A girl with “some very bad characteristics”, Dunst says primly. It’s usually more teen movies, where it’s all geared commercially. My father saw my picture and thought I was 24,” she says proudly.”The majority of my roles recently have been edging towards adulthood, but this one goes all the way Things like this don’t usually come along for girls my age. “I carry myself older here, I’ve been doing breathing exercises to get more air into my belly and a deeper voice. Side-saddle and severely habited she looks unrecognisable and totally adult. Dunst – cramming down cream cheese-laden bagels and with a curious tick in her left eye that seems to signal complicity – is enormously likeable After each bold statement she giggles, apologetically She does know she’s riding for a fall… as we speak, literally.She’s talking on the set of All Forgotten, an American-made amalgam of Turgenev’s novel First Love and Chekhov’s The Peasant Woman.
Dunst apart, the cast is largely British (James Fox, Julie Walters), and the shooting takes place near Prague where Dunst, uninstructed but game, is playing her first horseback role. As soon as I came out of my mom’s stomach I knew what I wanted to do Perhaps I’m an old soul – that’s what psychics say to me Anyway, I have this whole plan in my head Yes, I do.”It could easily sound brattish, but doesn’t. I’ve never put that sort of negative energy into my frame of thinking. And I want to get married and have kids some day, too.” She knows the rest of the world doesn’t always feel so confident, but only in that academic sort of way unwounded kids do.”I’ve never had that sort of insecurity, because I’ve got a whole team behind me who’ve never looked at the down side.
“She does pretty much all the things I want to do.” Acting, writing, directing, running her own production company “Except that I also want my own fashion and make-up line. Drew Barrymore is not a helpful image here – but one is reminded of Jodie Foster, forcibly.”Jodie Foster is one of my role models!” says Dunst brightly. But any one of the remaining three could be considered a potential star-maker, while Dunst’s protective family background leaves no room for the problems that have tripped other young stars in flight. “Dunst is growing up and her film career is going to pop,” said the LA Times, who should know.
Dunst has four films due out in the US OK, one of them is a sequel to The Crow. But Dunst is 17 now, and at the age when the child-actress turns into an actress pure and simple – or fails to It is already quite clear which way she is going to go. Nothing in the next five years – Little Women, Jamanji, Small Soldiers – lived up to that award-nominated turn.
Dunst was three when she started in the business, 11 when she got her break with Interview, a progression she seems to find rather slow. Says one cretinous valley girl to another: “I know you can be overwhelmed, and underwhelmed, but can you be whelmed?” to which her friend earnestly replies: “I think you can in Europe.” Everything sophisticated and complicated comes from Europe Who says so? Dummies, that’s who.. Kirsten Dunst has a list of co-stars that would be envied by an actress three times her age. Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in Interview With the Vampire, Dustin Hoffman and Robert de Niro in Wag the Dog, George Clooney in ER (she played the throat-slashing child-woman, an Albanian refugee, and a recurring teenage runaway respectively). And in case you’re wondering, Lutz and Smith deal with anti-American snobbery head on.
Capturing the dizzy rush of adolescence but also middle age, 10 Things sends you out into the real world on a high, your faith in mainstream American fare restored. As flyers for a free beer party swirl through the air to the sounds of Air, or kids pile into the playground as Joan Jett yells “Bad Reputation”, this film makes even school look good. Kat’s flashing of her breasts and Patrick’s sudden fondness for positivity (“Do you love her?” he asks Bianca’s young fan Cameron, “well then, go for it!”) also prove irksome But on the whole, director Gil Junger knows what he’s doing. Kat’s favourite riot grrrl band are horribly plastic (and would an intelligent girl like Kat have the All Saints on her bedroom wall?). Where other actors might have pushed the “sweetness” further (thus inducing a sense of nausea in us), Ledger just let’s the erotic friendliness dangle.Of course, false notes are struck.
