Jodie Foster has finally finished fiddling with The Beaver, her first movie as director since 1995’s Home For The Holidays. Now that the Mel Gibson-and-puppet vehicle is on the verge of release, she’s turning her attention back to acting. And there are two very different projects in the pipeline: God of Carnage and Elysium.

First is Roman Polanski’s God Of Carnage, currently shooting in Paris. It stars Foster and John C. Reilly as one married couple, Kate Winslet and Christophe Waltz as another. As Foster explains exclusively to Empire, things soon get intense. “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.”

For a radical change of pace, Foster will then be joining Matt Damon and Sharlto Copley in Neill Blomkamp’s mystery-shrouded sci-project Elysium. Or will she? “Actually, I’m not on that movie! I don’t know how that got out there,” says the actress. “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…”

So there you have it. For world-beating coverage of The Beaver, including an on-set report and Foster’s reaction to her star’s controversial phone calls, check out a future issue of Empire.