Showing posts with label D.Interviews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label D.Interviews. Show all posts
Feb 4, 2016
Jan 30, 2016
VIDEOS: 'How To Be Single' Interview/On Set/SWith the Cast
How To Be Single On Set Interview - Dakota Johnson
'How to Be Single' Star Leslie Mann Gives Dating Advice for Her Daughter: Show Your Boobs!
Dakota Johnson and Leslie Mann Hit On Reporter
How To Be Single Behind The Scenes B-Roll - Dakota Johnson, Rebel Wilson, Alison Brie
PHOTOS & Interview : New photoshoot of Dakota for 'The Edit Magazine' (Jan 2016)
Interview
If you watched her breakout movie Fifty Shades of Grey last year, you may think you know every inch of Dakota Johnson’s body. But in the candlelit Sociale bistro in Brooklyn, New York, she is peeling back her The Row sweater to make a new revelation: tattooed in white, near invisible on her alabaster skin, is a quote, “Lightly, my darling,” from Aldous Huxley’s Island. Her sister, Stella Banderas, has the same.“Some of the others I’m not so proud of,” admits Johnson, pulling her sweater back into place. “I went through a phase where I loved tattoos, and I loved the feeling of getting tattooed. But now I’ve outgrown them mostly, and [because] I always have to cover them for jobs, God, they’re annoying!” she laughs, showing off an endearing little gap between her two front teeth that the big screen doesn’t seem to pick up.
“Basically, I really should have listened to everyone. But therein lies my problem in life!” Any preconception of Johnson, 26, being a gentle, lip-biting wallflower in real life, should be hastily revised. For as sensitive as she is (“I feel so much all the time that it’s exhausting. I cried four times during the Golden Globes, and once was during the commercials...”), she is also smart, funny and refreshingly real. “I’m a quiet observer,” she supposes. “[Growing up] I was demure some of the time, but also outspoken... I was ‘colorful’,” she sniggers, knowingly, in air quotes, at her private euphemism. “I didn’t abide by rules very well. I was like a wild, feral little child.” At ELLE’s 2015 Women In Hollywood awards, Leslie Mann, who stars with Johnson in new comedy How To Be Single, quipped, “In real life, I feel like [Dakota] would eat Christian Grey. She would suspend him from the ceiling and smack him open like a piñata.” When I relay this to Johnson, she alternates between giggling and musing how she should explain what Mann means, before resorting to a diplomatic, “I’m just not sure!”
Christian Grey is – should it somehow have escaped you – the ‘love interest’ of Johnson’s protagonist character, Anastasia Steele, played by Jamie Dornan in the movie adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey. At the height of its popularity, the BDSM romance book was selling two copies a second before Sam Taylor-Johnson brought it to the big screen last year, directing the first part of the blockbuster franchise. The director’s decision to cast the relatively unknown Dakota Johnson as her leading lady led to overnight global attention for the young actress, which was perhaps not altogether welcome. “It almost feels like a free-for-all nowadays. There’s no more mystery, no more elegance,”she laments. “The Golden Globes, for example, used to be so special. It was a time when you got to see your favorite people, who were making your favorite movies, all interacting with each other; having some witty banter, being enticing and charming. You didn’t see actors unless they were on the red carpet; they weren’t publicly photographed all the time. Now anyone can take my picture, and I can take anyone’s picture, at any moment. I feel like something has been lost.”
Alarmingly, Johnson looks as though she is on the verge of crying. “It’s like a little bit of magic is slipping away and I don’t know why.”It’s a modern trade-off for her job, after all, I mutter, hoping this won’t make tears cascade. “I know it is,” she says, both frankly and forlornly. “And, today, I don’t feel OK with that.”
If you hadn’t already seen evidence of just what a fine actress Johnson is, you might not think it probable from meeting her. For while she attempts thoughtful answers to questions that she considers tiresome, her face invariably says it all. One such subject is ‘celebrity’. She really doesn’t like it. She left LA to get away from it. In fact, she gives me the wholehearted impression that she finds it immeasurably... tacky. “I understood that my family was famous [her mother is Melanie Griffith],” she says. “I saw the way it felt from the inside, and that put me off ever feeling like I was capable of gawking at someone because they were famous.” But then most of us didn’t grow up in a Hollywood household. So it is engrossing, to us nobodies, to think of a little Dakota waddling around in her mother’s spangled Oscar sandals, with the glam team unpacking their coiffing kits around the family in the kitchen. “I’d try on all her dresses beforehand,” Johnson admits. “I would watch her get ready for every Oscars and Golden Globes.”
