Ode to Kirsten Dunst

From "Vanity Fair" -May 2002 issue. Thanks for this article, Penny Lane, it's one of the best interviews that I've read about this blonde "vampiress": I'am transcripting it in a elipsis way because typing all the 5-pages article would be too long.
"We stand surrounded by serpentine sofas and old industrial clocks at a Los Angeles furniture store called Balckman Cruz on La Cienaga Boulevard. At the very least, passing as an ordinary 19-year-old Valley Girl will get harder when Spider-Man opens this month, with Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker and Dunst as Mary Jane Watson, the webslinger's beloved girl next door.
The dark horse of superheroes -younger and more vulnerable than Superman or Batman, and more likable- is getting a big, splashy studio production from Columbia Pictures, which is sure to pump up the profiles of both young actors, but specially Dunst's. Maguire is already the Dustin Hoffman of his generation, his sloe-eyed charm beautifully established in 1999's "The Cider House Rules" and Wonder Boys", not to mention "The Ice Storm".
For those who prefer films to flicks, Dunst has just opened a nifty little period piece called "The Cat's Meow", in which she plays actress Marion Davies to Edward Herrmann's William Randolph Hearst, aboard Hearst's yatcht in 1924. Her portrayal of Davis is startlingly complex and beguiling: all flirting and fun in flapper's beads and bangles, yet privately committed, in a poignant way, to the jealous newspaper magnate, choosing steps to make that most treacherous of passages, the one from teen actress to adult star, doing it with all the grace and aplomb of one of her idols, Jodie Foster. Dunst is part giggly girl, part ingenue. She's stayed at home longer than a lot of teen actors, garbed in Marc Jacobs, with her hair done and makeup on, she seems a decade older. She's bought a white Philippe Starck sofa, and at the store on La Cienaga she pauses before an immense hanging cross. The girl in Dunst can seem somewhat unformed, even about the movies. In her teen comedies she acts with the screwball charm of a Judy Holliday, yet she's never seen a Judy Holliday film. A bit guiltily, she's starting to watch classics. Like Foster, she's acted since the age of three, first in TV commercials, then in no fewer than 25 feature films, bit parts leading to larger ones, propelled by her breakthrough at age 11 in "Interview with te Vampire". She knows the business and has an impressive depth of emotion to draw on -the upwelling of pure, unadulterated, natural talent.
"Man, she can roll with anything, She's a pro.", says Peter Bogdanovich, who directed her in "The Cat's Meow". Bogdanovich admits that Dunst was the studio's choice for Davies, not his own. He spoke to her on the phone from N.Y., and saw a video of "Bring It On", but flew to Europe for the start of filming withouth having actually met her.

At least, he thought, she has a period face. When Dunst arrived on set -perky but shy-, with a boyfriend in tow to keep her company amid the adults- Bogdanovich regarded her with hope and trepidation. She could make or break a film the director had envisioned ever since he heard its tory from Orson Welles in the early 1970's. Welles told him about a long-simmering Hollywood legend that Hearst had shot and killed silent-film maker Thomas H. Ince during a party trip aboard the press lord's yacht after mistaking Ince for fellow guest Charlie Chaplin, who Hearst believed was having an affair with his beloved young mistress Davies. Ince did die after a trip on the yacht off the California coast; aside from Chaplin's chauffeur, who reported seeing Ince removed from te yacht on a stretcher with his head bandaged, no one on board ever discussed the incident -including ambitious columnist named Louella Parsons, who signed an unheard-of lifetime contract with Hearst newspapers soon after the trip. When filming began, Dunst was disconcerted by Bogdanovich's penchant for long one-shot scenes. "The actors who are any good come to love it, and want to do it with every scene" -Bogdanovich says- "Kirsten was like that".

"She understood that Davies adored the guy, and so she threw herself into it with great enthusiasm, -muses Edward Herrmann, who plays the helplessly obsessed Hearst- assimilating all the emotional dynamics of a more mature character. I think she's an extraordinary girl. And I think she shows in this movie why she'll shortly become one of the best known actresses we have on-screen". "Orson Welles once said the camera photographs thoought, not emotion" -Bogdanovich recalls, and if you're thinking, the camera knows it. And, boy, was she thinking. It was like a gift"[...]The role of Mary Jane Watson went unfilled. "We had seen a lot of great actresses" -Sam Raimi explains- "They were believable and thrilling. But we were looking for the chemistry you see in all romntic pictures when they're working -the chemistry that makes an audience want to see these two people together". None of those actresses clicked with Tobey Maguire the way Raimi thoought they should, when producer Laura Ziskin brought up Dunst again. When the trio -Raimi, Maguire and Dunst- checked in at their hotel in Berlin -where Dunst was shooting "The Cat's Meow"-, there was a note for Maguire from Dunst, who had heard he was sick and wrote how much it meant to her that he'd traveled so far to see her. Maguire thought that was a pretty classy move, especially for a teenager. He'd seen "Bring It On", and every day he was reminded of Dunst when he drove from his home past a huge image of her in a Gap ad on Sunset Boulevard. He'd figured Raimi must have called her earlier so he hadn't even mentioned her. Dunst knocked on Raimi's hotel door at the end of a day that had started at five a.m. She found Maguire, still sick. Dunst could only imagine how poor the chemistry would be between them, but she did her best. She was so nervous that when the reading was over she left her CD case behind. "The moment she got in the room with Tobey" -Raimi recalls- "you saw it happen. They both just came to life".


