Dakota Fanning and Jake Johnson on Their New “Punk Rock” Pic at SXSW

When Jake Johnson and longtime collaborator Joe Swanberg decided to embark on another film together, they knew one thing right away: They did not want to do it in Chicago. “We wanted it to feel different and like we were growing up,” says Johnson, who first starred in Swanberg’s Windy City-set Drinking Buddies in 2013. The result is The Sun Never Sets, an Anchorage, Alaska, dramedy about a woman caught between her divorced-with-children boyfriend (Johnson) and an ex (Cory Michael Smith) who recently moved back to town. They eventually tapped Dakota Fanning for the lead role in what Johnson describes as Swanberg’s “most mature movie yet.” The two stars talk with THR about their new project, which will premiere as a sales title (UTA) at SXSW. What was the first conversation about this movie like?

JAKE JOHNSON Joe called me up and said he had an idea based off his real life that could work for a movie. We started fleshing it out, and then my agent at UTA suggested Dakota, and we both freaked out.

DAKOTA FANNING When the three of us met, it really clicked personality-wise and creativity-wise. I’d never made a movie this way before, and as much as Joe likes to use improvisation, they promised me it would feel like a real movie. There’s never a point where you don’t know what you’re filming. So friends of mine were like, “Aren’t you scared?” But I was at peace with it.

Jake, had you heard the story about Joe’s love triangle before?

JOHNSON I had. We obviously fictionalized and heightened everything. I’m trying to play it lighter than Joe did in real life. For Joe, it was sad, but when I hear it, I do find it funny. This was also a collaboration, and when Dakota came on, it evolved even more.

FANNING When we first met, I told them some bonkers dating stories of mine. I brought my perspective as a 31-year-old woman who’s navigating dating men and what I want and what I’m looking for.

There’s a scene in which your character ditches a first date because she runs into Cory Michael Smith’s character. Has that ever happened to you?

FANNING I’ve never ditched in the middle of a date, but I have lied and said that I’m going home and instead gone and met up with friends.

How did filming in Alaska affect the production?

FANNING Alaska was a big draw for me because I’ve always wanted to go but just hadn’t found the reason. The sun really does not set, and that didn’t bother me, but it did bother Jake.

JOHNSON It’s 11 o’clock at night and you’d see kids at a playground. There’s a scene where my character is on a date, and we go outside the bar and it looks like noon. But it was late at night, there were drunks harassing us. You’d be driving home from the bar and see bar-time vibes in daylight. We shouldn’t see all this stuff — it should be under the cover of darkness.

FANNING I’m not outdoorsy, so that was a difference I embraced. My character, Wendy, works on a construction site. In L.A., it would be unusual to see a young blond woman on a construction site; I can’t stress enough how not unusual that is in Alaska.

Besides the new location, how else did this feel different from past Swanberg movies?

JOHNSON We purposefully did more for this one in terms of budget. What we got excited about in the past was how we could make things on a shoestring budget and how we could counter the overspending of Hollywood. We really thought of that as fun and punk rock. But now, I wanted to be part of allowing Joe to be more than an indie filmmaker who can do it all for nothing.

FANNING It was still punk rock.

JOHNSON But you do get to a point where you’re like, “OK, we’re too old to live in a van like this.”

What does success for this movie look like to you?

JOHNSON Well, Dakota said if this doesn’t do better numbers than the Marvel movies, then it’s a failure. I said, “Lady, you’re a perfectionist and I respect the hell out of you.” But, really, when Joe and I asked ourselves [whether] we should write personal checks and finance a movie again, the goal was to make a movie without real financiers or studios giving notes and messing with it. The real goal is to do it our way, and if we can find an audience who connects with it and really loves it, then this was a big win.

This story appeared in the March 11 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.