'A kind of love that feels like partner love': Jodie Foster claims mother and son love is 'romantic'

Jodie Foster has spoken about how she believes that mother and son relationships share a certain element of romance.

The Silence of the Lambs actress – who has two sons Charlie, 19 and Kit, 16 – claimed that mothers can feel the same love for their sons that they feel for their partners, using her 1991 directing debut to illustrate her point.

Foster told The Talks: “I look at a film like Little Man Tate, which is the first film I directed and is a movie about a mother and a son, and that is a specific relationship.

“I would say that one of the aspects of a mother and son relationship that is so interesting to me is how romantic it is.”

The 55-year-old explained: “There is something about raising somebody who will become one of the most powerful people in the universe.

“That’s what I thought Little Man Tate was about: raising a herald for the next generation, a prodigy, somebody who is the new messenger for the next generation […]

“You’re raising them from infancy, and that awe in front of this child that you are raising in their differentness, and how different they are…

“It articulates itself through a certain kind of romanticism, and a kind of love that feels like partner love.”

Little Boy Tate was about a little boy raised by a single mother who struggles to adapt to being different and come to terms with being a genius when it isolates him from his peers.

Foster, who is famously private about her life, also opened up in the interview about her own mother who has dementia.