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Transcription by Us.
Dakota
Rising
On the eve
of becoming notorious with the release of "Fifty Shades of Grey",
Dakota Johnson, Its under-the-radar star, relishes her last moments of
anonymity. Hamish Bowles joins her for a whirlwind jaunt through London Fashion
Week.
"My
most favorite thing about London," confides Dakota Johnson on the first
day of our madcap foray into the capital's Fashion Week, "is that nobody
recognizes me. It's really...cool."
At this
point, it must be noted, Dakota hardly recognizes herself: She's temporarily a
flaxen blonde, and an overeager hairdresser has chopped something approximating
sideburns into her tousled mane. "I'm not the kind of person who is like,
"What have you done?!" Dakota shrugs. "I'm like, "I love
it!".
But
although she passes generally unnoticed by the city's paparazzi as they
scramble to photograph Alexa Chung, Poppy Delevingne, et al, that situation, it
can safely be assumed, will soon change dramatically once, Dakota, 25, embodies
Anastasia Steele, the adventuresome heroine in the screen adaptation of
"Fifty Shades of Grey", EL James's erotic best seller ("a very
dark Grimm's fairy tale, told for adults," ad director Sam Taylor-Johnson
describes it). The Fifty Shades trilogy's critical lambasting was rewarded with
sales of 100 million copies worldwide, and the movie, a very alternative love
story that open on Valentine's Day weekend, might just make Dakota this
decade's Vivien Leigh.
"I
think about my dwindling anonymity," she says, "and that's really
scary because a very large part of me would be perfectly happy living on a
ranch in Colorado and having babies and chickens and horses -- which I will do
anyway." Still, she could not pass up the opportunity to play a character
that so many people felt they knew. "I wanted to be involved because it's
so different," says Dakota, "And it's an intense love story."
Taylor -Johnson
wasn't aware of Dakota's Tinseltown credentials (she eas the first second-generation
Miss Golden Globe) before they met, though she had seen her memorable cameo as
the one-night stand of Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake) in David
Fincher's 2010 The Social Network. "She was a bit of a
scene-stealer," says Taylor-Johnson. "It was one of those little
appearances where you think, I need more of that girl!". For the Fifty
Shades audition, Dakora was given a monologue from Persona, Ingmar Bergman's
intense 1966 psychological drama. "She blew us out the water,"
Taylor-Johnson remembers. "She understood the nuance of that passage and
how to play something delicately. Dakota has the ability to play so fragile and
vulnerable, but with this underlying strength that makes you feel she is going
to triumph".
Although
the director was determined to give Dakota the role, she had her come back to
read with a few contenders for the role of Christian Grey---the charismatic
love interest wih the unconventional sexual appetites.
"We
couldn't offer her the part until we felt there was a definite chemistry
between her and whoever was going to play the part of Christian," say
Taylor-Johnson. Enter the improbably good-looking Northern Irishman Jami
Dornan, charismatic star of the hair-raising BBC crime series The Fall, with a
proverbial twinkle in his eye. Their chemistry, as the director recalls, was
immediate.
"Dakota
is very funny---and humor on a film set goes a long way," says Dornan.
"But she also had the ability to be very strong dramatic actress. She'd be
telling a joke one minute and breaking your heart on-screen the next---so she
was perfect."
"There
are tough scenes in this movie," adds Taylor Johnson, "scenes where she had to be naked---and
not just in the flesh. Bit she was utterly fearless and brave." Dakota,
meanwhile, says that she and Taylor-Johnson "have a very special
connection. I trust her with everything. She has a very level head, and there
was never really and anxious moment."
Although
Dakota hadn't yet seen the movie in London, she is one of the more than 100
million viewers who have seen the trailer, which became Universal's most-viewed
teaser ever. "It's just the most insane thing to be part of," Dakota
says. "I've never experienced anything like this; I don't think anyone
has. It's terrifying---and it's exciting."
