Jodie Foster Says Her Role In Neill Blomkamp's 'Elysium' Isn't Yet Locked

Jodie Foster is working for Roman Polanski right now, acting in his new film God of Carnage, and it has been widely assumed that she'll be one of the primary stars of Neill Blomkamp's second feature, Elysium, alongside Matt Damon and Sharlto Copley. But now the actress says that the deal isn't quite set, which leads us to wonder if she's moving away from the role, or if contracts are just taking some time.

She talked to Empire, responding to a question about her role in Elysium with,

Actually, I'm not on that movie! I don't know how that got out there. Well, I'm not not on it, but I'm not booked or involved in a deal yet. People want to jump the gun on Neill because he's the new David Fincher or whatever. And I get why – I love him and District 9 was my favourite film of 2009. But we're just not at that time in the process yet...

Interesting answer. This is a woman who has been around a long time, so perhaps she's just being quite matter of fact about the dealmaking process, and we should take this as nothing more than "we're still hammering things out." But it also sounds like she isn't nearly as set for the role as we'd previously thought. One way or the other we should know soon, given that Elysium is reportedly set to shoot starting late this spring, with production kicking off in Vancouver before moving to Mexico.

Jodie Foster also talked about God of Carnage, which is based on the play by Yasmina Reza and stars John C. Reilly (as Foster's husband), and Kate Winslet and Christophe Waltz as another couple.

The two couples have a child each, who fight each other on a playground. One of them gets hurt, so the parents go to the others' house to have a negotiation. It all happens in real-time, so it's about an hour and 45 minutes of negotiation between two sets of parents and how it all falls apart. Kind of like Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, but a little funnier. There's a lot of wit.