Elle Fanning’s first cinematic obsession: “I wanted to live in that world”
Elle Fanning had the rare opportunity to work with one of the artists who shaped her passion for filmmaking.
Since she started working as a child star, Fanning has managed to work with an array of acclaimed filmmakers, including Cameron Crowe, Mike Mills, Joaquim Trier, JJ Abrams, and Dan Trachtenberg, just to name a few, and while her journey into acting may not be all that surprising considering that her sister, Dakota, her passion for cinema is just as strong, with a particular film that sparked her interest in the medium.
“I had pictures of The Virgin Suicides all over my walls,” Fanning told Variety, “It’s just so beautiful and dreamy, I wanted to live in that world”.
Based on the novel of the same name by Jeffrey Eugenides, the film was directed by Sofia Coppola, who, with this debut, tried to paper over the public backlash she had received for her abysmal cameo in her father, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather: Part III, putting forth a defiant step forward that proved her mettle as a filmmaker.
The Virgin Suicides explores the mysterious death of five sisters as they are perceived by teenager boys in their community, all of whom look back on their memories and try to determine what actually happened, and the atmospheric, dreamlike style that Coppola utilised was unlike anything the American independent film scene had witnessed before, and clearly had a significant effect on Fanning and many other young cinephiles.
Although it was much more of a cult hit than it was a smash success, the movie made sure that the industry was paying attention to Coppola and granted her the opportunity, and most importantly, funding and investor faith, to work on other projects. Among them was Somewhere, a melancholy drama about a movie star who tries to be more present in the life of his young daughter, and it was this role of the child that Fanning was cast in, allowing her to finally meet her hero.
Unlike the director’s previous films, this one lacked the biting humour and opulent production, favouring a more realistic depiction of how draining it can be to be a part of the film industry, in many ways, feeling like the most personal of her films, as the young girl’s backstory was about how she grew up in the shadow of a famous father.
Casting Fanning as her stand-in meant that Coppola had to put a lot of confidence in the young star, who delivered with one of the most impressive child performances in recent memory, and continued her streak in the years following Somewhere, proving herself and evolving into the star she is today.
She later reunited with the director on The Beguiled, a revisionist western that was inspired by the same novel that Don Siegel had made into a film in 1971 that starred Clint Eastwood, and while the opportunity to continue her collaborative relationship with Coppola must have been exciting for Fanning, she also had the chance to co-star with Kirsten Dunst, who had her own breakout role when she appeared in The Virgin Suicides, a cinematic passing of the torch, if there ever was one.