Still,
while Taylor-Johnson works through the Los Angeles nights to edit her movie,
here in London Dakota feels very far removed from nine-and-a-half intense weeks
that she spent filming it. Among other details, she hasn't yet got a handle on
the movie's relentless promotional schedule: "I'm surviving n an
hour-to-hour basis right now!" she says. She has, however, started working
with the stylist Kate Young on her fashion choices. "We're buddies---we
like to hang out---and we come uo with cool stuff together," says Dakota.
With
eclectic red-carpet dressing on her mind, Dakota is contemplating a rack of
clothes to wear to a trio of hot-ticket London Fashion Week shows. Chic sexy?
Ethereal romantic? Hitchcock Class? And what about a shoulder purse? "It's
so nineties," she says, sighing appreciatively.
The actress
exudes the effortless cool of an It girl, from her Stella McCartney platforms
and the eighties Rive Gauche and Ungaro pieces in her wardrobe (recently
ferreted out from a vintage store on the Rue de Grenelle) to the discreet skull
earrings that were a gift from her mother (Melanie Griffith, if you didn't get
the memo; Don Johnson is her father and Antonio Banderas her stepfather.) The
clothes are arranged in a suite at the Chiltern Firehouse, her London home from
home (when she isn't crashing with Kate Moss in her storied eighteenth-century
house in the north of the city). Meanwhile, Dakota has her "best friend in
the whole world." the Nashville-based decorator Emily Ward, in tow for
moral support and empathetic drollery. Ward, who could be a double for their
mutual pal Reese Witherspoon, is married to the Black Keys' drummer, Patrick
Carney. (Dakota is currently stepping out with Matthew Hitt, the lead vocalist
and guitarist for the indie-rock band Drowners and a sometime model with the
attenuated looks of an Egon Schiele portrait.) Ward and Dakota spar in various
accents---Scottish, French, Welsh, Wisconsin--- and are so winning and
conspiratorial and so very, very funny together that you find yourself wishing
that you might be their second-best friend in the whole world.
The calm
that Dakota is so persuasively projecting is, however, illusory. In fact, she
is thoroughly discombobulated. She has just spent two months on the rugged and
far.flung Italian island of Pantelleria filming an update of Jacques Deray's
iconic 1969 Movie La Piscine (in which she reprises the played by Jane Birkin
in the original) with I Am Love's high style director, Luca Guardagnino.
(Taylor-Johnson recommended her for the role.) Dakota loved Guadagnino
("I'm so excited that he exists," she says), as well as her costars
Ralph Fiennes and Tilda Swinton, who calls her Cousin Duckie and talked her
down from the ledge when she felt ill prepared for the role, which she had
landed just days before filming began. "At time I was like, 'This is my
slow, trickling descent into madness---I won't come back from this!'"
Dakota says, laughing. "Luckily, I was playing a complete sociopath."
But
Pantelleria, she says, "is like being in Alcatraz surrounded by
jellyfish---you really can't leave" So I'm experiencing full-blown culture
shock now. I have bizarre anxiety about being in a city---I have no idea who I
am or where I am."
Our
immersive London Fashion foray only promises to heighten her sense of
disorientation. It begins at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, where
Stella McCartney is presenting the sustainable clothes she has designed for
Livia Firth's Green Carpet Challenge. "She's very special, that Stella," says Dakota. "No bullshit,
very straightforward--- and kind." The two were originally introduced, in
true child-of-celebrity style, by Henderson, a beloved New York driver whom the
McCartneys and the merged Johnson-Griffith-Banderas clan have each used for
decades. "I've known him my entire life," says Dakota. "He knows
everything about me---I tell him everything. He's met all of my
boyfriends."
"I
need a group hug!" yells Stella when Dakota and Emily walk into her party.
At their first blind dinner date, when the girls were in town for a Black Keys
tour, conversation tuned to Akron, Ohio, where Carney comes from, at which
point Stella thoughtfully summoned fellow Akronite Chrissie Hynde to join them.
