In Rebecca Zlotowski’s Paris-set A Private Life (Vie Privée), Jodie Foster stars as renowned Freudian analyst Lilian Steiner, who goes on a mission to uncover the cause of her client’s death with the help of her ex-husband (Daniel Auteuil).

In the film, Liliane experiences a major personal shift and has to understand that she does not, in fact, have it all figured out – it’s a kind of midlife turnaround.

“I connect to the midlife part,” Foster said in an interview at the Deadline Cannes studio. “But maybe, actually, I’m a little older than midlife, so I’m like the post-midlife part. Weirdly, I feel like I’ve been playing a midlife crisis my entire life, from the time I was young. I think there’s something about characters that have to transform, that have to suddenly become aware, because their survival mechanisms are making them cut off. I think I tend to play that a lot, so it is something that I’m interested in, obviously, because I’m drawn to it over and over again.”

Foster’s role is entirely in French (except for a few expletives) and she explained how working in another language makes her feel like almost a different person. “First of all, I have a totally different voice in French than I do in English,” she said. “So my voice is much higher and I’m more careful in French, because I’m worried about making a mistake. I’m a little more vulnerable. Yeah, I have a different personality… that’s fun to work with.”

Foster also relished being part of a truly French production: “I didn’t want to make a big Franco-American co-production, a big fancy film. I really wanted to make a real, authentic French movie, and everything that comes with that – the auteur cinema spirit and that the filmmaker is everything.”

Writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski described the process of researching Freudian analysis with Foster in Paris ahead of the shoot. “Jodie came one month before to practice the French and just walk with me, the European way, and just talk about the film,” Zlotowski said. “So first it was like a connection between each other. And then we went to those shrinks – amazing psychiatrists, not shrinks, really famous, renowned female psychiatrists in Paris. And we entered their office, and they were thrilled to have Jodie, and I could tell that they tried to erase it on their face, the excitation, because they were renowned psychiatrists, and they had to hide the emotion.”

Zlotowski descirbed the experience as “hilarious” as the analysts would ask them if they wanted to lie on the couch or sit in the chair, as though they were there as patients, but ultimately they would have extremely fruitful conversations. “Everyone would just talk and have a seance with each other,” Zlotowski said, “with Jodie saying very deep things, and those women saying deep things.”

Foster has been coming to Cannes since childhood and recalled her first time at the festival with Taxi Driver back in 1976. “Nobody had seen it yet, and we didn’t really know if it was going to be well-received. And there was a lot of questions about the amount of violence in the film, which is funny, because, of course, we think now there’s very little violence in the movie. So it was the beginning of everything for me… it really was the beginning of my career.”