Luca Guadagnino has always been a filmmaker who frames the human body in a really bare and unique way. Do you share this sensibility? I feel like a lot of your work – particularly the Fifty Shades of Grey films and A Bigger Splash – feature women’s bodies as important factors in their aesthetics and narratives.
Dakota Johnson: I've always had a real love for the female body. When I was in high school I studied visual arts and I studied figure drawing so I was always drawing women, nude women, every day. I don't know, I think I have such a respect and love for bodies. I get excited when there are films that want to portray women the way that I see them. Preparing for the film unfolded from the moment that Luca and I talked about it when we were filming A Bigger Splash. It was from then until we started filming that I was preparing for this movie. So that was a couple of years of research and understanding of the vibe of the film, the politics of the film. Learning from the references that Luca had sent to me. I think the thing about women and the body in this movie is that it's a tool. It's a tool of expression and it's a symbol of feminine strength. The movement of bodies is a language in itself. What inhabits the body is energy and history.
Maternity seems to be very important in the film. Mothers are present in many ways. Suzy is haunted by thoughts of her own mother and the relationships between the dancers and their teachers is strangely maternal as well. Then of course we have the discussed “Three Mothers”…
Dakota: It's a very twisted topic. It's a lot about manipulation and possession. We're all trying to survive our mother. Having this - however tumultuous it may be - relationship with your own mother. Then there's the mother that is you. Then there is, if you dare to access the ferocious energy and power that lies within Suzy, then she's the ultimate mother. It's interesting because it's also about thresholds. Suzy denounces her mother but there's also a sort of bizarre maternal relationship between Suzy and Madame Blanc, but perhaps it may be a bit loving. Not at all romantic or even sexual, but complicated. There are just so many levels to it, especially in regards to the maternal aspect. I can't even begin to touch on all of them.
This is the second film you’ve made with Luca Guadagnino and Tilda Swinton. They of course have been working together since 1999. Have you developed a particular language in the way you work together?
Dakota: It's totally telepathic. I look across the room and I can make eye contact with Luca or Tilda and we are on the same page and it's fantastic. It's fun. It's a collective of people, it's the three of us but there's also a team behind the camera that is always the same people. It's a big family and there's a lot of history and stories on the other side of the camera as well as in front. It's sort of a seamless collaboration and understanding and respect. I feel really lucky. When I feel discouraged about the world, which is like multiple times a day right now, I feel even more grateful and lucky that I have found two people who I find to be the masters of their craft. They let me near them [laughs].
I understand that you did nearly all of your own dancing in the film. What was the preparation for that like?
Dakota: Two months before we started filming there was a few weeks of intensive training and learning of the choreography. That was the time we were with the dancers all day. We did sort of create this dance collective. It was a legit dance company. The women are professional dancers, but for a lot of them it was the first time they were on a movie set. They also were so supportive and encouraging of me and Mia and they were so helpful. When there were days when we were filming dance sequences, one of them - I worked really closely with a couple. They would warm me up and we would do a workout. These women, their bodies are their craft, it's like a paintbrush. They pay such close attention, it's something that I knew a little bit of when I was growing up. I danced a bit, I did ballet, and I was on a little dance team for a little while, but it was nothing like this. When you're young you learn about technique and form but for these women it's about expression and it's so beautiful to me. Through Suzy I learned about that, then there's the side of me that is such an overachieving perfectionist that I was like strangling the time to make the dancing perfect. So there was a really fine line between me needing to get it right and also needing to inject Suzy's expression through my body. The collaboration with the other dancers was extremely helpful because I kind of got to see what each of their signatures was. If dance is the language then they all had different accents. It was just extraordinary.
One of the few obvious similarities between this Suspiria and the original film is that the name of your character has remained. Do you think there are similarities between them?
Dakota: I think they're totally different and I think it all comes down to the way in which they absorb what's happening around them. I think Suzy is not worldly at all but she has this - when things occur around her, if she hears a bomb for the first time or sees a naked man for the first time, it's almost like she's thrown into a weird fit of glee instead of being shocked and scared. Fear is not something that she feels - if she feels fear she's excited by it and she feels like it feeds her. It almost makes me uncomfortable to compare the Suzy's because they're so different and the movies are so different. I love Jessica Harper as the first Suzy so much; I just feel that this movie is a completely different film than the other one.
I wanted to return to the discussion of bodies. The 1977 film depicted violence mostly through vast amounts of blood. This film on the other hand really focuses on the manipulation of the body in its murder scenes. What do you think of the way the film functions as body horror?
Dakota: I think in a way it's almost more horrifying, because when you see gallons and gallons of blood in a horror film there's something very obvious and sort of expected about it. With this one, you see a body being mangled and you almost feel like, "Oh my god, maybe that could happen to me" and it becomes more personal because you have a body. The fact that the witches are women, it's the personal touch that makes it more eerie and more scary when you feel like it's real. When you feel like you've seen these women before, you've been here before. There's nothing totally outlandish. There's nothing like "Oh god, that couldn't happen."
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