"It was the most glorious experience for us because we worshipped the
Pretenders," remembers Dakota. As it turned out, she and Stella both of
them. "She saved twelve horses from going to the meat market," Stella
says proudly about Dakota. "Paid the rent on a riding school that was hit
by the recession---for three years."
A passion
for animal rights runs in Dakota's family. As her grandmother Tippi Hedren,
star of Hitchcock's The Birds and Marnie, has recounted, when she resisted the
director's sexual advances he made it difficult for her to work again as an
actress. "The studio system then was crazy---you were like a trained
animal," Dakota tells me. "It's hard for me to hear." Tippi took
to rescuing wild animals instead. Dakota's mother famously grew up with a lion
in the house, while Dakota herself gleefully remembers a brace of rescue
elephants, Timbo and Cora, in their backyard.
Hedren now
lives on a ranch in California's Soledad Canyon "with some small cats and
some big cats," as Dakota puts is: "Lions and tigers, a black
leopard, and a three-legged cheetah." She calls her grandmother, who's now
85, "the most glamorous woman I've ever seen. She's so beautiful and smart
and a real, true class act. She's just extraordinary."
On the
following day we head to the Erdem show, where Dakota admires the fey
Edwardiana and again passes vitually unnoticed. We break for a salad lunch
before Burberry, but the traffic is so horrid that we risk missing the show
altogether. In desperation, I suggest that we get out and run for it. Dakota
removes her high heels and gamely takes off like a cross-country runner.
"I've been barefoot on an island for two months!" she yells.
"It's OK!" Arriving out of breath, we are hustled into our seats just
as Malaika Firth appears at the end of the runway in an hourglass denim jacket
and a golden-sequined pencil skirt.
"That
was sooo funny!" says Dakota with a laugh after the show. "I loved
every second of it!" She also likes Christopher Bailey's frothily romantic
color palette but admits that she preferred the men's clothes. "I want to
get my hands on those velvet pants," she says.
Though
Stella is hosting a girly lunch in Holland Park, after the near debacle of our
Burberry adventure we decide to err on the side of caution and head over early
to the Christopher Kane show at the Tate Modern instead. Lauren Santo Domingo
joins us in the car. "If you have to grow old and knit, where you would
live?" she asks Dakota. "Colorado---or Nashville," she replies.
"L.A really doesn't feel like home to me anymore."
"Los
Angeles is a really strange place," she tells me later. "I grew up
there like a normal kid, but it was not until I experienced others parts of the
world that I realized how really and truly bizarre to the core it is---inside
the homes of the powerful and damage. Nashville is only a couple of hours from
New York," she says, "and people just move at a slower pace
there---and they don't care who you are or what you do." In fact, her
phone has been beeping almost constantly with Zillow alerts on Nashville real
estate. "Sometimes it's nice to just hang out in someone's backyard
instead of prancing around the city," she says. "But other
times...it's nice to prance around the city!"
A
relentless travel schedule was a fact of life for Dakota when she was growing
up. Her "normal kid" childhood was spent "everywhere," she
tells me: "Cincinnati, Colorado...Budapest. I traveled a lot with my
parents"---to their movie locations, and then between them when they split
(for the second time) in 1995.
"I was
always taken in and out of school," she says (she counts seven or eight of
them total). Mornings on the road were spent with a tutor and afternoons on
adventures, exploring new cities and museums---an upbringing that has left
Dakota with an ardent curiosity and an informed sense of global culture. She
studied art in high school, but "I just assumed that what I would be doing
is making films," she says, "because I grew up around people making
films, making art, making music. And being on a
film set is the most comforting thing in the world to me. Seeing a
catering truck feels like home."
