Kirsten Dunst discussed the progress that has been achieved in the film and TV industry since the #MeToo movement took hold during an on-stage interview on Thursday at Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Film Festival.
Asked by an audience member whether male actors and directors had got the memo on #MeToo, she fired back: “I think we’ve put a lot of people away. I feel like people definitely can’t get away with what they used to. That’s for sure.”
She added: “Everybody has an eye out now. So I think that it’s a much safer environment for all of us.”
Speaking about her experience when she was a young actress, she said: “I was lucky. I had a good family, a good mother. My mother was always around. Like, I never had anything, you know, negative happen to me like that. I was very protected.”
Dunst preferred to accentuate the positive aspects of the industry in other parts of the discussion, such as when, as an 11 year old, she appeared in “Interview With the Vampire.” She recalled: “I remember everyone treating me like a little princess, that’s for sure. Like I remember it was Christmas time and Tom Cruise put a gorgeous Christmas tree in my dressing room.”
Speaking about Lars von Trier’s 2011 film “Melancholia,” for which she won best actress in Cannes, she said: “I loved making that movie. Even though I was playing someone who was very depressed, I was having the best time making that film.
“I felt so safe. Lars … his whole team was women, around him. It was such a calm and nurturing environment, and all the other actors were so wonderful,” she said, name-checking Alexander Skarsgård and Charlotte Rampling, who she said was “one of my favorite actresses.”
She added: “So just to be there and feel so comfortable and not question anything that I did … it was one of the most freeing acting experiences for me that I’ve ever had.”
Dunst also paid credit to Sofia Coppola, with whom she worked on 2006 costume drama “Marie Antoinette.” She said the relationship with Coppola “was really impactful, as a woman at 16, for me, because in an industry that wants you to change how you look, or, you know, focuses a lot on vanity, she really just loved me and my weird teeth, you know, things that other people wanted to change about me.
“She thought I was beautiful, and at 16, to have someone you look up to so much think that of you really gave me, like, such a huge, huge confidence. You know, I didn’t have an older sister, so that gave me a very big confidence. It’s not like I was overly confident, but it was like a quiet knowledge that I had inside me, that sustained me while I was growing up in this industry.”
Dunst also teased her upcoming film, “The Entertainment System Is Down,” directed by Ruben Östlund and also starring Keanu Reeves. Comparing the experience of making the film to her time working on “Melancholia,” when she “just didn’t think about the audience,” she said, “I felt like I bared a part of myself, and so it’s weird that it’s going to come out because of what I’ve shown, what I know that I’ve done. So, in the moment, you don’t think about it, but then you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, people are gonna watch me doing this. Wow, that’s crazy.’”
