When Elle Fanning was round 14 or 15 years previous, she had a cork board in her bed room adorned with footage she had printed out from the web. There have been a number of Tumblr images and pictures of It Woman Alexa Chung (“a fashion icon,” Fanning says). Additionally pinned to that shrine? Photographs of Bob Dylan.
Fanning had been launched to Dylan’s music when she was a 12-year-old on the set of Cameron Crowe’s “We Bought a Zoo.” Crowe would play the track “Buckets of Rain” on a regular basis. It piqued Fanning’s curiosity, so Crowe launched her to Dylan’s 1975 album, “Blood on the Tracks.” Fanning was hooked.
“It opened up my world,” she remembers, leaning in near the Zoom digital camera, her excited face filling the display screen. “It was a whole other side of music. It was like I was living in my own fantasy — I would create these future mes and my future self and think of myself doing things and listening to these songs. That’s what it evoked for me.”
Fanning, 26, is starring in “A Complete Unknown,” director James Mangold’s considerate Bob Dylan biopic (in huge launch Dec. 25), which captures the musician in his nascent period as he prowls the Greenwich Village scene. She performs Sylvie Russo, a personality based mostly on Dylan’s one-time girlfriend Suze Rotolo, albeit with a unique title. Rotolo, famously, was the woman clinging to Dylan’s arm on the duvet of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” the landmark 1963 album that launched songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.”
As Sylvie, Fanning brings the perceptive vulnerability audiences have come to anticipate from her after movies like Sofia Coppola’s 2010 “Somewhere,” during which she performed a film star’s wistful daughter, and Mike Mills’ “20th Century Women,” enjoying a teen experimenting along with her sexuality. Her Sylvie falls in love with Bob, performed by Timothée Chalamet, earlier than he breaks large and introduces him to a world of political activism that informs songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Most of her scenes are reverse Chalamet, re-creating the intimate moments of a lady courting somebody she’s captivated by however who additionally retains her at arm’s size. She then watches as fame pushes him out of her attain. Fanning’s emotive face, even in photographs with none dialogue, punctuates a number of key sequences within the movie. She expresses the ache of watching a beloved one soar past her attain — there’s a way of satisfaction but additionally a deep sorrow, understanding he can not be hers alone.
Crowe says that whilst a preteen, Fanning had an open high quality to her that made her a match for Dylan’s music.
“She personally sets a tone which is elegant, but it’s wise and uncynical and open to feeling,” he says on the cellphone. “That just makes her porous to music and to that era of Dylan.”
Elle Fanning and Timothée Chalamet within the film “A Complete Unknown.”
(Searchlight Photos)
Fanning, who grew up in Studio Metropolis, has been performing since she was 2 years previous, typically stepping in as a youthful model of her actor sister Dakota, earlier than touchdown components for herself. When enjoying the title function in Daniel Barnz’s 2008 movie “Phoebe in Wonderland,” a couple of woman with Tourette’s, she first began to course of that performing was a metamorphosis, however Sally Potter’s 2012 “Ginger & Rosa,” during which she starred when she was 13, was much more pivotal for her.
“I always hold that really close to me because I didn’t feel like myself at all when I was playing that character,” she says.
“She went before school every day for weeks and then was able to do that whole performance herself,” Coppola remembers.
If there are two recurring themes that come up in dialog with Fanning, it’s intuition and creativeness. Whereas she couldn’t precisely make profession selections herself when she was first auditioning (administrators like Coppola and David Fincher selected her earlier than she selected them), she does really feel like she now has an inside compass that helps her decide initiatives.
“There’s a real kind of self-confidence that I feel now with my choices,” she says. “I feel kind of uninhibited. Possibilities are endless in a really interesting way.”
“You can sometimes feel when you are pushing yourself more,” Fanning says, reflecting on a 12 months that’s seen her return to the large display screen with a vengeance.
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Occasions)
She credit a lot of her fearlessness as a performer to her time spent on the Hulu collection “The Great,” on which she performed a fictionalized model of Russian empress Catherine the Nice. The function was, in some methods, a departure from Fanning’s typical milieu. Whereas a typical Fanning character is quiet and introspective, watching the world round her with curious eyes, Catherine was forthright and bold. Not solely was she working in a British accent, she was tasked with delivering author Tony McNamara’s dialogue word-perfect.
“I feel like the challenges of that role set me up for right now,” she says. “I feel like, OK, I can take it on. Bring it. I am so ready.”
Catherine is the character in her oeuvre with whom Fanning feels essentially the most kinship. She says she pertains to the sensation of strolling right into a room and being underestimated. Even by our video name, you’ll be able to see Fanning’s chatty ebullience come by as she sips from a espresso cup, foam typically dotting the highest of her lip.
Her Emmy-nominated work on “The Great,” in addition to the true-crime restricted collection “The Girl From Plainville,” which she additionally produced, saved her away from films for almost 4 years. However 2024 has been a whirlwind of labor for Fanning.
In the beginning of the 12 months she was onstage in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Tony-winning play “Appropriate,” making her Broadway debut.
“I was definitely a newbie,” she says. “I had to learn the ropes for sure. It’s very different from film, extremely, because you’re trying to re-create this magical moment every time, whereas film those moments are fleeting and you just capture them onscreen, never to be created again.”
After her run in “Appropriate,” Fanning began work on “A Complete Unknown,” which lasted about two and a half months. That was adopted by a sci-fi jaunt within the upcoming “Predator: Badlands,” then a flight to Norway to make “The Worst Person in the World,” director Joachim Trier‘s latest, and after that, Barcelona, to work with Brazilian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz. Meanwhile, she also has a production company with her sister, Lewellen Pictures, which has 15 film and television projects in development.
