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Arriving at the "Somewhere" Screening -> 12th December 2010

Tribeca Grand Hotel, New York, NY

Source: tlfan.to

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  • 2 weeks later...

Elle looks wonderful. I've first noticed her in Benjamin Button she was incredible, a vision, and in Somewhere she was so graceful (but actually the fact that her part

was just laughters annoyed me).

I've just realised that she was the little girl in Babel, excellent point she was fantastic there also. With "only" three or four noticeable movies while at her age her sister had so much more

makes me feel good for her, she didn't miss a thing and won't be put in boxes too early in her acting life .

Here are two close-ups from Jalouse Dec 2010/Jan 2011 for you :) Photos: Mason Poole There also were article + longer editorial + cover

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Leaving Ballet class -> 7th January 2011

Los Angeles, California

Source: justjared via elle-fanning.net

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"Somewhere" press conference -> 8th December 2010

The Four Seasons Hotel, Beverly Hills, California

Source: elle-fanning.net

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"Best Performances"

W February 2011

Photographer: Inez & Vinoodh

Stylist: Melanie Ward

Source: wmagazine.com

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“The first movie I really fell in love with was The Seven Year Itch. I love Marilyn Monroe. I went as her in the white dress for Halloween. I did the mole and the little cat eye.”
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"American Dream"

Jalouse December 2010/January 2011

Photographer: Mason Poole

Source: elle-fanning.net

Credit @ original scanner

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Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 2nd Annual Governors Awards -> 13th November 2010

Grand Ballroom at Hollywood & Highland Center, Hollywood, California

Source: elle-fanning.net

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NY Times 8th December 2010

Photographer: Alex Prager

Source: nytimes.com

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An actress arrives on set in an atypical mood. Almost always a whirlwind, she is calm today. Typically a chatterbox, she has gone strangely quiet. For the scene she is about to shoot, she needs to take herself to a dark, sad place, and she is trying to edge up to it. She puts out the word to the cast and crew that they should please, please not be insulted by her withdrawal.

She has played tough moments before. In one movie she found herself abandoned in the Southern California desert. In another she was mute, struggling to communicate through sign language, and in yet another she grappled with a brother’s death in a hit-and-run accident.

But her character this time is in even greater pain, tormented by an inability to control obsessive-compulsive behavior that threatens to tear her family apart. And when the cameras roll, the actress must, in a fit of crying, communicate a lifetime of wishing that things were different and worrying that they might never be. As she glumly readies herself, some of those around her marvel at the wisdom and maturity of her approach. That’s because — the missing detail — she is 9 years old.

She is all of 12 now. Her name is Elle Fanning. Chances are you’ve heard little about her: the movie in which that crying scene occurs, “Phoebe in Wonderland,” got limited exposure when it was released in early 2009, and many other roles were bit ones. But the surname might ring a bell. She has a 16-year-old sister, Dakota, who starred alongside Denzel Washington in “Man on Fire” and Tom Cruise in “War of the Worlds” and has been regarded for nearly a decade as the kind of child-acting prodigy who comes along very, very rarely. And yet here’s another one, from the same home, with similarly uncanny abilities, more than 15 movies behind her and a few prominent, career-accelerating roles straight ahead. No small number of Hollywood casting agents must be cursing her parents, Steve and Joy Fanning, for not being more fruitful. They stopped at these two gifted girls.

“They’re both going to be so incredibly interesting to watch,” says Jodie Foster, who knows a thing or two about child acting, having done it (in “Taxi Driver,” among many other movies), watched it up close (in “Panic Room,” in which she shared the screen with Kristen Stewart, then 10) and directed it (in “Little Man Tate,” showcasing a 7-year-old named Adam Hann-Byrd). Foster saw “Phoebe in Wonderland” and says: “I was blown away by that performance — blown away. She should have been nominated for an Oscar. I think Elle Fanning is just so amazing.”

