Elle is on the cover of W Magazine’s march issue featuring a wonderful new photoshoot by Zoë Ghertner. Elle is sharing the cover with Kirsten Dunst and Rashida Jones.

Back in the 1980s, when Sofia Coppola was a teenager, the pages of this magazine looked a little different than they do now. Flipping through early issues, the filmmaker-to-be was drawn, she said, to “society hostesses posing in their glamorous settings, in those ballgown skirts.” Today, those stately images, featuring the likes of Deeda Blair, Lee Radziwill, and Marella Agnelli in their well-appointed living rooms, offer a respite from our current domestic state.
“I think we’re all so starved for some beauty and fashion after being home,” Coppola, 49, said of her vision for the project you see here. “I wanted the whole thing to be feminine and fancy, because we’re too casual these days. The idea is that these women are lying around like they’re tired after trying on so many gowns.”

Coppola chose to feature three of her closest collaborators, with whom she’s worked throughout her career: frequent muse Kirsten Dunst, whom Coppola first directed in The Virgin Suicides, when Dunst was 16 years old; Elle Fanning, who appeared in Somewhere at age 11 and in The Beguiled at 18; and Rashida Jones, the protagonist of last year’s On the Rocks and a longtime behind-the-scenes influence.
With Coppola appearing on a tablet screen from Belize, where she had been spending part of the winter with her family, photographer Zoë Ghertner captured Dunst and Jones in a Beverly Hills home on an evocatively gloomy day. Photographing Fanning, who is based in London while filming the second season of The Great, was an entirely remote affair, with both Ghertner and Coppola appearing via Zoom while Fanning posed in de Gournay scion Hannah Cecil Gurney’s Battersea house, chosen for its riot of ornate floral wallpaper. Ghertner’s 2-year-old son sat on her lap for part of the shoot, and Coppola’s 14-year-old, Romy—who, as an infant, used to hang out on her mother’s lap while Coppola was on set—popped her head into the frame at one point to say hello. “It was like playing photo shoot,” Coppola said. “I was sitting in my pajamas, having tea.”
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Elle Fanning, star and executive producer of Civic Center Media/MRC Television’s Hulu series The Great, is expanding her relationship with the indie studio partnership. She and her sister Dakota Fanning have teamed to launch Lewellen Pictures production company and have entered a first-look television deal with the studio, a joint venture between UTA and MRC. The Fanning sisters plan to develop feature film and television projects, as well as other forms of media, including podcasts.

Their first project under the pact is an adaptation of Megan Miranda’s bestselling novel The Last House Guest, which is being developed as a crime thriller series. Sarah Walker (The Secrets She Keeps, Wentworth) will write and executive produce the series. It centers on an intimate friendship between two girls who fall violently in love with each other’s differences, which, in the end, create doubt, betrayal and tragedy. The Fannings will executive produce alongside Brittany Kahan Ward and Mary Jane Skalski for Echo Lake Entertainment.

“Elle has brought such perspective and thoughtfulness as an executive producer on The Great,” said Elise Henderson, President of MRC Television. “We are excited by the vision she and Dakota have for Lewellen Pictures and for MRC Television to provide a home for the stories they will tell.”

Elle Fanning has received Golden Globe and Independent Spirit Award nominations for her work on The Great, which is now in production on its second season for Hulu. She recently starred in Sally Potter’s The Roads Not Taken and Netflix’s All The Bright Places, the latter of which she also produced.

Dakota Fanning was recently was seen in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time in Hollywood and TNT’s Angel of Darkness. She will next star in The First Lady for Showtime.

The siblings will star together for the first time in the feature film adaptation of The Nightingale for Tristar and director Melanie Laurent.

They have also brought together existing projects in development that they had been production individually and will now fall under the Lewellen Pictures banner. That includes feature I’ve Got Your Number set up at Amazon Studios with Dakota and Freddie Highmore attached to star, Kiwi Smith and Jessica O’Toole adapting the Sophie Kinsella novel, Echo Lake Entertainment, Alfresco Pictures and Joey Plager producing; One Click podcast which Elle will narrate and is executive producing along with Brittany Kahan Ward, Vespucci and Cadence 13; and The Girl From Plainville, a limited series for Elle to star in for UCP and Hulu, with showrunners Liz Hannah and Patrick Macmanus. Brittany Kahan Ward also executive produces.

