Queen Of The Wood Nymphs

Who else but KIRSTEN DUNST could star in the Rodarte sisters’ trippy first film?

- Amy Larocca

THREE GREAT FRIENDS— THE ACTRESS KIRSTEN DUNST AND LAURA ANDKATE MULLEAVY, the fashion-designing wonder siblings behind the craft-meets high-fashion line Rodarte—are sitting in a booth at Smoke House, an old-school Hollywood place with red leather booths and headshots on the wall just across from the Warner Bros. lot in the valley. They are discussing Woodshock, a dreamy, trippy feature film—a meditation on grief, destruction, and psychedelic drugs— that will be released September 22. The movie was written and directed by the Mulleavys; Dunst served as an executive producer and the film’s star.

“We went on a trip to Florence together in about 2011,” Laura says. The sisters had already drafted a short version of a script, “and we drank so much limoncello and we started talking about it.”

“We’re all so emotionally interconnected,” Kate explains.

“I was the first actress to wear their clothes,” says Dunst. “It was while I was doing press for Spider-Man, and it was this black dress with chains that it turns out were sewn by their mother, and they sent me a box of trinkets—we were all just so excited.”

“Artistically, I think you just meet someone you’re supposed to work with,” Kate says. Both sisters are big talkers: articulate in describing their intentions and their art. Dunst is a bit more reserved. “Laura and I are a very internal network, so for me, writing a script, we didn’t talk to anyone about it,” says Kate. “So for us to sit down with Kirsten and say, ‘Let’s get through a really early state of something,’ that was a big deal.”