Dakota Fanning’s favourite movie inspired her career: “I thought that I wanted to do movies like that”
Dakota Fanning might have been in the acting biz since she was five years old, but she didn’t discover the movie that inspired her career until she was a little older.
Most people probably know her from family films like Uptown Girls and The Cat in the Hat, but even before that, she was appearing in thoughtful, moving movies. At just seven years old, she became the youngest person ever nominated for a SAG Award for her performance in I Am Sam. However, it wasn’t until she was around ten that she discovered the film that would go on to inspire the rest of her career.
When asked by Refinery 29 what film made her want to act, Fanning said, “Probably What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? … It was kind of the first movie I’d seen that was just about people”.
1993’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? is about a young grocery store clerk living with and taking care of his dysfunctional family, including his mentally disabled younger brother, starring Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio, two of the biggest stars of their generation, in what is a quiet, tender film that came right at the beginning of their careers. For an actor like Fanning who had been thrown into the business at such a young age, she was probably used to all those family-friendly 1980s and ’90s blockbusters, which had outrageous plots and schemes.
While I Am Sam is itself a rather quiet and tender movie, it was made when she was so young that it’s understandable she couldn’t fully appreciate it, for most children grow up believing most films are always action-packed and filled with sensational plots, and when we finally see a film that resembles real life, it can be life-changing.
For Fanning, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? was the movie that made her realise all a good film needs is good characters. “Everything was just a story of human interaction,’ the actor explained, “I thought that I wanted to do movies like that”.
Fanning’s career has mostly been made up of more action-packed or horror-related films in the past few years, from the likes of the Twilight Saga to Ocean’s 8 and Vicious, but while she might not have been in as many human-centric, simple movies like the one that inspired her so much, she tends to bring that quiet human quality she appreciates in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? to whatever role she’s playing.
Even in the Ripley TV series, which is, of course, about a conman and murderer, she manages to bring groundedness and authenticity to the character of Marge, and, at only 32, she still has most of her career ahead of her to take on the kind of roles she’s always wanted to do.
Perhaps this year’s The Sun Never Sets, about a woman thrown into a love triangle after her boyfriend suggests a break, will be that more human-centric set-up she’s loved all these years. And while the upcoming adaptation of Kristan Hannah’s novel The Nightingale, starring Fanning and her sister Elle, is set during the period of WWII, it seems like it also has a deeply human heart. Here’s to whatever films Fanning will inspire us with in the coming years.
