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.