At 96 years young, documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman has a new credit to his résumé: scene-stealer. The director makes a notable supporting turn in the French drama A Private Life, which opens in theatres this weekend. In the film, Wiseman plays Dr. Goldstein, the mentor to Jodie Foster’s Lillian Steiner, a psychiatrist who may perhaps be the one person in the film most in need of therapy.
Wiseman shows up at a pivotal moment as Lillian finds herself wrestling with imposter syndrome and self-doubts as she wonders if one of her patients (Virginia Efira) died in a suicide or was murdered. Lillian can’t stop crying, but her mercurial mentor shows her not an inch of sympathy. Instead of offering guidance, he provides a rude awakening by questioning Lillian’s skills as a shrink. Wiseman is cold and compelling in one of those brief but memorable performances that turns a film on its head.
It’s not Wiseman’s first time in front of the camera, either. Wiseman previously appeared in A Private Life director Rebecca Zlotowski’s dramedy Other People’s Children (2022) playing the gynecologist to Virginia Efira’s Rachel. Acting in confident (if heavily accented) French, he administers some tests and prescribes life advice to Rachel as she debates having a baby as she approaches 40. It’s a much more nurturing role compared to his turn in A Private Life, which shows the range of his dramatic chops, but also Zlotowski’s smart choice in casting him in these figurehead roles. (Audiences can also recognize Wiseman’s voice in Carson Lund’s 2025 drama Eephus playing the radio announcer during a lazy day of baseball and in the French farce Jane Austen Wrecked My Life.)
Ask Zlotowski how she came to see the dramatic potential in a veteran documentary filmmaker, though, and she credits a pair of shoes. Two pairs of shoes, in fact.
“He’s my muse,” Zlotowski tells POV during a press event at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall. She says that she met Wiseman at the Venice Film Festival in an elevator where he admired her giant sparkling shoes.
Zlotowski says she returned the compliment, to which he playfully pointed to his orthopaedic footwear, “Director’s shoes.”
She laughs and says she called his bluff, replying, “Director’s shoes as well.” They struck up an easy friendship from there.
“I feel like I’m his neighbour because he lives in Paris, but he likes to talk to the younger generation,” Zlotowski adds. “He’s so still curious. Obviously you have that in his films. I feel that after 45, 50, 60, years of filming and being invisible—fakely invisible—in the films that he [made], he likes to be seen. It’s fun for him, and it’s part of what I respect a lot.”
Foster, who gives an exceptional performance as Lillian, says that Wiseman was a brilliant scene partner on the day that he came to set. Moreover, she adds that there’s a real shift in the dynamic of A Private Life as Lillian’s encounter with her mentor opens up aspects of her psyche that have been suppressed during her search into her patient’s death. “It’s the first time I speak English in the movie, and to have a whole scene with somebody who’s an American and be able to speak English, it shows a different side of Lillian Steiner than you’d known,” says Foster.
Zlotowski says it’s no coincidence that a man who spent years observing America’s institutions—hospitals, libraries, museums, city halls, gourmet restaurants, and then some—now plays a fly on the wall to human behaviour in her films. She says she hopes to mirror “what he did by collecting and recording of all those democratic institutions.”
Foster leans into her director’s comments about feeling like Wiseman’s neighbour in Paris and seeing him as emblematic of institutional legacy and knowledge. Wiseman, like Lillian and Dr. Goldstein, is an American ex-pat. Foster thinks that energy finds its way into A Private Life.
“I think what Fred brought to the film, textually, is that we see Lillian as somebody who left her country, abandoned her country, to become somebody new. That new person is a fantasy of what a French person would be, which is what Americans want to do,” Foster observes. “They want to come to France, and they want to live a fantasy like Jean Paul Belmondo [from Godard’s Breathless]. They want to inhabit this idea of what they have in France, live in this beautiful apartment overlooking the Parc Monceau and having little espresso cups and all that stuff.”
Lillian enjoys a life of comfort in Paris and indeed embarks on an unconventional crime story that could easily fuel a Godard script. But Foster notes that all comes to a head when Lillian seeks Dr. Goldstein’s advice.
“When she meets Fred Wiseman in the film, A) he dominates her because he was her supervisor, an older man who’s a different part of culture, who knows a #MeToo part of culture, who tells her ‘you’re wrong, I’m going to hold a mirror up to the reason that you’re using this person [and] the psychoanalytic reasons why you’re finding yourself in this spot, because you’re a terrible doctor and you’re a bad therapist,’” Foster explains.
“To see Lillian so vulnerable in that moment and trying to find the words to fight up against the institution, and still feeling like she’s been called out—like she’s a young girl in college whose professor is telling her she’s stupid—I think it allows us as an audience to really love her, in a way, because we suddenly understand where she comes from,” Foster observes. “There’s no other place in the movie where you really get a sense of seeing her and why she is the way she is.”
Zlotowski, meanwhile, can’t say if she’ll cast Wiseman again in another film soon, but echoes the significance he brings to the part as someone who is emblematic of a cultural historian. “He’s like the record of what’s vanishing right now, and that’s so threatened,” says Zlotowski. “Maybe I want to [create], unconsciously, something in my cinema that would come from him. I just want to bite that: we’re vampires. I just want to make him stay forever, in a way.”
Now, Frederick Wiseman in a vampire movie would certainly be something to see.
