Rebecca Zlotowski said she felt freer than ever making A Private Life with Jodie Foster, and the reason was the range she allowed herself inside the film. She described a project that moves between humor, thriller elements, relationship comedy, psychological drama and murder mystery without forcing those pieces into separate boxes.
Jodie Foster and the open range
“I felt freer than ever before,” Zlotowski said in conversation with Paul Risker. She added, “I had the privilege to work with Jodie Foster, who is someone I've been wanting to work with for so many years,” and 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.”
That creative latitude matters because A Private Life, also titled Vie Privée, is not built like a single-genre vehicle. Zlotowski said she could let the material move where it wanted, and Foster’s role as psychiatrist Lilian Steiner gives that structure a lead character who can carry both investigation and emotional fracture without the film having to flatten either one.
From therapy to the set
Zlotowski said she began therapy five years ago and has now stopped therapy. Her last session ended after she and her therapist had finished shooting, and she said, “In my last session, the ceiling literally collapsed.” She added, “I could have put that in the film.”
The director also said the film’s humor “began more like a Jewish joke,” and that there had “never been laughter in my films until this one.” That is the useful clue here: the comedy is not decoration but part of the film’s structure, running alongside the thriller and murder-mystery pieces instead of sitting apart from them.
Lilian Steiner’s mix
Jodie Foster plays Lilian Steiner, a bilingual psychiatrist whose path intersects with Paula Cohen-Solal, played by Virginie Efira, after Paula’s suicide in the film. Gabriel Haddad, played by Daniel Auteuil, is Lilian’s ex-husband, and Mathieu Amalric and Luana Bajrami also appear in the cast.
Because Zlotowski said she wanted to work with Foster for so many years, the collaboration reads less like a one-off casting move and more like a director using a long-planned partnership to widen the film’s tone. She said Foster was “super-happy with that,” which suggests the performance was built to accommodate tonal shifts rather than force the film into a cleaner, narrower shape.
Vie Privée’s next step
For viewers, the practical takeaway is simple: A Private Life is being positioned as a hybrid, not a straight thriller and not a straight comedy. The film’s next pressure point is how that mix plays once audiences see whether the joke-to-mystery balance holds across the full story of Lilian Steiner, Paula Cohen-Solal and Gabriel Haddad.
