Making her screen debut at the age of three in a TV commercial, Jodie Foster started her acting career earlier than most. By the time she’d even left her teenage years, she was already a veteran with dozens of film and television credits under her belt.

In fact, by the time she turned 20 in November 1982, she was already an Academy Award and two-time Golden Globe nominee who’d worked with Martin Scorsese twice, shared the screen with Robert De Niro, and collaborated with everyone from Alan Parker and Disney to Martin Sheen and Doris Day.

With two Oscars to her name and a back catalogue of formidable performances, Foster has spent more than half a century under the bright spotlights of Hollywood, and having grown up in that system, it was almost inevitable that she would eventually turn her hand to directing.

Her directorial debut came in 1991’s Little Man Tate, where she also starred as a single mother raising a child prodigy. Family became a recurring theme in Foster’s early directorial efforts, and she followed up her first feature with 1995’s Home for the Holidays, starring Holly Hunter as a single mother reconnecting with her chaotic clan.

That would be the last time she directed for 16 years, eventually returning with The Beaver. Once again, family is at the centre of the story, albeit more dysfunctional than ever, with Mel Gibson’s beleaguered toy company CEO dragged back from the brink and convinced not to kill himself by the cockney twang emerging from a disembodied beaver puppet, which he subsequently wears on his hand at all times as he pieces his life back together.

Foster, Jennifer Lawrence, and the late Anton Yelchin play the wife and kids of Gibson’s Walter Black, making for a star-stuffed central quartet. The director and the disgraced star had been friends for years already, with The Beaver being one of the two-time Oscar winners’ first major roles since he hit the self-destruct button on his career.

Foster was doing more than just extending an olive branch, though. The actor told Collider that it reunited her with one of the best actors she’d ever worked with, almost two decades after they first worked together on-camera in Richard Donner’s western comedy Maverick.

“He’s an amazing actor. I loved working with him,” she said. “He and Chow Yun-fat are my two favourite actors that I’ve ever worked with. I think everybody feels that way. It’s pretty universal in Hollywood. I knew that he had a combination of the lightness and wit that the character needed and that he would also really understand the struggle and want to go to a deeper place, mostly just because I know him and I know how his psyche works. He’s somebody who’s interested and wants to change.”

Foster worked with John Woo’s former muse and action icon Yun-fat in 1999’s period drama Anna and the King, where he clearly made an impression. There are interesting similarities between the two, however, with Yun-fat and Gibson initially rising to prominence in their native countries via hugely charismatic performances in the action genre that brought them worldwide attention.

Another thing they have in common is that they’re the best actors Foster has ever worked with, even if one experienced more success than the other in her orbit after the negative publicity swirling around Gibson’s offscreen behaviour was partially attributed to The Beaver sinking without a trace at the box office.