Rebecca Zlotowski says she felt freer than ever making A Private Life, and she credits that freedom in part to Jodie Foster. The director said the film let her mix thriller, relationship comedy, psychological drama and murder mystery in a way she had never done before.
Zlotowski discussed the film in an interview with Eye For Film, where she said she had wanted to work with Foster for so many years that the collaboration itself changed the shape of the project. Foster plays Lilian Steiner, the bilingual psychiatrist at the center of A Private Life, while Zlotowski steers the story through the death of Paula Cohen-Solal and the theory Lilian pieces together about it.
That mix matters because Zlotowski is not describing a careful compromise. She said, “I could have it all if I wanted to, and Jodie Foster was super-happy with that. I felt we were on the same page.” In other words, the film was built to hold several tones at once, and Foster’s presence gave Zlotowski room to push further than she had in earlier work.
The director also framed the film’s emotional engine in unusually blunt terms. She called Lilian Steiner a really bad therapist, along with being a cockblocker and a bad mom, which cuts against the polished authority usually associated with a psychiatrist on screen. That contradiction gives the film its bite: Lilian is supposed to analyze other people, yet she is also stumbling through her own mess, dragging her ex-husband Gabriel Haddad along as she goes.
For Zlotowski, the freedom was personal as well as artistic. She said she began therapy five years ago, then stopped after A Private Life was shot, and remembered that in her last session the ceiling literally collapsed. That memory fed into the film’s offbeat tone, which she said began more like a Jewish joke than a straight mystery. She also said she has never had laughter in her films until now, adding that the whole thing can feel as if someone is setting up the audience to laugh just as the scene turns serious.
What emerges is a project that looks less like a single-genre vehicle than a deliberate collision of forms, with Foster at the center of that gamble. Zlotowski has said the film was not only a thriller, a comedy, a psychological drama or a murder mystery, and that may be the best way to understand why A Private Life stands out in her work. The unresolved question now is how much of its final shape came from Zlotowski’s writing and how much from Foster’s embrace of the mix, because the director has made clear that both were driving in the same direction.
