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Luca Guadagnino: "Working with the actors is one of the things that I love most about my job: when it comes to the creation of an environment using their own bodies, and of course regarding their acting. I know exactly what I'm doing, I'm very focused on it, and the casting is fundamental. Dakota Johnson has been chosen [for the role of Penelope] a long time ago and she goes perfectly along with they way I work. She 'respected' all the rules I set, and was really easy-going with all the other members of the cast and performers."

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Dakota without Shades

“In Venice with a scary role. I’ll be a far more shady seductress than Jane Birkin.” 

“I got into character quite easily.” Her character, Penelope, is a malicious seductress. “She’s a young and precious woman, she’s unclear about who she is and what she wants. She has a great ability, she can play with people’s emotions with such a passionate cruelty.” What do you mean? “She’s a troublemaker with a lot of mystery and that shade of confidence that is nerve-wracking for such a young age. Luca describes her as that moment in your life when you finally realize the true meaning of things inside yourself.”

“She likes to play with the people around her,” says Guadagnino. “She manipulates, in the most childish of ways and doesn’t understand the consequences of her cynicism.”

The cast was chosen and they just missed the actress for the role of Penelope. He was looking for “a beautiful actress that wasn’t one of those gorgeous girls movies are so full of nowadays.” Dakota came in last minute, “It’s not true that Dakota came in last minute and neither the fact that she hadn’t shot Fifty Shades of Grey at the time. He went through many actresses and through Sam Taylor-Johnson (the director that put Dakota under the spotlight), Dakota and Luca met. He’d been really attracted by her attention, the awareness and the humor. He immediately told her he did not intend to turn her into a nymphet, a Lolita.”

A Bigger Splash (that takes inspiration from the colorful painting by David Hockney) is a revisit rather than a remake of the well-known ‘La Piscine’. Dakota: “Luca told me, ‘if you wanna see it, then do it’, but we didn’t really talk much about it. I ran to see Alain Delon and Romy Schneider – such a stunning couple – besides, I’ve always loved Jane Birkin. The original Penelope is much more nicer, she has that sweet innocence. Mine instead is twisted and calculating.” Dakota was disappointed by the fact that she wasn’t on set the day Tilda Swinton sang in a stadium. In reality, it was San Siro and singer Jovanotti ‘landed’ the stage to her just twenty minutes before his concert. The audience has been notified of such thing and it went mad. The director also followed Tilda’s advice on losing her character’s voice, “that is why she’s silent for the whole movie.”

Did Guadagnino warn Dakota that Venice can easily turn into a lions’ den? “I’ve been here six or seven times, either as a director or a judge. I feel at home in Venice, it has been both generous and brutal with me.”

Dakota, one question: you have many tattoos, some of them written in Latin even, and in many scenes you’re just wearing a bikini. “We decided not to hide them because Penelope, like myself, is afraid of regretting something that is permanent. She’s afraid of not being able to change what has been done and can’t be undone. When I was younger, I never truly realized how precious my body was. Penelope, in this story, is not aware of the precious things life has in store for her.”