Out this Friday on Paramount+ is Vicious, the latest visceral nightmare from filmmaker Bryan Bertino (The Dark and the Wicked, The Strangers) that stars Dakota Fanning as a woman experiencing the worst night of her life. Vicious centers almost entirely around Fanning’s character, Polly, who lives alone and reluctantly brings an older woman (Kathryn Hunter) out of […]
Dakota Fanning, left, and Writer/Director Bryan Bertino on the set of Paramount Pictures’ “VICIOUS.”
“There were days when I’d be like, ‘Bryan, I don’t know what I’m doing.’ You know what I mean? And he’d be like, ‘All right, this is what we’re doing.’ We’d talk it through. Because it’s a genre that I’m not super familiar with, and there are a lot of technical things. As an actor, I haven’t felt like I’d done a truly pure horror film before. There are a lot of technical things that I have learned a lot about. It was a great challenge for lots of reasons, but the most fun I’ve ever had. Really fun.”
Polly gets put through an extreme gauntlet of physical, emotional, and psychological turmoil as the box tasks her with unthinkable challenges. It’s a steady but brisk escalation of horror and violence, with sustained heightened stress and emotions, a tough role to navigate before you consider that productions often film scenes out of order.
“We actually filmed in order almost totally,” Fanning says. “There were a few things that had to be done out of order because of locations, but for most of it, it was filmed in sequence, which was super, super helpful. Because yeah, it’s like being at a level 10 the whole time. It’s a lot of crying and a lot of screaming. There’s no way around it. You just have to go there and do it. That was something that I was a little nervous about, not knowing what that experience would be like, and whether there would be a day when I just wouldn’t be able to cry anymore. I was like, I don’t know. But for some reason, I was always able to keep it going. Then at the end of the day, you’re just really tired. It’s just a challenge in the stamina that it takes. I’m super impressed by people who are in many horror films, and that’s their genre of choice because it’s hard work. It is hard work.“
Did her challenging but rewarding experience on Vicious deepen Fanning’s relationship with horror or satisfy her artistic curiosity?
“It did both,” she answers. “I think it fulfilled, and then also gave me a little bit of the bug. I think because I’ve grown up acting and grown up on sets, and so I am marrying the technical elements of acting and performing. Being an actor with emotion is something that I love doing in any kind of film, series, or anything. But especially with a horror movie, you’re constantly blending the technical and the emotional, because you’re doing effects practically sometimes and angles of the camera. And again, I think that’s where the partnership between Bryan, Tristan, and me was so helpful that it was so strong. Because you’re like, if you can just do it like an inch to the right, we can make it work. You know what I mean? Sometimes it’s as small as that, the difference between doing something with a visual effect and being able to do something practically.
“It was a really fun puzzle for all of us to try and figure out. Then at the same time, keeping the story and the emotions present and not losing that to the technical. You’re always balancing those two things, especially in this genre, I feel like. I loved that. That was a fun challenge.”
