MEDIA > ARTICLES & INTERVIEWS > 2005

DAKOTA'S FAN CLUB
from The Detroit News, October 16, 2005
by Glenn Whipp / Los Angeles Daily News
Dakota Fanning didn't see any movies this summer. She was too busy embarking on what she calls her "world tour," bopping from Paris to London to Marseilles with Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg in support of "War of the Worlds."
"Paris is my favorite city!" Fanning enthuses. "We climbed to the top of the Arc de Triomphe! And the chocolate crepes! Lots of chocolate crepes! Did I mention I'm learning French?"
No, Dakota, but you didn't need to. Once the 11-year-old Fanning sets her mind to something, it is a fait accompli. For "Dreamer," one of two movies she has arriving in theaters this month, Fanning learned to ride a thoroughbred race horse. When it threw her off, she climbed back on. This happened twice.
Then the horse learned.
As we all are. Here are 10 reasons why It's Dakota Fanning's world and we just live in it:
She learned to read at the age of 2. After celebrating her fourth birthday, she went to work, having found her life's calling.
Fanning doesn't come off as frighteningly precocious in conversation. She begins most every sentence with a chirpy "Uuuuummmm ..." and ends most every sentence with a childlike burst of enthusiasm that demands an exclamation point.
Having said that, she's not like you or me. She was reading before most kids are potty-trained. She skipped kindergarten and went straight to first grade when she was 4. In between, she started to act. She'd stuff a blanket under her dress and pretend to give birth, wailing with a soulful anguish that would register a knowing look from most any mom. (Little sister Elle, who has a nice little career of her own now, played the baby in these dramas.)
But kids being kids, Fanning got bored performing for her family. ("I like a challenge!" she says adamantly.) She told her parents, Steve and Joy, that she "wanted to be an actress on television and movies instead of just around the house."
So, the family left its Conyers, Ga., home, initially for six weeks, but then longer as Dakota turned into what her agent calls a "booking machine," landing commercials, a prime guest spot on "ER" and then the lead in "I Am Sam" opposite Sean Penn.
Eventually, mom and dad saw the writing on the wall and put their Georgia home up for sale.
"It's fun to know what I want to do -- you know, when I grow up," Fanning says. "I have friends who say, 'Oh, maybe I'll be an astronaut or whatever.' But it's cool to want to do this forever. I knew from my first commercial that I wanted to be an actress."
She receives 10 scripts ... a day.
You get Fanning, you get your movie made. That's her power in Hollywood today. John Gaitins shopped his screenplay for "Dreamer" and was met with rejection -- until he signed Fanning.
"Then we couldn't start shooting soon enough," Gaitins says.
By the way, of all those scripts, Fanning might read one a week.
She takes her own meetings but must be listening to some good advice.
"My mom comes with me, but she waits outside," Fanning says of the days when she sits down with studio executives, producers or directors bidding for her services. And you figure, OK, sure, now that she has become the No. 1 child star, why not?
"Oh no, that's always been the case, even when I was 6," Fanning says. "That was my mom's idea. My mom doesn't really get involved in anything else, just getting me there to the meeting."
But even if you're reading, say, Dante's "Inferno" at the age of 3, there still has to be someone encouraging Fanning to narrate a documentary about outsider artist Henry Darger (the movie, "In the Realms of the Unreal," won the Grand Jury Prize at last year's Sundance Film Festival) or sign on to "Nine Lives," an anthology movie telling the stories of middle-age women. (Fanning plays the daughter of Glenn Close.)
Little girls -- even ones who list "Gone With the Wind" as a favorite movie -- just don't come to such things naturally.
Or do they? When Fanning showed up to rehearse "Hide and Seek," she came armed with several drafts of the script, each peppered with pages upon pages of notes.
"And not in any precocious 'I'm a child star' way, more like any adult actor might come with genuine inquiries about why certain scenes had changed," says director John Polson. "If she had a favorite line from a previous draft, we would negotiate as I'd do with any actor to see if we could change it back."
She doesn't need to wait forSanta Claus.
When "Dreamer" wrapped, Kurt Russell gave her a horse named (what else?) Goldie. Tom Cruise floated her an iPod while shooting "War of the Worlds." It came loaded with several thousand songs -- "Everything," Fanning says, "from Gwen Stefani to Buddy Holly." (She hasn't loaded any tunes herself, explaining, "I haven't listened to all Tom's songs yet.") Cruise also gave her a laptop computer and a cell phone for her birthday.
But despite all this, she remains, by all appearances, a healthy, normal child.
Fanning punctuates her conversation with giggles, loves to bounce on a soft mattress, collects dolls and still sleeps with a green teddy bear at night.
"She is a wonderful girl," says Elisabeth Shue, who has acted opposite Fanning twice this year, in "Hide and Seek" and "Dreamer." "I can tell you that it was a lot more fun playing her mom than her enemy. You can tell she has a great mom and dad herself, just by the way she acts."
Your fourth-grade teacher was Ms. Cunningham. Fanning's was Steven Spielberg.
Fanning goes to school on set, but she says her real education (well, she doesn't exactly use those words, but you know what she means) comes from watching people make movies.
"When I go on a movie set, I'm learning about movies," Fanning says. "I learned 100 lessons a day from Steven. I always think I might not have this opportunity again, so I try to cram a lot of information into my brain."
Her big-name co-stars respect her.
Denzel Washington, Kurt Russell, Cruise, Close ... they all say Fanning is one of the best actresses they've worked with. They do not qualify the praise by using the word "child" before actress.
"The first scene we did, she looked at me dead in the face and just performed," says Washington, who acted with Fanning in "Man on Fire." "I was like, 'Oh shoot, I'm in trouble. This kid can act.' "
Adds Russell: "I guarantee you, (Dakota) is the best actress I will work with in my entire career."
And they're not just being nice.
For her work in "Hide and Seek," Fanning won an MTV Movie Award this year for Best Frightened Performance. MTV got it wrong. It should have been Most Frightening Performance. The haunted look, the dark circles under her eyes, the running commentary with her "imaginary friend" ... That's the stuff that will keep you awake at night, not De Niro's ham-fisted freak show.
Watch her opposite Close in "Nine Lives." You won't see a more naturalistic piece of acting this year. She alternated between screaming and stricken in "War of the Worlds" and shows she can break your heart and charm your socks off -- sometimes in quick succession -- in "Dreamer."
If Fanning is indeed in this for the long haul and doesn't succumb to the pitfalls that come with being a child star, she should always live in a house with a mantle that's both long and deep.
She always sends thank-you notes.
After every meeting, she returns home and jots an appreciative missive. "I learned that from my mom, absolutely," Fanning says.
And she just became a full-fledged Girl Scout.
Just imagine the cookie sales.

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