Others do, too. She is a busy, busy girl. She has the lead role in a movie still in theaters, “The Nutcracker in 3-D,” though it presents an outdated portrait of her, as three years passed between its production and distribution. She has another new movie, “Somewhere,” the latest from the director Sofia Coppola, coming out Dec. 22. It is an elliptical chamber piece about a dissolute actor (played by Stephen Dorff) taking temporary care of a daughter (Fanning) he has shortchanged, and it shows a significantly taller, cusp-of-adolescence Fanning. Coppola says that Fanning was growing so fast during the shoot in the summer of 2009, when she was 11, that she went up two shoe sizes in six weeks. She lost her last baby teeth just before she traveled to Italy this past summer for the movie’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the top prize. In photographs from the event, you can see the gaps in her smile.

Coppola’s father, Francis Ford, cast Fanning in his coming movie, a ghost story titled “Twixt Now and Sunrise,” whose production in November overlapped that of “Super 8,” a science-fiction thriller, directed by J. J. Abrams. Although Abrams won’t divulge the plot of the movie, which is scheduled to open in June, he says that Fanning has a lead role. And he speaks of her in a way that goes well beyond the customarily rhapsodic praise directors lavish on stars they have an investment in.

“Every day that we’re working, she astounds me again,” Abrams says. “You give her a note and some direction and she makes this little grinning grunt with a nod — humph — and what that half-syllable noise means is: ‘I understand what you mean, and I know exactly how to do it, and you don’t need to discuss it anymore, and I don’t need to ask you another question, and let’s just do it again.’ And suddenly you’re doing another take and you’re not only thunderstruck that she heard you but that she understood the idea behind the note.” He adds that he has observed a few people who have this kind of thing. “They’ve all been decades and decades older,” he says.

Daniel Barnz, the screenwriter and director of “Phoebe,” who told me the story about her preparation for that big scene, says: “Elle could deliver anything at any moment. She was that versatile.”

By the time I met Fanning in mid-November, I had heard so many testimonials of this kind that I half expected her to appear before me in a puff of smoke, or maybe on a clamshell, trumpets bleating, angels weeping. But with her mother, Joy, at her side, she walked slowly and unceremoniously up the driveway of a San Fernando Valley house, not far from theirs, where she studies ballet, for the same reason many other girls do: it’s pretty and romantic. Joy said a polite hello and goodbye and left right away. I followed Elle, who seemed only a little less shy than you’d expect a youngster with an inquisitive stranger in tow to be, inside.

Only after she began her private lesson, obeying her instructor’s every command (“up,” “down,” “squeeze,” “forward”), did she strike me as exceptional. It was the way she alternated, like clockwork, between three minutes of intense focus — eyes trained unblinkingly on a nearby mirror, expression frozen hard — and no more than 10 seconds of relaxation, during which she would go soft and loose from head to toe, steel becoming jelly, and let out a high-pitched squeal of a laugh. Steel, jelly, steel, jelly: she displayed an eerie ability to turn her concentration all the way on and all the way off, a formidable asset for a movie actor, who spends more time waiting than doing and has to tap fresh energy take after take. And it carried over to a long lunch we had at a nearby restaurant afterward. Her attention would be complete whenever she was fielding a question and then drift instantly when she wasn’t. In a related fashion, she toggled from serious to silly and back again.

She said she loved acting “so much” and hoped to do it forever, but as to why, she was no more (or less) insightful and eloquent than any other intelligent 12-year-old. “You’re going to this different world, and you’re a person that you’d never really be in real life, doing things that you’d never really do in real life,” she said. “You just sort of do whatever.” In other words, it’s a refined game of dress up, and she adores dress up. This was clear in her detailed digression about the Halloween costumes she has worn through the years.

She was a Madame Alexander doll most recently, bedecked in vintage clothes, and before that Mary Poppins, carrying an umbrella to which she glued a fake bird. She was Snow White, though she told me she would prefer not to remember that. “That was the year I was really sick,” she said. “I threw up. I couldn’t go trick-or-treating.”

