At 30 years old, Dakota Fanning is way ahead of most actors her age considering her experience playing big screen roles dates back to being seven alongside the likes of Sean Penn and Michelle Pfieffer in her movie debut, I Am Sam. As the actress stars in her latest movie, Ishana Night Shayamalan’s The Watchers, it made me wonder how her first horror movie, Steven Spielberg’s War Of The Worlds, may have come into play.
During our CinemaBlend interview, I told Dakota Fanning that War Of The Worlds was one of the first scary movies I got to see. I was about her age when my parents let me watch the 2005 movie because it was made by Steven Spielberg and a little girl like me starred in it. Here’s what the actor recalled about being on the set 20 years ago:
I mean, I learned so much on that movie just working with the greatest of all time in Steven [Speilberg], and working with Tom [Cruise] and all of the people that they surround themselves with, who are just at the top of their games. And so it was a learning experience every day. But for suspense, I think [that I learned] to always take your time.
The 2005 movie was an ambitious adaptation of the classic H.G. Wells novel that had the production buying a retired Boeing 747, dismantling it and building houses around it for one key sequence. The wreckage from War Of The Worlds remains a fixture of Universal Studios’ Hollywood’s Studio Tour today. As Fanning continued in our interview:
I think you can’t rush that. And I think that this film also shares that of, you don’t necessarily get to see the creature right away or something, you know what I mean? When you say War of the Worlds, I’m reminded of like that scene in the basement when that kind of eye is coming down and the build of that and it’s sort of simply done, in a way, but it’s the pace of it, you know, that kind of creates that.
She’s certainly right when it comes to the attention to suspense between War of the Worlds and her new movie The Watchers. Clearly the early film still has stuck with her all these years, as she continues to talk highly of her director and co-star Tom Cruise. Recently, she also revealed that Cruise has continued to send her birthday presents every year since they made War of the Worlds together.
While it’s been a long time since she was on the set of the Spielberg movie, Fanning thought back to the iconic basement scene (which you can revisit on YouTube) where Fanning’s character and Cruise must hide from extraterrestrial war machines trying to exterminate them. All these years later, Fanning is still attracted to suspense, this time with The Watchers.
The upcoming release has the daughter of M. Night Shyamalan, Ishana Night Shyamalan, distinguishing herself from her father with a fantastical horror movie with roots in Irish folklore based on the A.M. Shine novel. In a prior interview, Shyamalan told me she’s particularly inspired by Hayao Miyazaki’s work when it comes to crafting ideas.
You can see Dakota Fanning in The Watchers, which hits theaters on June 7. You can check out what its first audiences are saying about Ishana Night Shyamalan’s debut and take a look at what other upcoming horror movies are on the way this summer.