Griffith was married to Miami Vice star Don Johnson, Dakota’s father, and later remarried to actor Antonio Banderas. This ‘fame’ trickles down through three generations; Johnson’s maternal grandmother is Hitchcock muse Tippi Hedren. Johnson had the rare opportunity to absorb their craft, following her parents’ shooting schedule from film set to film set. “I was around for a lot of it and I would watch them. But there were also things I could see that I didn’t want to, like watch my parents have sex with other people. And there was a scene where my mom got slapped in the face. I lost my mind! I couldn’t deal with that at all.” Johnson laughs, although it sounds distressing. Despite this, she caught ‘the bug’ all on her own, and would watch films obsessively; rewinding Mary Poppins or Home Alone to see them for the third time that day. The VHS would be worn out by the end of the year. “I [wanted to know], ‘What are they doing to make me feel these things?’So I’d keep watching. It [has to] be a really good movie if I’m not thinking about how they did it.”
Perhaps what Johnson finds tedious about being asked who she holidays with (her mom’s best friend Goldie Hawn and her daughter Kate Hudson, in Aspen, every Thanksgiving) and who she’s friends with (Jaime King and Riley Keough, for starters), is that she hasn’t relied on these connections in the industry. Prior to Fifty Shades..., Johnson had won small – although well-executed – parts in The Social Network and The Five-Year Engagement. Her tenacity in forging her own path has paid off; she’ll next star opposite Tilda Swinton and Ralph Fiennes in A Bigger Splash, and has been nominated for BAFTA’s prestigious Rising Star award.
Johnson is Next Generation Hollywood in her own right, no matter what the dynasty. Now, she has just a few more weeks to “get ready to crawl into a hole for six months, say goodbye to my friends and my life, and stop dating bread” before filming back-to-back the next two installments of the Fifty Shades... trilogy. I ask if the first film’s reviews will affect the next chapters but, as it turns out, Johnson doesn’t read them. “Then it’s not fun,” she reasons. “If people are into my work, great. But I just want to enjoy my job.” She shrugs. “Artists are complicated and sensitive people, you know? At least, I am a complicated and sensitive person.” She smiles, content with the assessment. Later, I Google Huxley and that secret tattoo: “So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling.” How To Be Single is out Feb 12 (US); A Bigger Splash is out Feb 12 (UK)
Jan 7, 2016
Jan 4, 2016
INTERVIEW: Dakota Johnson for "Vogue UK" Magazine (February 2016)
Dakota Johnson covers February British Vogue, photographed by Alasdair McLellan and marking her debut as our cover star. Inside the issue, the actress sheds light on life in Hollywood, growing up as a part of an acting dynasty and why she has no regrets about her most famous role to date.
"I'm proud of Fifty Shades of Grey. I don't need to distance myself from that," she told us."The more work I do, the more the general public sees the different things I can do. Do I think it opened doors? Yeah. More people know my name."
She also gave her views on ageism in Tinseltown, using her mother, Melanie Griffith, and grandmother, Tippi Hedren, as examples.
"Why isn't my mother in movies? She's an extraordinary actress! Why isn't my grandmother in movies? This industry is fucking brutal," she stated candidly. "No matter how tough you are, sometimes there's the feeling of not being wanted. It's absurd and cut-throat. Whenever I have downtime, I'm unsure that I will ever work again. I don't know what it is, but it's a definite thing that happens to me."
For now though she hasn't got any downtime on her hands, as she is currently promoting her new film, Black Mass, in which she stars as the downtrodden wife of career criminal Whitey Bulger, played by Johnny Depp - her appearance in which she was more than happy to embrace.
"In my real life, I don't look pretty all the time. Nobody does. I love films that are honest... That's the thing that turns me on."
Dec 20, 2015
Interview & Scans: Dakota Johnson in "Total Film Magazine" (February 2016)
The Sam Taylor-Johnson-directed film went on to gross a whopping $570 million worldwide, but Johnson can barely remember what she did in those post-Grey months. “I blocked everything out,” she says. As it happens, she was shooting How To Be Single in New York, an ensemble rom-com in which Johnson plays Alice, a freshly-solo girl who gets taught the ways of the dating scene by Rebel Wilson’s loud-mouth friend. With Wilson lambasting her in the trailer for her, ahem, lady gardening (“It’s like Gandalf is staring right at me”), “it is a pretty hysterical, unconventional friendship,” explains Johnson. “They both learn a bit from each other.”
