NEW YORK, Oct. 13 (UPI) -- Dakota Fanning says one of the drawbacks to being a film actress in the 21st century is everyone knows everything about you -- or at least thinks they do.
Co-written and -directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, Fanning's latest big-screen drama is about the controversial relationship between cinematic swashbuckler Errol Flynn and his teenage girlfriend, aspiring actress Beverly Aadland. Kevin Kline plays Flynn, the Australian star of the classic adventure movies The Adventures of Robin Hood, They Died with Their Boots On, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Dodge City and Captain Blood. Fanning plays Aadland, a young beauty who appeared in one of his last films, Cuban Rebel Girls, and who was with him when he died of a heart attack in 1959 at the age of 50. Susan Sarandon plays Aadland's ambitious stage mother Florence.
"I was being asked by an interviewer, like, 'So, Sean Penn gave you an iguana for your birthday?' And I was like, 'No, he didn't,'" Fanning, a former child star, recalled during a recent roundtable chat with reporters in New York.
"Stuff like that where people think they know all this stuff and say it with such confidence and you are like, 'That's not true' or 'No, I'm not like that.' ... I think it only gets to you as much as you let it get to you."
The 20-year-old actress went on to say, "Certainly, in this film, you see a different time when there was so much more mystery to movie stars.
"You never saw a movie star without makeup on," she reflected. "It was very kind of idealized and the
information that was put out there would have been created by studios and that was what was sold to audiences, so they believed just enough and there was enough mystery to keep you guessing, I suppose. I wish it was more like that, I guess. I think so much of the mystery of the movies is gone and everybody always wants to know why you do this and why you do that and how you do this and what it's like... I don't know. I feel like it would be nice to have a little bit less, so people wouldn't know so much about you because I think that affects how people watch your films."