Raimi, a quirky director who started with cult horror films such as "The Evil Dead" (1982) and "Army of Darkness" (1993), had grown up loving Spider Man and felt disinclined to mess with the icon that four decades of Marvel comics artists had portrayed. Not for him the dark personal phantasmagoria of Tim Burton's 1989 "Batman". Raimi "tweaked" the backdrop with digital tricks. "There's no building in our film that doesn't exist in Manhattan", "There just wouldn't be as many unique and fantastic buildings on one block". Throughout the film her only inkling that Parker may actually be Spider-Man is the result of a memorable meoment that everyone on the set would refer to as the Updside-Down Kiss. Maguire found Dunst's own emotional range amazing. "She's very, very talented" -he says- "She's very appealing and beautiful. She has a womanly quality, but also a very fun girl quality, an innocence. There's no vanity in her acting. She just commits and goes for it". Jeff Habberstad, the movie's stunt coordinator, confirms that Dunst did things that a lot of actors wouldn't do: "There's scenes where she's falling off the Queensborough Bridge; in Times Square she falls off a 15 story balcony. In some of these shots, as a result, you actually see her falling quite a ways. She was a trouper". Raimi ended up as much a fan as Bogdanovich: "She has a complexity when you get the camera in close, she's very intelligent, and there's alot going on behind the eyes... I couldn't even tell you what color they are. It's about what's coming from behind them".
At the Dunst family's Valley home, the door is likely to be opened by Kirsten's mother, Inez, a big, garrulous woman who redefines the stage-mom type: passionate rather than hard-edged, proud rather than pushy. On one side of her is Kirsten's twinkly-eyed and impish grandmother -Inez's mom. On the other is happily obedient Kirsten. Kirsten's grandmother is a midwestern Swede who grew up doing barnyard chores before moving east to the Jersy Shore. Along with that lineage, Kirsten has German blood from her father, whom her mother met when the two were in college at Carnegie Mellon University; despite marrying at 20, Inez worked for years in fashion design and as a flight attendant for Lufthansa. Neither Inez nor Klaus, a medical-services executive, had any connections to the entertainment world, but Inez resolved to try. "We went into a N.Y. modeling agency and that was that. You usually need an appointment, but when they saw her on my husband's shoulders, they pretended she had one". The agency was Ford, which directed Inez to take Kirsten to a first commercial audition for Kix cereal. She had the angelic face, the Pre-Raphaelite hair, and an uninhibited charm. Eventually, Kirsten appeared in more than 100 commercials. Kirsten's closest childhood friend, Lindsay Schlisserman, remembers Kirsten getting on the school bus some mornings with her hair up in pink sponge curlers in preparation for an afterschool audition. "She'd get teased a bit for that" -Lindsay says when the girls attended the private Ranney School.
Kirsten won her first movie role at seven, from director Woody Allen, in "New York Stories" (1989). "All I remember is that we were doing a scene at Tavern on the Green" says Kirsten, "and I remember Woody getting ice cream for his daughter Dylan, who also was in the movie. He got ice cream for Dylan, but not for me and this other kid. And I remember Mia Farrow getting angry at him for that". Tom Hanks was nicer, Kirsten was his daughter the following year in "Bonfire of the Vanities".[...] Dunst thinks she has a fat face on-screen and smiles too much; she also thinks her head is too big for her body. One thing she won't do is go to college. "My friends in college they don't know what they want t do; I do! And I love what I do; college would just keep me away from it". There are other reasons to go to college, obviously, but Dunst waves off the thought- "I'd like to take classes" -she concedes, but I'd like to do it on my own time. College is so not for me". Strong words, but Dunst is old enought to maker her own way, in every way. She's not even a teenager anymore. Leading ladies, look out". -Michael Shnayerson for Vanity Fair.