big part of your life.

I had a French education, so at nine years old, my mom kind of dropped me into a French immersion school.

At the time, it was the 70s and she had never traveled anywhere.

And she took one trip to France, like a bus tour, a touristy bus tour.

She went there and she came back and said, okay, that's it.

And then, you know, if we have to split, that's what's gonna happen.

I cried for, you know, probably six or seven months.

And I was doing math and science and history and geography and French.

And so in this film, you're speaking fluent French the entire time.

And did it change your acting style that you're speaking in this foreign language?

I'm a totally different person in French.

First of all, I have a really high voice in French.

Well, a lot of the ladies that I learned French from, they all spoke a little bit like this.

And I guess I imitated them when I was a kid.

So I have quite a confident way about me in English and in French.

And I wouldn't say screechy, but definitely a little bit higher voiced.

Yeah, I have a totally different personality.

I have the personality of somebody who's eternally frustrated that they can't communicate themselves well enough.

I swear to God, if I do speak some Spanish, and

I like to break it out every now and then, and

I was using it, I try and use it as much as I can in Los Angeles, where there's a lot of opportunities to do it always go very well.

And your voice gets a lot lower, mine gets a lot lower.

And I sprout a little mustache, a little Telemundo mustache.

There's a rhythm to these languages and you start to behave a little differently.

And I would imagine if I spoke French, I could see myself becoming more existential.

Maybe a little more dismissive and you know, and you should try it.

And drinking red wine at 11 in the morning.

So there's something about that, you know, people that leave everything behind and they say, my whole identity, everything that I am, my past, my family, everything about me that I've always considered as me, I'm gonna leave that behind.

I'm gonna break out and be a brand new person.

And in some way, very often expatriates choose some fantasy version of what it would be like to be a French person.

You know, suddenly they're wearing a beret and they're, you know, their house is right on one of those lovely parks and they start telling you they're on vacation and that they can'.

I thought that was interesting, an interesting thing to explore, like, who wants to erase their past and become this new fantasy?

How do your relationships suffer and do you become.

I think the irony is, and the film does have a lot of comedy to it.

The irony is that this psychoanalyst, very Freudian psychoanalyst, which we make a lot of fun of her because of that, goes on this murder investigation thinking that her patient's been killed potentially.

And then very quickly realizes, oh no, she's just investigating herself.

So she kind of goes on through hypnosis and a number of things and starts realizing, you know, that maybe she's not a great mom and that she, you know, there's parts of her, of her relationship with her ex that she still has questions about.

So it's more of a self discovery movie than it is a murder mystery.

What's the longest time you've ever spent living in France or a foreign country?

But I've always thought I would like to live in Paris for a year or London for a year, or Dublin for a year and just immerse myself in being someone slightly different.

You get to be a different person when you're in another country.

Well, you get to do that when you're on location as an actor.

Because when you're on location as an actor, you're usually there for three and a half months.

If you're a director, you're there for at least six months.

If you're doing a limited series like True Detective, I was there for seven months.

But the director was there for a year and a half in Iceland.

So, yeah, you get to become this brand new person that's obsessed with something.

Because if you're making a show or making a movie, you're just obsessed 247 with this one thing.

And it's every bit of energy that you have is put into this one thing.

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Jodie Foster Doesn’t Know Why Her Voice Is Higher In French | Conan O'Brien Needs A Friend

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