We are so
early to the Kane Show that they are still in the middle of rehearsals in the
museum's Turbine Hall, so we take in the Robert Mapplethorpe show. "He
holds a really special place in my heart," says Dakota, who was stirred by
the photographer's Grand Palais retrospective as weel as by Patti Smith's 2010
memoir of her life with Mapplethorpe, Just Kids, and The Coral sea, her elegy
for him. She once caught Smith's eye in Paris when they were both shopping at
Dries Van Noten (the men's store, naturally). "I didn't know what to do
with myself," Dakota tells me. "The she left and I followed her down
the block and I felt really, really creepy!".
From
London, Dakota is heading to New York, where her beloved younger sister,
eighteen-year-old Stella del Carmen Banderas, has an interview at
Barnard---"She's the smartest person in our family," says
Dakota---before flying to Vancouver to shoot some additional Fifty Shades
scenes and thence to Los Angeles, where we meet up again, a month after the
London Shows, on a balmy afternoon at LACMA. The now-brunette Dakota is wearing
a dark Laura Urbinati bra (which she admits she stole from the wardrobe of the
Piscine remake) under her filmy blouse and is delighted when it's pointed out
that her Jen Meyer turquoise heart pendant marches the color of the day's
museum pass.
Dakota, who
hasn't been home to L.A in nearly a year (Mom has been dog-sitting Zeppelin,
her Jas Russell-schnauzer mix), seems serene and collected after disorienting
London adventure---but the calm is illusory this time, too. The week before,
Dakota finally seen the latest cut of Fifty Shades---an experience that has
left her feeling discombobulated once again.
"It
looks beautiful," she says. "I've never seen anything like it. But
it's confusing to the brain---I still can't look at it objectively or wrap my
head around it. The parts of the movie that are difficult to watch were even
more difficult---and emotionally taxing---to shoot."
Dakota
loves the museum's stylish exhibition on 1910s German Expressionist
cinema---particularly the Weimar filmmakers' idea of "the set of a movie
being a character along with the actors, where even the wallpaper means something."
It reminds her of the Red Room on the Fifty Shades set, where "everything
has a place and every drawer and cabinet and box has something in
it"---though it's not something even visible to the viewer. "Only
Jamie and I knew," she says.
We then decide to take in the "Hollywood
Costume" exhibition, put on by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, where Dakota notes more hidden details---the brightly colored linings
of Mary Poppin's dour wardrobe, for instance, or the purse that Meryl Streep
carried to embody Margaret Thatcher, carefully filled with all the correct
paraphernalia, which only the actress knew about.
"I
Know that voice!" says Dakota suddenly as we turn a corner. "I can
hear my grandmother!" Sure enough, Tippi Hedren's pistachiogreen suit from
The Birds is in the next room (Dakota deconstructed the look for her appearance
at the Christopher Kane show). The exhibition designer's conceit is to have
Tippi in conversation with archival footage of the famed costumer Edith
Head---in whose legendary wardrobe building on the Universal lot Dakota's
nuanced Fifty Shades costumes were fitted by designer Mark Bridges. Then the
Tippi Hedren voice comes through again: "I realized how important wardrobe
is to a film, to a character....Is she rich? Is she poor? Is she...a
slut?"
"What?
What!?" Mormor!" shrieks a genuinely outraged Dakota, using the
Swedish word for "grandmother" and revealing a streak of prudery that
seems somewhat at odds with her on-screen antics in Fifty Shades.
"Oh.My.God."
She's
somewhat pacified by the 1930s Adrian and Travis Banton costume extravaganzas
that follow. "Movies are just the best things in the world," she
says, sighing. Suitably enthused, she decides to see one this evening with her
sister, and they agree on Gone Girl.
What does
the immediate future hold? "I do a bit of press for Fifty, and then I'm
just going to take the rest of the year off," says Dakota blithely.
"I want to hang out with my friends. I want to hang out with my
family---well, I sometimes want to hang out with my family!"
Sam
Taylor-Johnson isn't quite sure. "I think it's going to take her to a
place where she has witnessed her parents go," she says of Dakota's
career-affirming role. "Now she's going to experience it for
herself."
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