“I was very mature and calm and rational,” Dakota Fanning says of her six-year-old self. “My mum was calling me from across the playground, so I jumped from the climbing frame and ran over.” Dakota had already starred in ER, CSI, Malcolm In The Middle and Ally McBeal. Now her agent was on the line and she had a choice to make: a lead role in a TV series (the short-lived Fighting Fitzgeralds), or to play Sean Penn’s daughter in a film called I Am Sam.
She took Penn’s offer and beat Haley Joel Osment and Daniel Radcliffe to best young actor at the Critics Choice awards that winter. Orlando Bloom held her in the air so she could reach the microphone. She spoke with total composure for more than two minutes. “I want to thank God for all of the things he has given me,” she said, her legs dangling, “and for the best agents in the world.”
Dakota is now 20 and about to start her senior year at New York University, where she is majoring in women’s studies, with a focus on the portrayal of women in film and culture. “If I’m going to do both, it might be helpful for one to inform the other,” she says. She’s still working furiously. On top of the dissertation she’s writing on Bette Davis – “I’m told we have similar eyes, so I’m drawn to her,” she says hesitantly, perhaps realising it sounds a little narcissistic – she has four films released this year. In fact, she’s averaged four films a year since starting university, and has another four slated for next year.
Despite spending most of her life making movies, however, she’s surprisingly independently minded. “Dakota won’t let you do anything for her and she is adamant about that,” says Kelly Reichardt, the director of her latest film, Night Moves. “That’s very unusual for someone that’s been acting for so much of her childhood.” Likewise, her “process” is unusual, too. “She didn’t want to rehearse before we shot the film,” adds Reichardt. “I sent her a whole box of research material outlining who her character was before we started shooting, but she told me she never even opened it. I have no idea how she got the character [as well as] she did, and she didn’t like it when I asked her.” It must be unusual for a young actor to take that attitude with a director… “Yes it is,” agrees Reichardt, who’s also directed Meek’s Cutoff and Wendy And Lucy. “She is very much her own thing.”
Yet Fanning is brilliant in Night Moves as Dena, a trust-fund college girl turned environmental terrorist who – along with Jesse Eisenberg’s Josh and Peter Sarsgaard’s Harmon – plots to blow up a dam in an Oregon nature reserve. Jesse’s Josh remains predictably terse and nervous and Sarsgaard’s Harmon fuelled by bravado, but Fanning goes from being an idealistic accomplice to a steely, even cunning, influence. She makes us root for a girl about to commit a reckless crime. And then, after it’s done, she makes us feel for her.
“I can understand being a young person and wanting to do something that has immediate effects,” she says when asked if she sympathised with her character. “I think my generation is obsessed with instant gratification. We want everything now, now, now. I can understand feeling invincible, and wanting to do radical things because you have that confidence. I’m not going to do anything like that, but I can see where it comes from.” So she’s not stockpiling ammonium nitrate under her bed? “Can you imagine?” she laughs. “I was thinking when we were filming the scene, ‘What if I were actually an environmental activist who had this elaborate plan to blow up a dam, and was just pretending to be an actress?’”
That would be quite an elaborate plan, considering the length and breadth of her career so far. Fanning was born in Conyers, Georgia, and raised as a southern Baptist by her mum Heather Joy, a professional tennis player, and dad, Steve, a minor-league baseball player turned salesman. Dakota play-acted constantly and, when her drama teacher convinced Steve and Heather of their child’s ability, the family moved to LA for pilot season. I Am Sam launched her and, by the age of 10, she was sharing the screen with Denzel Washington in Tony Scott’s Man On Fire.
A year later, Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg came calling with their adaptation of War Of The Worlds. From there, Fanning went straight on to Charlotte’s Web, the Hollywood version of the classic children’s book. She made her only real mistake with Hounddog, a terribly misjudged southern gothic thriller in which her character is brutally raped. “Fanning’s willingness to please appears to have been grossly exploited,” wrote Time Out New York. Her parents copped a lot of criticism and the film sparked a national, prurient debate. Despite the outcry, her career never suffered. As a 13-year-old, Fanning was earning more than $4m a year, according to Forbes, and that was before she joined her best friend Kristen Stewart and the then-unheard-of Robert Pattinson on the Twilight series. Fanning now has 55 acting credits to her name, with parts in over 30 feature films. She was educated on film sets, with a teacher travelling everywhere for three-hour-a-day sessions. She’s moved seamlessly into more adult roles, and will soon be seen leading the sexually explicit period drama Effie, a film written by and starring Emma Thompson, about the Victorian art critic John Ruskin and his teenage bride Effie Gray. She admits to disliking the fame that defined her childhood. “Being a known person is pretty much all I’ve known,” she says. “I don’t remember much of a time when people didn’t know who I was. But you grow up and think about things differently, and you realise how strange fame is. If I can achieve it, I don’t want anyone to know anything about me.”
She’s particularly interested in how the star system that worshipped its idols has been replaced by an industry intent on bringing them down. “There was so much mystery in the movies back then,” she says of Bette Davis’s time. “Some of that mystery has gone. I’m trying to work out what happened. Why do we need to know everything about everyone?”
She sounds earnest but Reichardt confirms that Fanning is actually incredibly down to earth: “As a director, you have to deal with actors’ agents a lot, and they’re always very, very demanding on behalf of their clients. When the actor actually shows up, you never know what you’re going to get, and sometimes the actors are more demanding than their agent. In Dakota’s case, she couldn’t have been more a part of the film. She stayed in the same motel as the crew, ate the same food. She would put the laundry on. It seems clear that at some point she made a very conscious decision that she wasn’t going to separate herself from the small chores and hassles of life, which she could do very easily if she wanted to. And that shows, I think, in her acting.”
On the first day of filming, Reichardt shot the film’s most dramatic scene, when Fanning, Eisenberg and Sarsgaard place their loaded speedboat at the foot of the dam. The scene took 12 hours to complete in the cold and rain, and Fanning had to hunker down in the metal canoe for the entirety of it. She looks on the edge of tears, but contained, strangely composed. “She was perfect in that scene,” Reichardt confirms. “She just knew what to do. She cried after we wrapped the scene, and I immediately felt like I knew her.”
When I ask Fanning about this, her voice doesn’t waver. “It was a magical experience for me,” she says. “Film-making is about being in a canoe at four in the morning in the middle of the lake, with strangers that become your best friends for the shortest time.”
Night Moves is in UK cinemas on 29 Aug
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