“I made some difficult choices to be there for my kids. I always really valued the idea of parenting as a job. And it’s paid off — I have the most amazing kids!” says writer-director-producer Naomi Foner. Lots of moms say that, but Foner’s progeny are particularly accomplished: actors Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal.
Foner, a longtime screenwriter who helped create the out-there ’70s kids’ PBS show “The Electric Company” and wrote the screenplay for the 1988 thriller “Running on Empty” (for which she was an Oscar nominee) has a new film. At age 68, she’s making her directorial debut.
“Maggie likes to say I’m the first grandmother who directed her first movie,” says Foner with a laugh.
That movie is “Very Good Girls,” out Friday and starring Dakota Fanning and Elizabeth Olsen as two Ditmas Park-dwelling teens during the summer after their high-school graduation. Foner says she was intent on making a movie that celebrated female friendship.
“I remember, when I was growing up, if you had plans with your girlfriend and a guy called you, you changed the plans with your girlfriend. I always found that very offensive,” says Foner. “I wanted this movie to reflect the opposite.”
One of the film’s first scenes is a doozy: Fanning and Olsen take a trip out to Brighton Beach, where they dare each other to skinny-dip in the crowded ocean, in broad daylight.
“We shot just a little bit down the beach from Brighton, in a gated community,” Foner says. “We didn’t have the budget to manage a crowd or anything, so we needed a more private space.”
Foner, who grew up in Ditmas herself, also availed herself of her talented relatives: Son-in-law Peter Sarsgaard (Maggie’s husband) plays Fanning’s character’s sleazy boss.
“It was a little awkward to ask Peter to do that,” she admits. “But … I couldn’t think of another actor who could make a character who’s kind of dark and a little villainous somewhat vulnerable, too.”
Foner says both she and her kids see being in the entertainment business is an opportunity to tell stories that matter. “I think the reason we do this, at least in my family, is because it’s a very powerful medium — it can potentially change people’s minds, empower people.”
Maggie, soon starring in the BBC miniseries “The Honourable Woman” (premiering July 31) — about a lady promoting reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians — has taken that to heart. “She’s taking her roles seriously, and I think that’s an artist’s job,” says her mom.
Foner, who lives in the city, is glad her kids — raised in California by Foner and her ex-husband Stephen Gyllenhaal, whom she divorced in 2009 — live in New York, where they all see each other on a regular basis. She says she and Maggie talk about career and motherhood (the actress has two young daughters, Ramona and Gloria, with Sarsgaard). “It takes an exquisite selfishness to be an artist, and an exquisite selflessness to be a mother. I know Maggie struggles all the time when she does material that’s going to disrupt her family.”
Foner doesn’t, however, have much commentary on her son’s personal life. Asked if she has anything to say about the songs Jake’s former flame Taylor Swift reportedly wrote about him, she says simply, “No.”
But she surely understands Swift’s outspokenness. “For me it was always a political choice,” she says of her own career choices. “Even when it doesn’t seem political, it always is.”