She outlined eclectic tastes at once predictable and unpredictable for a girl her age. The person she most fantasizes about meeting is Beyoncé, her go-to movie is “The Devil Wears Prada” and she’s a “Project Runway” fanatic. But one of her and Dakota’s favorite joint pastimes, she said, is lying in bed together at night to watch the TV serial-killer procedural “Criminal Minds.” She appeared on it twice, in 2006 and 2007.

Dakota was the one who tugged the Fanning family toward show business. Her parents hadn’t been involved in acting or theater as children; they were jocks. Steve played minor-league baseball, Joy college tennis, and Elle said that Dakota and she were “supposed to be like Venus and Serena,” referring to the Williams sisters. But Dakota, she said, constantly play-acted around the house. “My mom sort of put her into this little acting thing” — referring to a community playhouse — “and they said, ‘Oh, you should go to L.A. or New York and find an agent.’ ”

The family was living in Conyers, Ga. For the next few years they divided their time between there and Southern California, then moved to Los Angeles as Dakota graduated from commercials and guest spots on TV shows to movies. She was just 6 when she shot her breakthrough role in “I Am Sam,” as a little girl removed from the care of a mentally challenged father (Sean Penn) not as smart as she is.

That movie’s writer and director, Jessie Nelson, needed a day or two of work from a toddler to represent a younger version of Dakota’s character. At Nelson’s request, the Fannings let her use Elle, then 2. Nelson remembers noticing how comfortable Elle, like Dakota, was on a movie set. “Some kids hide behind their moms — you have to coax them to relax,” she says. “With both of these kids, there was a feeling that they were at home.”

Following Dakota’s lead, Elle appeared on TV and then in movies; at age 4 she shot “The Door in the Floor,” a domestic drama about grief and infidelity, in which she plays a little girl often ignored by a troubled mother (Kim Basinger) having an affair with a teenage boy. Because it was rated R and she was, as she said to me during a phone conversation, “way too little to see it,” the producers gave her a highlights disc with just her scenes.

She says she does only those movies that she and her parents agree on. The decision is usually cemented by the family’s meeting the director and feeling confident that the set will be a supportive environment; a few of the adults she has worked with have made a point of getting to know her off set, so that she feels at ease with them. Before the “Phoebe” shoot began, Barnz went with her to Color Me Mine, one of those places where kids get to make their own pottery. Before “Somewhere,” Dorff ended up doing the same thing. She fashioned a soap dish; he, an ashtray.

Through her publicist, her parents declined to be interviewed for this article. So did Dakota. The family has felt the sting of caustic attention (when Dakota, at 12, played a rape victim in the movie “Hounddog”) and snark (a “Saturday Night Live” parody of Dakota as a preposterously mature wunderkind condescending to her peers), and tend to open a window into their lives only to the extent necessary for the promotion of the girls’ work.

Steve and Joy Fanning are trying to preserve a few glimmers of normalcy, according to moviemakers who know the family. He works full time as an electronics salesman, and the Fannings don’t live extravagantly, opting for the valley over Beverly Hills. Elle said that she and Dakota share a bathroom and are responsible for cleaning their own bedrooms and making their own beds.

Although the girls were initially home-schooled so they had flexibility for acting work, they were enrolled about three years ago in a private academy lenient about absences and classwork done on set. Nelson, who has remained friendly with the Fannings, says the change came because Dakota craved a traditional high-school experience, with cheerleading, homecomings, proms and all that. She is now a senior there, while Elle is in seventh grade.

Neither is allowed to hit the Hollywood party circuit or revel in movie-star perks. Dorff and Coppola both recall Elle’s mother spiriting her away early from a nighttime celebration in Venice so that she could get to bed at a reasonable hour.

And yet the Fannings have permitted their daughters to work at a noticeably brisk pace, in projects lesser and greater. There are head-scratchers in each girl’s body of work: “Nutcracker,” for example, received mostly scathing reviews, an insult added to the injury of what Elle’s co-star, John Turturro, told me was a grueling and sometimes sweltering summer shoot in Budapest.

