Jodie Foster says Robert De Niro was ‘uninteresting’ on ‘Taxi Driver’ set

Robert De Niro didn’t impress Jodie Foster at first on the “Taxi Driver” set.

During an appearance at the Marrakech Film Festival on Sunday, Foster, 63, recalled meeting De Niro, 82, when she was 12 years old to shoot Martin Scorsese’s 1976 psychologically thriller.

De Niro, according to Foster, took the young actress “under his wing” and brought her to coffee shops, but she was turned off by his method acting approach to the movie.

“We’d run the lines and run the lines a second and third time. And I’m sure maybe some of you have been here when Robert De Niro was here. One of our greatest American actors, so proud to have worked with him — not the most interesting person on earth,” Foster told the audience, according to Variety.

“And at that time, he was very much in character, the way he was in those days,” the “True Detective” actress continued. “So he was really uninteresting and I remember having these lunches with him and being like, ‘What is happening? When can I go home?’ And he wouldn’t really be able to talk to me, so I would talk to the waiters and the people in the restaurants.”

However, Foster eventually bonded with De Niro when he introduced her to his prep process.

“He finally walked me through improvisation by the time we had our third lunch together, and it opened my eyes to what acting could be,” Foster recalled “And I realized at 12, ‘Oh, it’s my fault because I haven’t brought enough to the table.’ I’ve just been saying lines and waiting for my next line and acting naturally, but building a character is something different.”

“And I remember how excited I was, I remember being kind of sweaty and excited and giggly and coming back up into the hotel room to meet my mom and saying, ‘I’ve had this epiphany,’” Foster added. “And I think from there, everything changed.”

Foster played a teenage prostitute named Iris alongside De Niro as titular cab driver Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver.”

The role earned Foster an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

During an appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” last year, Foster revealed that De Niro and Scorsese, 83, were “scared” of her on the “Taxi Driver” set.

“I was 12. And they had to say things like, you know, ‘Can you pull his fly down?’ And it was a little awkward,” she shared.

“So I was like, ‘Whatever. Just, move over,’” she added. “Yeah, they were a little scared, Scorsese especially, who kept giggling every time he talked to me. He’d start giggling and De Niro had to take over.”

Later during her conversation at the Marrakech Film Festival, Foster admitted that she “would never have chosen to be an actor.”

“I don’t have the personality of an actor. I’m not somebody that wants to dance on a table and, you know, sing songs for people,” she explained. “It’s actually just a cruel job that was chosen for me as a young person that I don’t remember starting. “

“So right there, it makes my work a little bit different because I am not interested in acting just for the sake of acting,” Foster said. If I was on a desert island, I think probably the last thing I would ever do is act. So I was just trying to survive.”