If you were planning an indie film and were looking for two actresses considered at the top of their game in that field, you’d be hard pressed to beat casting Dakota Fanning and Elizabeth Olsen. Director Naomi Foner had the same thought, and has finally locked them in alongside Anton Yelchin for Very Good Girls.

Though you wouldn’t think either woman likely to struggle getting dates, Girls will find Olsen and Fanning as two lifelong best friends planning to spend their summer after graduating high school finally losing their virginity. Like so many teens before them, they see it as a vital rite of passage into adulthood. But there’s a hitch: they both fall for the same boy (Yelchin), and soon things become very complicated…

Foner has been trying to get the film made for a while now, and with her cast in place can aim to start shooting this June in New York. “The film deals with female sexuality and friendship in a way we haven’t seen before,” she tells Deadline. “These girls will be stunning young women in a couple of years, but they’ve struggled through high school with only each other. Most of us have been there. This is the summer where they finally get to touch real life.”

Olsen is currently enjoying more Sundance acclaim in Josh Radnor’s Liberal Arts and has Martha Marcy May Marlene about to hit UK cinemas, and Fanning will crop up at the end of the year as psycho vamp Jane in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2.

source: empireonline.com

Dakota Fanning has been in the film industry since she was 6 years old, but the young actress will take on her first adult role in the upcoming period drama, “Effie.”
The film, which is slated for release in June 2012, follows the disastrous marriage between 19th-century art critic John Ruskin and his young bride Effie Gray. The tumultuous union ended after Effie fell madly in love with young artist John Everett Millais.

“It’s the ultimate bad marriage,” Oscar-winning actress Emma Thompson, who wrote the screenplay, told the Associated Press. “It happens to be a costume drama, but you could be doing a story with this kind of complexity and oddness in any period.”

Ruskin married Gray in 1848, when he was 29 and she was 19 and according to historians, on their wedding night, something about his bride horrified Ruskin and the union was not consummated. Ruskin claimed it was her personality, but Gray wrote that her husband “had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was.”

“We’re talking about a girl who is objectified, and then disappoints a man by being real,” director Richard Laxton said. “If that isn’t relevant, I don’t know what is.”

At the time, divorce was illegal and so Gray suffered through the marriage until she fell in love with Millais, who was part of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – a group of painters whose boldness shocked the Victorian art world. Read the rest of this entry »

Dakota Fanning has a career people twice her age dream of, and her friend and costar Kristen Stewart has taken notice. The girls have starred in both the Twilight series and the rock biopic The Runaways, and KStew, 21, chatted about Dakota in the February issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.

“We had a few scenes that were crazy intimidating, and maybe once or twice, [Dakota] was like ‘Okay, I have a butterfly in my stomach,’” Kristen said of shooting Runways with her costar. “Meanwhile, I’m hyperventilating! Sometimes I give her shit for being so on the ball.”

As for how Dakota has shot up to superstardom before the age of 20, the actress admitted to Cosmo,

“Since I was young, I’ve always known who I was. I never really had to go through finding who I am. I’ve always felt really secure.”

It must run in the family as the actress’ younger sister Elle Fanning is also making a name for herself in Hollywood.

source: celebuzz.com