And Elle, like her sister, has been allowed to broach some decidedly grown-up material. Before she turned 10, she made three R-rated movies in addition to “The Door in the Floor” and appeared not only in “Criminal Minds” but also in the television sex-crimes drama “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” Elle says that when it comes to such disturbing material, she can “separate the movies from my real life. They don’t really harm my life.”

She adds: “It’s make-believe.”

Directors who have worked with the Fanning girls say that their parents don’t visibly egg them on or drive their careers. “It seems like the kids wanted to do it, and the family built a life around that,” Sofia Coppola says, before adding that the Fannings have enlisted Joy’s mother, Mary Jane Arrington, so that when both girls are shooting a movie, each can have a legally required guardian on set without Steve Fanning having to abandon his job. For example, Arrington accompanied Elle for “Somewhere,” because Joy was with Dakota for “The Runaways,” released early this year. Arrington lives with the family as well.

The director John Polson, who cast Dakota opposite Robert De Niro in the 2005 psychological thriller “Hide and Seek,” says that family members never showed any interest in looking over his shoulder, into his video monitor, even when he implored them to check out something extraordinary that Dakota had just done. “Wild horses couldn’t get them there,” he says. “They said, ‘This is her thing.’ ”

Barnz adds: “They’re delightfully Southern — they have that absolute inability to take a compliment. You’ll say to Joy or Mary Jane, ‘Elle is just amazing.’ They’ll say, ‘Well, that’s because she has an amazing director!’ ”

They come down hard on the girls for such instances of bad manners as interrupting an adult, he says, and are sticklers for proper etiquette through and through. Coppola recalls that after “Somewhere” wrapped, she got a handwritten thank-you note from Elle, along with a framed drawing Elle did of a ballerina.

Elle said that her parents have also instilled in her a belief that “you really have to love what you’re doing, and you have to do it well.” And whether she’s drawing, dancing or acting, she said: “I want to feel like I’m doing it good. And if I don’t do it perfect or right, everyone’s like: ‘It’s O.K. It’s fine.’ But for myself, I have to get it perfect. I guess I’m a perfectionist.”

She gets that in particular from her father, she said. “Whenever we’re writing out a birthday card, it takes him so long. He wants to get it so right that he writes it on another piece of paper first and then transfers it onto the card. It’s like, ‘Dad, just hurry up!’ If we’re going to a party, we all sign it, and then my Dad’s still sitting at the table. And then if you see it, it’s like: ‘Dear Whatever. Happy Birthday. Love, Steve.’ ” She let out one of her squeal-laughs, a sort of merry, helium-boosted yelp.

She learned bits of sign language for the role as the mute girl in the 2007 movie “The Nines.” To prepare for “Phoebe,” in which her character suffers not only from obsessive-compulsive disorder but also from Tourette’s syndrome, she went to a round-table discussion, arranged by Barnz, of children with those afflictions.

“Somewhere” required her most intensive preparation so far. There’s a long, wordless scene in which her ne’er-do-well father appreciates how quickly his daughter is growing and changing, and the catalyst for that realization is her fluid execution of a figure-skating routine. Coppola figured she’d need a body double, but Fanning didn’t want that. For six weeks before shooting began, she woke at 5 a.m. to train for a few hours before school began, then returned to the rink after school for more practice.

Fanning does have a lighter, frillier side. When she talked about movies, she wasn’t nearly as animated as when she talked about vintage-clothes shopping or the sewing machine that her parents got her for her birthday last April or two of her most treasured possessions: jars of Marilyn Monroe’s face cream and powder that she bought at an auction of the actress’s effects.

She has this thing about Monroe. It started when she was about 7. “It was like, I was so little, and I guess I just saw a picture of her and wanted to find out more about her, because she was so pretty,” she said.

John August, who wrote and directed “The Nines,” says she sometimes made a curious quip.

“Everyone says Dakota’s Meryl,” Elle would say, “and I’m Marilyn.”

