Some children naturally excel in front of the camera, and for a young Jodie Foster, she didn’t have a problem giving realistic and incredibly well-executed performances from an early age. After appearing in adverts, she graduated to television shows, starring in everything from The Doris Day Show to a TV adaptation of Paper Moon.

Foster’s career then took a turn after she moved from Disney movies to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, in which she played a child prostitute. Robert De Niro, the film’s star, took the young actor under his wing and helped her to rehearse her lines, helping to inspire her further. Foster received praise for the film, soon appearing in Bugsy Malone before going back to her roots and starring in the Disney classic Freaky Friday.

The actor continued to receive roles in movies ranging from Foxes to The Accused before landing another major part that would help her become a Hollywood star. 1990’s The Silence of the Lambs – one of the only horror movies to win an Oscar – was a massive opportunity for Foster, who landed the main role as Clarice Starling, a trainee FBI agent. She meets with Anthony Hopkins’ horrifying villain Hannibal Lecter so that she can study the mind of a killer, but events spiral out of control when he escapes from his prison cell.

Foster has worked with her fair share of iconic directors, like Robert Zemeckis, David Fincher, Richard Donner, Jonathan Demme, and Spike Lee, although that doesn’t mean she’s without complaints. There have been occasions when Foster has disagreed with a filmmaker’s way of directing, such as when she worked with Lee on Inside Man in 2006.

The film was a success, particularly at the box office, and it starred famous faces like Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Willem Dafoe, and Christopher Plummer alongside Foster. While Foster might have reaped various benefits from starring in the film, like working with acclaimed actors and a legendary director in a movie that earned critical and commercial success, she complained about Lee’s filmmaking methods in an interview.

Talking to The New York Times, Foster explained, “He’s so impatient. He doesn’t want to do more than one or two takes, and he doesn’t want to go back to the beginning of a scene. So if you forget a line he’s like, ‘Just keep going.’ That’s frustrating as an actor, because you want to get it perfect, but there’s a feeling that comes out of his work that you don’t get in anything else.”

Thus, while Foster found it hard to understand Lee’s choices, it taught her a lot about directing, which she has kept with her as a filmmaker. “Each director has something unusual about the way that they approach the job. It’s their psychology. I’m sure Spike has some history of impatience as a little boy,” she added.

She made her directorial debut in 1991 with Little Man Tate, and has since directed Home for the Holidays, The Beaver, and Money Monster. Clearly, working with a range of filmmakers, even if she doesn’t like their style of working, has helped her to hone her own skills.