kirsten dunst speaks out- part 2

If Kirsten sounds like a therapist, that’s her furthest goal. “I just want to be a good friend to people, that’s all,” she says. With that in mind, she’s trying to form a grassroots organization to help women discuss their problems. She considers Samantha Ronson’s reported relationship with Lindsay Lohan, for instance, a positive influence on teenagers. “I’m sure there are a lot of girls out there who are so much more comfortable because they love Mean Girls and Lindsay’s dating a girl,” Kirsten says. “I think that couldn’t be better. I know them enough to know that, deep down, they’re both sweet girls.”

At the same time, she’s trying to focus on what she does best: making movies. It helps that she fell in love with acting again on the set of the upcoming All Good Things, a murder mystery/love story set in the 1980s in which she plays a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who falls for a disturbed real estate scion (Ryan Gosling).

“I remember reading an article about Jodie Foster, that at one point she wanted to give up acting and go be a ski bum, and then she did The Accused and it reignited her passion for what she does again,” Kirsten says. “All Good Things was a little bit like that for me. After you go through a difficult time, you don’t care anymore. You’re so much more free. You’re not as scared, and you’re not as dependent on what other people think of you.”

The director, Andrew Jarecki (of the Oscar-nominated documentary Capturing the Friedmans), let her make the part her own. “Not everyone wants to see a woman be messy and scream and be angry and sexy and funny all at the same time,” Kirsten says. “That’s what I wanted to do in this movie, and that’s what he let me do. That’s why I think John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands made such amazing things together, because he loved her for every bit of her.”
Though she has spoken for years about wanting to make her own movies, Kirsten finally founded Wooden Spoon Productions with two of her girlfriends this summer. “The more I see and know about life, the more ideas I have and the more I want to make art,” says Kirsten, who also paints and draws in her spare time. “I’ve learned enough and met enough people along the way that I feel like we could put good people together and do amazing things.”

Their first project is a documentary called Why Tuesday?, about the movement to shift Election Day to the weekend so that more Americans can vote. “We’re not going to make a superliberal documentary,” she says of the film, which she plans to coproduce and codirect with Jacob Soboroff, the executive director of the organization Why Tuesday? “I just love this subject matter because it’s nonpartisan. People pay so much attention to celebrities, so if you can say something [positive], you can get things rolling sometimes.”

After that, she hopes to direct some music videos — “I have a lot of good, cheap ideas” — and eventually features. “I know I have it in me,” she says of a career behind the camera. Her aesthetic, at least, is impossibly chic, with references from The Night Porter, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and A Woman Under the Influence peppered through our conversation. “I can put together a nice house,” she says. “Why can’t I put together a good community of people to help me facilitate a vision that I have? It’s easier when you’re famous,” she admits, “[but] I’ve paid my dues, and I get to do what I want to do.”

This month, Kirsten plays a celebrity journalist and aspiring novelist in How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, based on the memoir by Toby Young. “I obviously get that world, but I get the person she is,” she says of the character. “The person who hates she’s in that world ...but who’s doing it anyway.” Kirsten is considering leaving a big part of her world behind by selling the lovely three-bedroom home in which she’s currently sitting to live in Manhattan full time. In New York, she says, it’s easier to blend in. “People don’t care,” she explains. “There are so many interesting people doing more important things.” She hopes to have her TriBeCa apartment, which she purchased in 2007, ready in a year. “I haven’t really started it, and I’m very hands-on. I’m not someone who hires someone to do their houses for them.”

The move would keep her close to one of her favorite hangouts, the Beatrice Inn. “They keep people out who will write stuff and blog about it,” she says. “But I’m not going to go there if what I do is written about. I’m very aware. I’m like an eagle eye. I’m not free as a bird [when I’m there], but I love to dance. And I literally have gone up to people and said, ‘Did you just take my picture?’ I have to protect myself.”

She protects herself in other ways, too, like not speaking about her romantic entanglements. “I don’t look around. If it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t,” she notes. Matt Creed, the DJ she has lately been spotted with, is just a friend, she insists. Rumors about a fling with Justin Long (a.k.a. Drew Barrymore’s ex and the “I’m a Mac” guy) are “the funniest thing on the planet Earth. I don’t know him from Adam. I met him once, and he and his friends were kind enough to walk me home. I’ve never seen him since.” Still, Kirsten would love to start a family. “I can’t wait to have kids one day. I want to have kids and a farm with lots of animals on a lake,” she says. At that point, she’ll maybe even put to music some of the lyrics she’s written in the several years that she’s been teaching herself guitar. For the moment, however, it’s just her and Cat Stevens, her longtime pet kitty, who has been living with her mother, but she plans to make the East Coast trek this fall.

“Listen, I’m happy single or not single,” Kirsten says with authority and a twinkle in her eye. “Everyone has to get to the point where they love themselves. Now I love me, so I’m okay.”