The one director Elle Fanning has always wanted to work with: “That would be cool”
For around 90% of her life, Elle Fanning has been in the public eye. Since making her movie debut at the age of three, she has appeared in at least one movie or TV show every year.
She has done just about everything there is to do in the acting game and, as of 2026, she’s still a couple of years away from her 30th birthday. It’s enough to make you sick, isn’t it?
Unsurprisingly, Fanning’s longevity and talent have opened doors for her to work with some of the greatest directors to ever walk the Earth, appearing in movies by Tony Scott and Alejandro González Iñárritu, within the space of a few months in 2006, both of which made over $100million at the box office.
In recent years, she has worked with James Mangold and Joachim Trier, among others, and she also snagged a working opportunity with Sofia Coppola on The Beguiled, achieving a dream she had harboured ever since she first became obsessed with The Virgin Suicides.
There’s still one name she hasn’t ticked off her list, and it’s a big one. Speaking to Digital Spy while promoting the 2011 JJ Abrams film Super 8, she took a moment to pay tribute to one of the movie’s producers, the great Steven Spielberg.
“I’d love to be directed by Steven because he’s just a producer on this; that would be cool to experience that,” she revealed, “JJ looked up to him so much. Steven was really involved and JJ, you always see him thinking about the details.”
It’s no secret that Abrams is a big Spielberg fan. You could argue that he’s spent his entire career trying to emulate him, with varying degrees of success. The entire plot of Super 8, which revolves around a train crash, is a not-so-subtle homage to both Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Cecil B DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, the film that inspired Spielberg to first pick up a camera.
Fanning’s Spielberg obsession might trigger a little bit of sibling envy. In 2005, Elle’s sister Dakota starred in the great man’s adaptation of War of the Worlds as a ten-year-old, playing the young daughter of the protagonist, Tom Cruise’s Ray, as they both become embroiled in an invasion of Earth led by ‘tripods’ from Mars.
The film was a major box office hit, becoming the fourth-most successful release of the year, and scored well among reviewers, but it’s not regarded as one of Spielberg’s all-timers. The film was also massively overshadowed by Cruise being really weird on talk shows, which couldn’t have been nice.
Given Spielberg’s propensity to make movies featuring child actors, it’s a little surprising that Elle didn’t get the call during her youth. However, with Fanning still astonishingly early into her career and Spielberg showing no signs of slowing down in his old age, there is every chance that the two could collaborate in the not-too-distance future. Better late than never, I suppose.