“This year, particularly, has been really special for me,” she says. “I just feel like there’s some progress occurring and I can really feel the expansion occurring. It’s odd that you could really feel it. It’s in my private life but additionally my skilled life.” (She reportedly is courting Gus Wenner, CEO of Rolling Stone.)
She provides she will be able to sense herself testing her personal limits. “You can sometimes feel when you are pushing yourself more,” she says.
Fanning was excited concerning the prospect of a Chalamet-starring Dylan film even earlier than she knew there was a task for her. She was about to play Patty Hearst in a movie for Mangold earlier than that challenge fell by, and had grow to be buddies with Chalamet on Woody Allen’s “A Rainy Day in New York.”
“I kind of knew Timothée before the explosion of him,” she says, remembering a shoot in the course of the fall earlier than “Call Me by Your Name” was launched. So when Mangold reached out, she leaped on the alternative. In any case, not solely did she have these footage on her wall, she additionally has one in all Dylan’s harmonicas. A producer on the film “Low Down” gave it to her as a present.
“I would have done anything,” she says. “It didn’t matter what the part was. I lucked out in a way that I feel so proud to be able to portray this part, but still, I feel like I manifested it.”
“My imagination is what guides me and it always has,” Fanning says. “Your imagination has to be limitless.”
(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Occasions)
Mangold says he has all the time discovered Fanning arresting.
“The work is so exquisite and alive and she represents something that is so hard for some actors to do, which is she can bring love and optimism and the spirit of kindness to a role without the character becoming like a greeting card,” the director says on Zoom. “There is such an authenticity to her.”
Fanning and Mangold mentioned how Sylvie was a surrogate for the viewers. She’s the one who witnesses most intimately how Bob evolves from a child mythologizing his personal life right into a celebrity mythologized by followers and the press.
Fanning additionally acknowledged how essential this relationship was to the actual Dylan. Sylvie is the one character in “A Complete Unknown” whose title has been modified (she was not a public determine), however that solely made Fanning really feel like she had extra of a accountability to play her with care. The true-life Dylan even wrote one thing for Chalamet to say to her throughout a scene when Sylvie and Bob are having it out. Fanning just isn’t imagined to reveal what that line of dialogue was, however it ended up in a Rolling Stone article anyway: “Don’t even bother coming back.”
“I was always aware that Bob Dylan himself wanted her name changed and that was the one character that he was very precious about,” she says. “Knowing that, I just felt kind of this subconscious weight to want to do justice to what they had.”
Whereas Fanning did her homework, scouring Rotolo’s 2008 autobiography, “A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties,” she additionally relied on her personal creativeness to organize for scenes. She inform me she daydreams precisely how she desires scenes to go, after which adapts to what’s occurring on the day.
“My imagination is what guides me and it always has,” she says. “It does in my life and it does in my work. I live in fantasy worlds a lot of the times. Your imagination has to be limitless.”
Earlier than a scene, she has an virtually athlete-like mentality, one thing she picked up from her sports-focused household. (Fanning’s father was a minor-league baseball participant, and her mom performed skilled tennis.) She will get in a zone the place adrenaline guides her. “I live off that,” she says. “I love it and it’s scary, actually.”
On the similar time, Fanning doesn’t act in a bubble. She is fascinated by the technical aspect of filmmaking and makes use of her information of how a shot consists to assist her carry out.
“That helps me,” she says. “It comforts me to know.”
It’s a software she first turned conscious of when she was 12 and dealing on J.J. Abrams’ “Super 8.” Performing in a shot, she turned acutely aware of the truth that because the digital camera pushed in she ought to steadily present extra emotion.
As a baby actor, she acquired uninterested in enjoying roles that have been principally about watching from the sidelines. It’s a part of what has made her so expert at conveying a lot with out many traces. “I remember thinking when I was young, ‘Gosh, I can’t wait to be, like, the adult one day and get to do the thing in a movie,’” she remembers.
Mangold believes that it’s due to her expertise as a baby actor that Fanning has a “preternatural” understanding of the right way to use the digital camera as a software.
“When you get a good actor, a really good actor, like Elle, faith is really easy,” he says. “You almost want to create the space for her to fill.”
A type of moments in “A Complete Unknown” comes when Sylvie is on the Newport Folks Pageant listening to Bob sing “The Times They Are A-Changin’” alongside Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), one other lady with whom he’s romantically concerned — and Sylvie is aware of that. The digital camera holds on Fanning’s face as Sylvie has a very completely different response from the remainder of the gang. Everybody else goes wild; Sylvie is beginning to comprehend how she’s dropping him.
Fanning loves lengthy takes — just like the one during which she sits on a blanket smoking a cigarette, simply listening to the music as Sylvie, biking by completely different feelings.
“That’s where I feel safe,” she says. “It’s such a cathartic experience for me.”
The way in which she describes it sounds virtually like remedy, excavating herself onscreen.
“I feel things really deeply, and being on set and being able to release those feelings in whatever way it is through a character is everything to me,” she says. “It’s just where I feel the happiest. It’s a really glorious feeling. When I haven’t been on a set for a while, it’s like gosh, my creative energy and my mind and my ideas are just racing.”
Crowe has watched her develop up onscreen. He maintains there’s one thing “musical” about her performing.
“It’s always musical to me, whether it’s straight-up music to me or not,” the “Almost Famous” director says. “She’s got that kind of rhythm that just suits the poetry and the music.” (After watching “A Complete Unknown,” Crowe texts me: “She’s the unforgettable lingering melody that powers the whole movie and allows Chalamet to soar without a net as Dylan.”)
So what would a teenage, Dylan-obsessed Fanning, crying within the automotive to “Tangled Up in Blue” and dreaming about her future, take into consideration her grownup self now?
“I’m very proud of her,” she says. “I guess it makes you feel like you are right where you are supposed to be.”