Playing the sensitive wallflower may not be a push for Johnson after Fifty Shades but, as A Bigger Splash shows, she’s more than capable of the other extreme. A remake-of-sorts of Jacques Deray’s 1969 film La Piscine, with Alain Delon, the film sees Johnson play Penelope, the alluring daughter to Fiennes’ verbose record producer Harry, who arrives on the remote Italian island of Pantelleria to shatter the tranquillity of Harry’s ex-flame, Swinton’s former glam-rocker Marianne, as she hides out with Schoenaerts’ doc-maker boyfriend. What follows is a languid study of sexual intrigue, past and present. “My heart was attached to Penelope right away,” explains Johnson, who read the script a year before she was hired, only to see the project collapse more than once due to financing issues. When it finally came together, in 2014, Johnson had taken the summer off – and was travelling on a tour bus with some musician pals in France (she’s besties with decorator Emily Ward, who is married to the Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney).
Johnson, who has been on-off dating vocalist Matthew Hitt from indie band Drowners, then got the call to meet A Bigger Splash’s director Luca Guadagnino (I Am Love). “It was a whirlwind and I was not ready at all to work,” she admits. “Normally, I’m like: ‘Let’s do it, I’m ready to go,’ and I feel like I have ample time to prepare myself mentally. But I was in an emotional place in my life, and my private life, and I wasn’t ready to do this. So it was very sudden.” Flying to Crema, where Guadagnino lives, Johnson then found herself battling the fear.
"I freaked out and I didn’t think I could do it, and I didn’t want to... I felt like I didn’t have enough time to develop a character as wonderful as this. I didn’t want to damage it and I didn’t want to fuck it up. I thought I was going to be wasting everyone’s time. And then Ralph and Tilda talked me off a ledge. I was terrified, though. I didn’t want to ruin it.”
Despite acting for five years, initially as Justin Timberlake’s conquest in David Fincher’s Facebook drama The Social Network, Johnson is still at that stage where feedback from others “whose opinion I value” is crucial. “Reading into things very specifically... I haven’t got to a place in my career where I feel comfortable enough to do that yet,” she says. “I’m sure that I will. I admire someone like Tilda, who is able to really read everything and dissect her work. I’m a little more fragile!”
That said, she’s been around the business her whole life. Her father is ex-Miami Vice star Don Johnson; her mother is actress Melanie Griffith; her stepfather is Spanish legend Antonio Banderas and her maternal grandmother is Hitchcock muse Tippi Hedren. So what’s the best advice they ever gave her? “That’s a very big question,” she sighs. “A lot of things, every day. My grandmother said to me, ‘Say exactly what you want to say and nothing more.’ So that’s what I do.”
Born in Austin, Texas, Johnson’s childhood was peripatetic thanks to her parents’ work; Cincinnati, Colorado, Budapest, she went wherever their films took them. In and out of high schools, her education came from other sources; her dad taught her to ride a horse, drive a car and even shoot a gun before she was 10. Her only movie role came playing her mother’s daughter – alongside half-sister Stella – in the Banderas-directed 1999 film Crazy In Alabama. “I took it very seriously!” she laughs. Her parents weren’t so keen on her acting, preferring her to study textbooks over scripts. “It can be a frightening business and it can be brutal and tough,” she says. “Any parent would want them to protect their child from that.” After graduating high school, Johnson started modelling – winning a campaign for Mango and becoming the first second-generation Miss Golden Globe (her mother had won the accolade in 1975). Acting, inevitably, was the next step.
Roles in The Five-Year Engagement, 21 Jump Street and Need For Speed established her – small fry, though, compared to Fifty Shades. Even now, the hysteria surrounding her and co-star Jamie Dornan, taking on the roles of Anastasia and the S&M-loving Christian Grey, is baffling to her. “That is something I don’t know if I’ll ever get my head around,” she says. “It’s astonishing and incredible. I have incredible fans and I owe all of my jobs to them.” Her anonymity eroded in an instant, and it didn’t help that she’d witnessed similar activity with her family. “It’s different when it’s you,” she argues. “I always watched my parents go through things like this and it’s a different feeling. [When somebody approaches me] I often feel very awkward and I think that maybe I went to high school with them... I always take it and make it my fault... yeah, I don’t know.” She stammers, momentarily. “I don’t know if anybody ever gets used to it.”
What about the critics, though? For an actress as “fragile” as Johnson, surely the savaging the film took from reviewers must’ve hurt? “Well, anyone who has their work criticised, it can sting a little. But for that specific film, we all knew that was coming. It wasn’t surprising. It’s a very peculiar movie. It was sort of expected.” She pauses, defiance in her eyes. “There were a lot of people who did like the movie... that made me feel happy and proud.” Already signed on for sequels Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed, due to be shot back-to-back in 2016, she’ll have to do it without Sam Taylor-Johnson, who quit the franchise to be replaced by veteran director James Foley (Glengarry Glenn Ross). So how does she feel about the switch? “That’s the way things go,” she says, diplomatically. “I’m excited to work with James and I’m excited to have a different experience.” She beams. “That’s the joy of my job.”
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