ELLE FANNING

Super Starlet

She may only be 13 years old but already Elle Fanning has worked with the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Sean Penn, Sofia Coppola, Brad Pitt, and most recently, J.J. Abrams and Steven Spielberg for sci-fi flick Super 8. Though she hobnobs with stars and spends more time on the red carpet than at school, Fanning is still just a 13 year old kid who lives with her parents and plans to go to college when she comes of age.

“I go to a regular school and everything,” Fanning replies chirpily when asked what her day to day life is like. “When I’m not doing a movie I’m in class.”

Though she and her sister have been in the spotlight from a very young age, Fanning still gets starstruck and was blown away when she received the call from J.J. Abrams telling her she’d been cast as Alice.

“It was crazy because, you know, it was a huge surprise really; I didn’t know that J.J. was personally going to call me and I picked up the phone and he was like ‘this is J.J. Abrams’ and I couldn’t believe it, I got so nervous, I didn’t know what he was going to say and then he said he would love for me to be in his movie! And I was trying to act very cool on the phone but I hung up and was definitely screaming and dancing around.

“I had seen Star Trek and Lost, actually at my school you can make up different clubs and there’s a Lost club. And you go, and you sort of uncover the secrets of Lost. I would have been in the club, but I was filming Super 8 at the time so all my friends were telling me about it, and I told J.J. about it. Oh my god, he thought it was so funny, he wanted to go to my school and show up at the Lost club one day, he could definitely get an A in that class… they would go crazy.”

The only female lead in Super 8, Fanning holds her own alongside a group of fantastic young actors, and she certainly enjoyed the experience of being one of the only girls on set.

“It was really fun, I loved it, especially since I was the only girl. They were so funny and it’s fun to go on set and have it just be really really fun, and have kids your own age around you. I’ve been doing [acting] ever since I was two so I’ve been doing it my whole life, and it’s always been fun to me, it’s never been work. And I love getting to be all different characters and all these different people and doing things you wouldn’t usually do in your normal life, you know, getting to do scenes that wouldn’t normally happen and that’s what’s so neat about it.”

In addition to perfecting her lines and performance, J.J. asked Fanning and his team of young stars to create a movie within a movie, writing, filming and directing the super 8 short which rolls after the credits.

“We made the movie within the movie that’s shown at the end of the credits. All of the kids wrote it and there was one guideline - it had to be a zombie movie. But we wrote all the lines, and we wrote all the stage direction and everything and if there were any breaks J.J. would tell us ‘okay, go write that scene’, and we would go and take out our pencil and paper and write it all down, and we’d shoot it with a real super 8 camera. I would love to [write and direct], I love writing, so I would love to write something. That’s sort of my dream. And then I would love to direct something, it would be cool to go behind the scenes for once.”

_EMMA BERGMEIER