Dakota Fanning Channeled A Dracula Heroine For The Watchers [Exclusive]

Dakota Fanning is only 30 years old, but she's been acting professionally for 24 of them. A child actor who fortunately avoided the trap of the teen idol curse, Fanning successfully transitioned into more mature roles like Squeaky Fromme in Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," Emma Collins in "The Equalizer 3," and as Marge Sherwood on "Ripley." Now, Fanning is starring in Ishana Shyamalan's feature directorial debut, "The Watchers," a dark fairytale about an artist named Mina who gets stranded in the woods and finds sanctuary with three strangers as they are all watched by mysterious, unseen creatures at night.

Fanning plays Mina, a messy, complicated, driven character that is a bit outside of the wheelhouse of what general audiences may be used to seeing her portray. The success of "The Watchers" hinges on whether or not the audience can identify with and root for Mina's survival. I recently spoke with Ishana Shyamalan about her approach to the film and was lucky enough to talk with Fanning to learn the same. Below is the full interview with Dakota Fanning, but if you want to hear the interview as well as my chat with Ishana Shyamalan, check out today's episode of the /Film Daily podcast below, or on your preferred podcast platform.

I know next up you're working with "The Strangers" creator Bryan Bertino on "Vicious."

We just finished!

Oh, fantastic. So you've got these two powerhouse names in horror that you're working with back to back, and you also have such a diverse filmography. What is it about horror that keeps you coming back to the genre?

Well, it feels back to back, but this was shot last July. I just did "Vicious." There are things that have happened in between. The two are so different to me. This film holds a different space to me than doing "Vicious" did. Obviously, I'm fresh out of doing "Vicious" too, so it's like, I always need time to process exactly what I did. I'll know how to talk about it when it's time to talk about it.

Totally.

But I think for me, I love films in all kinds of genres. I love getting to explore deeply real grounded human stuff in a heightened genre like a thriller or this surreal suspense horror world that the Shyamalan family — I think there should be a Shyamalan genre.

Absolutely!

I feel like it's so specific, and now we are getting to see Ishana's twist on that, which I'm so excited to be a part of. Yeah, I like doing things that feel unique and feel like things I haven't done before and to be able to have done all different kinds of movies by the end of my career — whenever that is — I embrace it all.

I love that this movie has so many little horror elements from other things thrown in there, namely your character's name Mina and her sister being Lucy, which is very "Dracula."

Yes.

Mina is one of those great characters because she's such a subversion of what was expected of Victorian women at the time. I'm curious if that sort of history at all was a motivating factor in playing this version of a new, sort of subversive female protagonist in a horror movie?

Yeah, I think it's super cool anytime you have those little cheeky details. I think it makes a story, a movie, more interesting, so I loved that little detail. Yeah, I love that Mina as a protagonist is a flawed character. She doesn't always do the right thing or say the right thing, and there are messy parts of herself and she doesn't have it all figured out. She's not perfect and not always nice necessarily. I like seeing more characters like that, [who] are as complicated as we all are. People don't always have it together all the time. I want to see characters that are making mistakes.

I think Mina is a character that is still searching for something and she's running from a past that still haunts her and she feels very broken inside and doesn't always deal with it in the healthiest of ways. Finding herself in these strange circumstances and being able to heal that part of herself through this supernatural fairy tale world is also very cool. But yeah, I love all the little cheeky nods to the genre, and Ishana, she wanted to make a fairy tale for adults, and I think she succeeded in that.

*****

"The Watchers" is in theaters now, and both interviews can be heard on today's episode of the /Film Daily podcast, along with a chat with /Film editor Ben Pearson featuring our thoughts on the film:

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