Dunst said that besides the opportunity to work with Crowe, she chose this part because of the depth of the character. “I don’t read many female characters like this in larger movies. She’s a normal girl. She’s messy and smart and a little crazy (laughing),” explained Dunst.
Kirsten Dunst on Researching Her Role as a Flight Attendant: “I go on enough airplanes so that I’ve observed the airline crews. And my mom was an airline stewardess for 10 years.”
Dunst said that even though she definitely had the knowledge and could have helped her with the role, her mom didn’t coach her. “Her airline experience was much more glamorous than mine. She flew Lufthansa first class so she was eating caviar and drinking champagne.
[She] had a run-in with Keith Richards at one point. She was putting him on a plane and he was sucking and kissing her fingers and telling her he’ll take his bags off the plane and spend time with her. And I know she did send bags to other places when they were mean to her because she worked the ground, too. She was naughty.”
Kirsten Dunst on Fleshing Out Her “Elizabethtown” Character: “I guess in reading the scenes when I first auditioned, I was very comfortable with her vocabulary. I could understand why she was doing things for different reasons. There wasn’t one particular thing, other than she felt like a really sad girl, to me, who really overcompensates for and really gives a lot of herself to other people.”
Kirsten Dunst on Playing a Strong Leading Lady: “It is not just the character. It’s me in the movie, too, so I brought that to it. I wouldn’t do a movie which was just playing the girlfriend, in a way, and didn’t have enough room to express myself. I could put many things in Claire.”
Kirsten Dunst and the “Elizabethtown” Phone Calls: Some of the most critical scenes involving Dunst and “Elizabethtown” co-star Orlando Bloom take place while their characters are chattering away on the phone. Dunst said, “I didn’t talk to Orlando. Only in the bed, for some reason, and that was like his only week off on the film so I was by myself. But I talked to John, the props guy, and Anna Maria, our script supervisor, and anybody who wanted to talk to me - or I just talked to myself.”
Kirsten Dunst on Working with Orlando Bloom: “I think that it was just like we met and we just started a friendship. Here we are in Kentucky and you’re thrown into situations with people, and you hope that they’re somebody who’s open to getting to know each other. It’s important to be on the same team doing this movie together and having so many intimate scenes. So it just became a friendship and appreciation for the other person, and I really cared about him.”
On the Getting the Accent Right: “I didn’t have a dialect coach or anything. I think I just kind of did it. I’d lay it on thicker for when I felt like she was a little bit more acting, putting on a little bit of a role.”
Kirsten Dunst on Orlando Bloom’s Accent in “Elizabethtown:” “It’s hard to, first of all, put down your sword, play Cameron, have an American accent… Just the music of the way an American speaks is so different than a Brit. They’re always asking questions at the end, kind of. And we, I think go down maybe more on our sentences. There’s a lot of things like that where it was really difficult for him.
He had a dialect coach there all the time watching it, which was really hard because sometimes it can be really inhibiting too.”
Kirsten Dunst on Cameron Crowe and Music: “Music’s a tool with every job that I do, what you’re listening to and why you’re listening to it while you’re doing this movie. So, for me, it wasn’t foreign but I did like it sometimes. I love the fact that we had music before a take or during a take, especially when there’s no dialogue. Like in the scene where it’s the morning after we’ve had an evening together and I’m getting my shoes and purse and everything. I asked him if I could do that whole scene to music because there’s something that you feel in the step [with] and the beats of things that has a nice flow to it. It just helps those kinds of times.
I feel like Cameron’s scripts are very musically written, the words are. I’m sure he could tell you which character has which song and why.”
PAGE 2: Kirsten Dunst on Cameron Crowe, Maturing as an Actor, and "Spider-Man 3"
