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Jodie Foster as Erica Bain in The Brave One. Abbot Genser/Courtesy of Warner Bros.

The vigilante picture gets a new twist in The Brave One, the first collaboration between director Neil Jordan (Mona Lisa, Interview With The Vampire, The Crying Game) and star Jodie Foster. In the film, Foster plays Erica, a New York City radio personality whose life is upended in a vicious urban crime. This lover of "old" New York, frustrated by her perception of the police's inability to achieve justice, sets out on her own to exact retribution and finds herself on a journey that takes her further than she ever imagined. Terrence Howard (Hustle & Flow, Crash) plays the police detective who initially tries to solace Erica, and then finds he may have to stop her.

While the setup sounds like a conventional thriller, Foster and Jordan sought to delve into a deeper story.

PREMIERE: Is it true you were involved with this before director Neil Jordan was? How did you and he get together?
JODIE FOSTER: I read the script a long, long time ago. It was very different, and I waited to see what they were going to do with it. And I did that for a year, after having said I felt like it needed a lot of work. I had been trying to work on it for a while, and then, honestly, Neil was the first director we went after. We really didn't go out for anybody else. I've just been a big fan of his for a long time. He brings such a kind of primal character quality to this kind of material. And he has this really interesting improvisational way of working where the things that need to be planned are planned; but he actually gets there and he really feels the space, he feels the people and changes things. And he will add dialogue, lose dialogue, come up with totally different things.

It seems that you two would make a good pair because in your films you tend to explore similar things: morality and how what's right is not always on the right side of the law.
Yeah. And he's interested in the details, you know, in this kind of understated way. He doesn't really want to just follow the rules of conventional cinema, which is nice. I think it's because he comes from being a writer, and he comes from, I think, a much more profound place where the truth of the characters and the truth of the text — whatever it is, whether it's a script or novel — really is in the people and the situation, it's not like, "How can I make them laugh or how can I make them cry?" He really asked the right questions, and it's surprising how rare that is these days.

Director Neil Jordan and Jodie Foster on the set of The Brave One. Abbot Genser/Courtesy of Warner Bros.

So how did the script change from the first time you got it until now?
It went through a lot of changes before it came to Neil. I think it wouldn't have been something Neil necessarily would have been interested in. It started out as — and I don't denigrate it at all, but it started out as being sort of a conventional vigilante genre movie that just changed the name to a woman's name. Well, you have to change it quite a bit, because of course women aren't men. And there are different things that happen to them; they react to situations differently. And especially with something like this, it's not the same rules that apply. And you're looking at a situation where this is not a statistical norm; women don't lash out when confronted with this. They tend to become alcoholics, or they kill their children. Faced with violence and faced with abuse, women go inside. And so you had to ask yourself that question: Who is this woman and why is she like this? So clearly something was wrong with her before this situation presented itself. And, beyond that, the question is how does somebody go from being one person to being another. And what's the process of becoming another person that you wouldn't even recognize? In answering these questions, it became, honestly, more of an existential movie than a genre movie. And, of course, Neil also took it beyond there, too.

So it wasn't ever written for a man then.
No.