“We are thrilled to be launching this company together and to be teaming up with MRC who have been excellent partners on The Great. Our goal is to tell stories, through comedy and drama, which are authentic to the human experience, and not just from our own perspective,” said the Fannings in a joint statement. “We also want to create content that we wouldn’t be able to make just as actors. We can learn so much when we look outside our specific points of view. We have been fortunate to work with many brilliant storytellers and hope to continue that track while also providing opportunities for many more.”

At MRC Television, Elle and Dakota Fanning joins a roster of talent that includes The Outsider‘s Cynthia Erivo, Richard Price and Jessie Nickson-Lopez, Ozark‘s Julia Garner and Chris Mundy, Rian Johnson and Ram Bergman’s T-Street (Knives Out) as well as Fear the Walking Dead co-creator Dave Erickson, Familystyle and writer-producer Noelle Valdivia.

Dakota and Elle Fanning are repped by UTA, Echo Lake Entertainment and attorney Steve Warren. Walker is repped by Gersh.

Via

Gucci is releasing a series of short films in partnership with Dazed Media.

The series, titled “AbsoluteBeginners,” invites nine friends of the brand and Dazed collaborators to direct a film each for the first time and to “celebrates the potency of pop culture and naïveté, the beauty in amateurism, and exposes the power and vulnerability of the creative impulse,” while incorporating the Gucci Jackie 1961 bag into the narrative.

The first set of five films available to watch beginning Wednesday have been created by Elle Fanning, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Jodie Turner-Smith, Benedetta Porcaroli and Emma Corrin, who plays the late Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales, in the upcoming season four of the Netflix hit show “The Crown.”

The second batch of four films have been directed by Lily Gavin, Barry Keoghan, Yoshi and Arlo Parks and are slated to premiere on Nov. 6.

The campaign also aims to go viral on social media. Morgan Presley, the creator behind TikTok’s viral Gucci Model Challenge, will promote the series with her “#GucciAbsoluteBeginners guide to living a Gucci life” video, which follows a Gucci-fied day in her life, in her Gucci-inspired look, with audio that other TikTok creators can use to re-create their very own Gucci day.

“My film is about captivating the nature of Gucci,” said Fanning, who has been wearing Alessandro Michele’s gowns at major film festivals. “Even a dog can be hypnotized by its beauty. One night while drifting off to sleep, I thought of this western showdown between a dog and dog owner with a scoreboard keeping tallies of how Gucci always wins. Since I am an absolute beginner to directing, I wanted to make a statement with the tone. Yes, this is a fashion film, but why not tell a funny story while looking at sparkling garments?”

On her directorial debut Elle said: “Growing up on film sets, watching directors I wholeheartedly admire has been the greatest classroom. The best directors are the first to confide in the people they choose to work with. Also, not being afraid to get your hands dirty. I have a very ‘anything for the shot’ mentality!”

Elle’s film titled “Gucci Always Wins” – shot over two days in her house – centres around a whimsical, technicolour tea party. And when a dog gets a (Gucci) bone, its owner tries everything to win back its attention. Elle invited Dakota to be her AD and help with the Art departmant. Her film also features her cousin Presley Panaro.

Elle is on the cover of Vanity Fair October’s issue featuring a wonderful new photoshoot by Tierney Gearon.

Elle Fanning has been acting since she was two. She’s 22 now, and there are estimates that she’s logged some 60 roles in her career, which would mean she’s already headed for Streep territory. During a Zoom call, I ask if this is true, or even logistically possible.

She tilts her head. “Could that be?” she wonders. “You know what? I did write it down one time, and I think I still have it on my phone.” She whips out a pink phone emblazoned with a sticker of the cartoon juggernaut Strawberry Shortcake. Her fingers fly.

“Thirty-six,” she announces finally.

The former child star recently triumphed with what she refers to as her “first woman role” as Catherine the Great in The Great—Hulu’s raunchy, rollicking, and, at times, gleefully ahistorical account of the monarch’s bold rise to power—but, at home, her life is reeling decidedly backward through time. Like many of us, Fanning has retreated to a safe space during the coronavirus pandemic. She’s cocooning in place at her mom’s house in the San Fernando Valley with her 26-year-old sister and fellow actor, Dakota; their mother; their grandmother; and the family’s elderly pet schnoodle (mini schnauzer-poodle), Lewellen.

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