Q&A: Stephen Dorff on Being Dwarfed by Elle Fanning

For an actor who reeks of rock-star charisma, Stephen Dorff has spent a lot of his time in roles that disguise it: as a transsexual (I Shot Andy Warhol), a vampire (Blade), and the stereotypical psycho indie filmmaker (Cecil B. Demented). Rarely have audiences gotten to see him stripped down, unplugged, and utterly acoustic—until now.When news broke that Sofia Coppola had cast him in Somewhere, somehow you couldn’t imagine any other actor lounging around the Chateau Marmont in jeans with a beer and a smoke—even if the last time you saw Dorff, he probably had blood dripping from his fangs. Watching Coppola’s latest masterfully minimalist meditation, you could easily confuse Dorff with his character, Johnny Marco. Then again, one of the keys to a great performance is to make it seem effortless despite all the hard work. Little Gold Men caught up with Dorff to discuss how he and Sofia captured the essence of Marco. (Hint: show someone smoke a whole cigarette.)

I’ve heard that Sofia’s sets are quiet and intimate to work on—is that what Somewhere was like?

It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced. For most of the movie it just felt like we were hanging out and shooting a documentary. So intimate, so few people, very limited crew. I’d look around the room, and it felt like a student film with all these Academy members.

That’s one hell of a student film.

It was the most raw, stripped-down set I’d ever been on.

How did the unique nature of Sofia’s set affect you and your performance?

It just turns it into the exact mood I needed. Normally, you negotiate a deal—I’d have to fight to get to stay at the Chateau, or I’d have to pay for it myself. That was something Sofia just immediately offered up. She said, “I want you out of Malibu. I want you to live at the Chateau and find this guy.” It was like training for the Olympics.

It’s an oddly Zen experience watching someone sleep until 3 p.m. at the Chateau and not say anything to anyone. Is it as Zen to do it?

Well, I’m a lot healthier than Johnny Marco, even though I smoke like him. But I think you do what you have to do to capture the essence of the story, and that’s why for the first 20 minutes I don’t think I talk. It’s really a behavioral performance. It’s much more a pared-down, kind of naked part for me. A guy can have everything, like Johnny Marco seems to in the beginning, and he can still have a big hole in his heart. That can happen to a plumber, the room-service guy, a writer for vanityfair.com.


Yeah, it’s universal. A lot of people in these Variety Q&As we’ve been doing ask, “Why wasn’t there more dialogue?” and I think the challenge for Sofia was in real life, people don’t really communicate their feelings. They have a hard time. They do so after the fact; in retrospect they realize what they should have said. I think that’s really true. Much of this film is being told with one specific line, as opposed to a monologue. In this film, I barely have a pair of jeans on—I’m naked through most of the movie. I have a cigarette or a beer, that’s the most I’m given. Other than that, it’s just me, and sometimes it’s just a camera pointed at me for five minutes without moving.

There are a lot of long takes in this film, which is pretty daring and minimalist.

Some of the sequences are shot in real time, which I’d never seen before. I’ve never seen a guy light a cigarette and finish it in one take. You’re always having to break to make it all match—in this scene, were you smoking it too long compared to that scene? Sofia cuts all those problems out by smoking the whole cigarette. There’s this amazing scene that Elle Fanning does in Italy when the girl’s in our hotel room the next morning. That whole scene is done with no dialogue. She just looks at me and says so much, basically, “Get this chick out of my fucking room.”

Little girls can speak a Gettysburg Address in one look.

Yeah, Elle’s just so good and so original. I feel like the whole movie feels so unique to me; I feel like I’m in something I’ve never seen before.

It’s an ideal that Sofia seems uniquely suited for.

She does have a lot of balls to make a movie like this and get away with it. She’s also the most detail-oriented director I’ve ever worked with—so specific, yet it’s all coming from this sweet soft-spoken lady. It was a dream. I just wish this shoot was longer. I’ve been on movies for six months at a time; I wish this were that long because I was just having so much fun.

What’s different about Sofia’s choices?

There’s a scene where I’m in the car while Elle is crying. My instinct was to pull the car over and talk to her, and she [Sofia] said, “When I was growing up, I think there’s something just about a hug that’s a more subtle way to approach it. If you pull over and make a big deal out of it then it sometimes causes more emotion and more sadness. Sometimes if you can just protect them and make them feel a little safer—” It’s definitely trickier as an actor to do it, but looking at the film, I think it was the perfect choice. If I had pulled over and had this one-on-one talk with her, it might not have worked.

The twin stripper scenes with Johnny also seem like a uniquely Sofia choice—they may be the most mundane, minimalist strip scenes in all of movies.

I love how she cuts from that long cigarette scene right into that one, like he probably said, “Let’s get another show going.” It’s like that depression when days go slow and you have this emptiness inside and you look at your watch and only 40 minutes has passed, even though it feels like it should be the next morning. The clock is just moving so slow for him and I just kept trying to think of that when I smoked that cigarette: “Well . . . I guess I’ll call the girls.” He doesn’t even care, really. He’s bored by it. He’s in a sad place.

Until Elle comes into the picture—and she does some amazing things. Were you nervous at all about diving into such a serious film opposite a young actor challenged to do some pretty heavy things?

I knew that was going to be the challenge and I was a little nervous. But when I met Elle, there was this effortless chemistry we had that just felt very natural—mixed with all the cool exercises that Sofia gave us. Normally, a director would want to hang out with her stars and actors. In this case, she [Sofia] really wanted us to hang out alone. One day, I had to pick Elle up at school; I was cleared by her parents to take her out for ice cream and do something for a couple of hours. Immediately driving over, I felt like the character. I’m driving over there and my car smells like smoke, and I’m like, “Jesus, Stephen, you need to get this together. You’re picking up Elle Fanning: you better get on your game, you better be driving right, you better be sure she’s wearing her seat belt, get some air freshener in here, let’s stop smoking up this car.” I’m not a father, but I do have two little sisters and there comes some responsibility from that, which I explained to Sofia early on. I said, “I don’t have a kid, but I do have a 10-year-old sister who has a very unique banter with me, and I think I can pull from this.” Elle was my equal, and sometimes I forgot that she was 11. Sometimes I still forget that she’s 11 because she’s going to be six feet tall. She’s growing like crazy, and I tell her to slow it down until we get through the release because I feel like mini-me when I stand next to her on the red carpet. She said she was trying.

Related: Vanity Fair spotlights Elle Fanning.