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With two Oscars and an acting career spanning over 40 years and counting, you would think that Jodie Foster’s third directorial debut, The Beaver, would be one of the summer’s hottest tickets. But for Foster, 48, her much delayed project has been overshadowed by its star and his struggle – Mel Gibson.

Casting Gibson in the lead role when his career had hopes of turning around, it was not long after the filming was complete that Mel was back to ground zero, being an infamous tabloid fixture. The Beaver stars Gibson as a chemically depressed husband and father who turns to a self-created cure by adopting a beaver hand puppet as a means to communicate. Foster pulls double-duty, acting as the neglected wife.

Foster is now finally relieved that her part of the film is done. Proud that audiences will get a chance to see her work, she admitted to being slightly scared when The Beaver made its buzzed about debut last month at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, “I know that it’s not a film for everybody. It’s a very specialized subject matter and it’s treated in a very special way,” said Foster during a roundtable interview at the Four Season Hotel in Boston. The film’s distributor, Summit Entertainment, is also handling the film in a special way, releasing The Beaver on May 6th in just a handful of cities before slowly expanding (a similar distribution tactic the studio used with last year’s lauded film The Ghost Writer, which received controversy over its director Roman Polanski).

Foster hopes that people can look past Mel’s personal problems and see the performance for itself, admitting that aspect of the movie is beyond her control. “Honestly, the wonderful thing about being a director is that you actually get to have this piece of film that says, ‘This is what I love and this is what I believe in,’” said Foster, continuing that film’s marketing and distribution is not her problem. Already receiving criticism from fans, she prefaces the buzz with “There are people who just do not like the movie and go, ‘Why isn’t it a comedy?’ And I understand that. There are other movies that fulfill that function. It’s just not this one.”

So what is the The Beaver’s function? Read on as Jodie Foster talks about her friendship with Gibson, depression, motherhood, Hollywood, and puppeteering.

The Beaver has a lot of different elements in it, from drama to comedy to absurdity. As a director how do you achieve that delicate balance?

Jodie Foster: Yeah, well, it has an odd tone to it and the tone took a long time to get right. It turns into a kind of an exaggerated drama as well. So we had to work a lot on that and reshoot some things, just to try to smooth that trajectory. It does have a weird tone, because the concept is a guy with a puppet on his hand and we’re going to assume that’s comedic. We were very careful. Every choice, I think we leaned towards the dramatic choice. We really tried to keep it a drama. Because if you want to feel those feelings in the end, you really can’t have all those comedic conventions in the beginning.

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