Home for the Holidays must be the most relatable movie ever made about Thanksgiving. It has a turkey, a parade, an eccentric aunt, a gay brother, men playing football in the yard, in-laws who detest each other and multiple familial meltdowns. Jodie Fosters film released 25 years ago, on Nov. 3, 1995 applies an unsentimental lens to the very American celebration while still managing to feel sweet, sympathetic and funny. Its also quintessentially 90s: a starry but intimate mid-budget dramedy released by a major studio (Paramount Pictures) that has become something of a cult classic in the intervening years.

Holidays was Fosters second directorial outing, following 1991s Little Man Tate. She cast Holly Hunter as Claudia Larson, an art restorer and single mom who has just been laid off from her museum job. Heading home to Baltimore for a prototypical Thanksgiving gathering hosted by her parents (Anne Bancroft and Charles Durning), she is thrilled to spend time with her wily brother (Robert Downey Jr.) and less thrilled to see her bitter sister (Cynthia Stevenson) who never left home. Over dinner and various other happenings, the Larson family comes close to imploding. Also on hand for the antics are Dylan McDermott, Geraldine Chaplin, Claire Danes, Steve Guttenberg and David Strathairn.

Fosters career behind the camera began with a segment of the 1985 horror anthology Stephen Kings Golden Tales and went on to include the movies The Beaver and Money Monster, as well as episodes of House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black and Black Mirror. But Home for the Holidays is easily her most distinctive directing effort thanks to a stylish kineticism that accentuates the scripts humor.

Last week, Foster called me to discuss the films development, shutting down the set because Downey Jr. was speaking in tongues, wanting to make something that appealed to people in their 30s, and why she wishes shed directed more movies.

Im glad you were interested in chatting about Home for the Holidays. That must mean you have a fondness for this movie.

Oh, I love that film. It was an amazing experience. It was sort of cathartic for me, you know? We developed it from the short story and an earlier script, and so the process of creating it was really about downloading all of our lives and thoughts and feelings about being in our 30s and looking at our families, going home for the holidays. It even has a very personal resonance to me.

Looking back on it, where were you in your life and your career when you started working on the film?

Lets see. It was just before I did Contact. I did not have children yet. I was 30, probably. 31, 32? I was running my company and I had already won both Oscars, so I was wanting to direct movies that felt like personal stories and that reflected my life in some way. I feel like Little Man Tate, Home for the Holidays and The Beaver, in a weird way, even though they were all written by different authors and they were about totally different subjects, for me, in my life, theyre sort of a trilogy.

Little Man Tate was, in some ways, really autobiographical themes about being a child that was prodigious. I dont know that I was a child prodigy, but I was prodigious. [It was about] coming to terms with that and being different, kind of coming of age. Home for the Holidays was really about that very particular time in your life when youre 30 and youre still kind of attached to your parents and your family. You still feel like a child. You feel infantilized by them, and you have this very particular search for meaning that happens in your 30s: Did I choose this life? Is this the life that I want? Where am I headed? I think all three of those movies The Beaver, as well are about people in spiritual crisis. Theyre people who are undergoing a kind of life assessment and are changing or making these transitions.