Great child acting taps a mix of innocence and precociousness, and the balance is delicate. Although naturalness on screen is vital, it isn’t really enough. Foster says, “Everyone has this idea that a child actor is a contrived thing, and every first-time director says, ‘I want to go out and get some child in the jungle who has been raised in a cave and untouched by reality.’ ” But for many roles, like the one Fanning played in “Phoebe,” according to Foster, the child has to have “a real interest in creating a character from scratch.”

Too much calculation and self-conscious sophistication, though, are deadly. Elle, like Dakota, has managed to avoid that. Dorff describes her as “a girlie girl” and recalls how she kept pestering him to tell her what he had bought her as a “wrap present” at the end of the “Somewhere” shoot. It was a gold bracelet festooned with pearls. “She opened it,” he told me, “and she started crying. She said, ‘Are these real?’ I said: ‘Yeah! You’re my leading lady. I couldn’t have done it without you.’ ”

She told me that she has never taken an acting class, and that she and Dakota don’t talk shop. Her approach to acting, as she explained it, is straightforward, intuitive. She thinks hard about the script and imagines what it would be like — and how she would behave — if she were that character. And she reminds herself that the scene should be like life, not an exaggerated version of it.

Her work in “Somewhere,” in fact, is distinguished by its restraint. She honors her character’s largely symbolic function as a wholesome, guileless foil to the show-biz cupidity and stupidity surrounding her father; her goofy smile and creamy complexion are as much a part of the performance as anything else.

Will whatever combination of instinct, talent and pure luck that has taken her this far translate into a successful adult career? Hollywood is full of child actors who seemed to make that leap relatively easily (Foster, Anna Paquin) and actors who struggled (Macaulay Culkin, Tatum O’Neal). O’Neal won a best supporting actress Oscar for “Paper Moon” when she was 10, in 1974, but her movie career since has been erratic. She says the business can grind the spirit out of a young performer, who also has to be careful not to let work crowd out actual living. “Not that you have to have gone through everything that you act, but you need to have some experience to draw from — as a human,” says O’Neal, who, as it happens, plays Dakota’s mother in “The Runaways.”

In January, Elle will begin shooting yet another movie, the latest from the director Cameron Crowe. Although she has played on her school’s volleyball team and there’s a drama club open to seventh graders like her, she isn’t currently involved with either. “It wouldn’t be fair,” she said, given how much school she has been missing.

But she said that just as Dakota is bound for college next year, she, too, won’t cut short her education. Her fantasy is to study in Paris, where she has never been. She loves croissants, and she said: “I’ve always thought of ballet corresponding to Paris. My teacher’s mom is French.”

During the ballet lesson I watched, she told her teacher that she had a dream in which she did 14 pirouettes in a row. The teacher said: “We’ll start with a single, and then we’ll see where it goes. Please don’t be overzealous.”

Fanning wasn’t. She stopped at one. But she didn’t look all that happy about it.

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Shopping at Opening Ceremony -> 1st August 2010

Opening Ceremony, West Hollywood, California

Source: tlfan.to

post-33914-0-1446069668-2389_thumb.jpg post-33914-0-1446069668-26794_thumb.jpg post-33914-0-1446069668-31858_thumb.jpg th_7d1eb7118590825.jpg/monthly_02_2011/post-33914-0-1446069668-36364_thumb.jpg" data-fileid="3395373" alt="post-33914-0-1446069668-36364_thumb.jpg" data-ratio="152.29">

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Elle Fanning: 'The Curve of Forgotten Things' Rodarte Video!

Elle Fanning digs for buried treasure in The Curve of Forgotten Things, Rodarte’s newest short.

The video, directed by Todd Cole, features the 12-year-old Somewhere star showing off Rodarte design duo Kate and Laura Mulleavy’s Spring 2011 collection.

Elle walks around the empty rooms of the historic Baldwin House in California, with her outfits changing as she moves from one room to the next.

Check out the video, which premiered on French luxury giant LVMH’s Nowness.com!

post-16808-1297292437_thumb.jpg

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