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"  On a shelf in Kirsten Dunst&amp;#039;s cozy Nichols Canyon home, high up in the Hollywood Hills, among volumes of poetry by Anne Sexton and biographies of Zelda Fitzgerald and Deborah Harry (whom she hopes to soon play in a movie about Blondie), sits a plastic-framed copy of L. Ron Hubbard&amp;#039;s Scientology Code of Honor. Kirsten, who has gone by the nickname Kiki since she was a small child and couldn&amp;#039;t pronounce &amp;quot;Kirsten,&amp;quot; is not a Scientologist. This was a relatively recent gift from Tom Cruise, with whom she starred in 1994&amp;#039;s Interview with the Vampire, her breakout film that garnered her a Golden Globe nomination at the age of 12. She likes to show theCodeto everyone who comes to visit, as if it were a piece of artwork like one of the Mari Eastman canvases hanging above her fireplace.  SEE LOOKBOOK: KIRSTEN DUNST Though the 26-year-old clearly keeps the Codearound less for affirmation (it offers wisdom like &amp;quot;Never need praise, approval, or sympathy&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Be your own adviser, keep your own counsel, and select your own decisions&amp;quot;) and more because it&amp;#039;s just so L.A., Kirsten concedes that such advice is nothing to be scoffed at, especially for a young actress who is picked apart in the tabloids and scrutinized in the news media on a regular basis. Indeed, her current philosophy is &amp;quot;Trust yourself first.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s an attitude that came out of her time earlier this year at Cirque Lodge, a rehabilitation facility in Sundance, Utah, where she checked in for depression. Though she confesses she is doing better than ever, she hesitates to talk about the circumstances. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t want to get into too much detail, because I give a quote and then it&amp;#039;s blogged about on the Internet for the rest of my life,&amp;quot; she explains, lighting an American Spirit at her kitchen table. Her hair is long, golden, and healthy, and she wears a casual but chic navy shirtdress. My Morning Jacket, one of her new favorite bands, plays on the speakers. The waft of a jasmine A.P.C. candle fills the room. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t want to be hassled about it. I would like to be a person who can help people, but privately.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;Everyone goes through a hard time in their life,&amp;quot; Kirsten continues, sipping a cup of freshly made coffee with rice milk. &amp;quot;They just don&amp;#039;t have to do it in front of tons of people and with our media the way it is. I did, and I&amp;#039;m lucky that I had the resources and the money to take care of myself. I learned a lot.&amp;quot; She describes herself prior to Cirque Lodge as &amp;quot;enormously co-dependent.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I wasn&amp;#039;t taking care of myself emotionally. I wasn&amp;#039;t expressing my anger. I was making nice all the time. When you spend your entire life as a child actress, being told where to go and where to stand, you&amp;#039;re performing constantly for people. It definitely breeds the kind of person who&amp;#039;s dependent on other people&amp;#039;s approval. If I&amp;#039;d trusted myself and listened to myself all the times that I ignored myself, I would have been \uFB01ne. But everyone has to learn their lesson, and now I&amp;#039;ve got it.  &amp;quot;Now,&amp;quot; she breathes, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m great.&amp;quot;  Women, she believes, have an especially hard time in the Hollywood pressure cooker. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t buy the rag mags, but I was looking at the cover of one, and an actress&amp;#039;s husband apparently had cheated on her. Who knows if it&amp;#039;s true? But they don&amp;#039;t put the guy on the cover, going, Look at what this guy did. They put the girl on the cover, going, Look at what he did to her. That is the stuff that I have no tolerance for,&amp;quot; Kirsten explains firmly. &amp;quot;Guys will go do this, that, and the other and they&amp;#039;re cool, and girls will go out with their friends and do this and it&amp;#039;s &amp;#039;horrendous.&amp;#039; If a guy&amp;#039;s flirting with me, I&amp;#039;m the slut. It can kill a girl&amp;#039;s spirit.&amp;quot; If Kirsten sounds like a therapist, that&amp;#039;s her furthest goal. &amp;quot;I just want to be a good friend to people, that&amp;#039;s all,&amp;quot; she says. With that in mind, she&amp;#039;s trying to form a grassroots organization to help women discuss their problems. She considers Samantha Ronson&amp;#039;s reported relationship with Lindsay Lohan, for instance, a positive influence on teenagers. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m sure there are a lot of girls out there who are so much more comfortable because they love Mean Girls and Lindsay&amp;#039;s dating a girl,&amp;quot; Kirsten says. &amp;quot;I think that couldn&amp;#039;t be better. I know them enough to know that, deep down, they&amp;#039;re both sweet girls.&amp;quot;  At the same time, she&amp;#039;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).  &amp;quot;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,&amp;quot; Kirsten says. &amp;quot;All Good Things was a little bit like that for me. After you go through a difficult time, you don&amp;#039;t care anymore. You&amp;#039;re so much more free. You&amp;#039;re not as scared, and you&amp;#039;re not as dependent on what other people think of you.&amp;quot; The director, Andrew Jarecki (of the Oscar-nominated documentary Capturing the Friedmans), let her make the part her own. &amp;quot;Not everyone wants to see a woman be messy and scream and be angry and sexy and funny all at the same time,&amp;quot; Kirsten says. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s what I wanted to do in this movie, and that&amp;#039;s what he let me do. That&amp;#039;s why I think John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands made such amazing things together, because he loved her for every bit of her.&amp;quot;  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. &amp;quot;The more I see and know about life, the more ideas I have and the more I want to make art,&amp;quot; says Kirsten, who also paints and draws in her spare time. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve learned enough and met enough people along the way that I feel like we could put good people together and do amazing things.&amp;quot; Their \uFB01rst project is a documentary called Why Tuesday?, about the movement to shift Election Day to the weekend so that more Americans can vote. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re not going to make a superliberal documentary,&amp;quot; she says of the film, which she plans to coproduce and codirect with Jacob Soboroff, the executive director of the organization Why Tuesday? &amp;quot;I just love this subject matter because it&amp;#039;s nonpartisan. People pay so much attention to celebrities, so if you can say something [positive], you can get things rolling sometimes.&amp;quot;  After that, she hopes to direct some music videos \u2014 &amp;quot;I have a lot of good, cheap ideas&amp;quot; \u2014 and eventually features. &amp;quot;I know I have it in me,&amp;quot; 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. &amp;quot;I can put together a nice house,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Why can&amp;#039;t I put together a good community of people to help me facilitate a vision that I have? It&amp;#039;s easier when you&amp;#039;re famous,&amp;quot; she admits, &amp;quot;[but] I&amp;#039;ve paid my dues, and I get to do what I want to do.&amp;quot; This month, Kirsten plays a celebrity journalist and aspiring novelist in How to Lose Friends &amp;amp;amp; Alienate People, based on the memoir by Toby Young. &amp;quot;I obviously get that world, but I get the person she is,&amp;quot; she says of the character. &amp;quot;The person who hates she&amp;#039;s in that world\u2009...but who&amp;#039;s doing it anyway.&amp;quot;  Kirsten is considering leaving a big part of her world behind by selling the lovely three-bedroom home in which she&amp;#039;s currently sitting to live in Manhattan full time. In New York, she says, it&amp;#039;s easier to blend in. &amp;quot;People don&amp;#039;t care,&amp;quot; she explains. &amp;quot;There are so many interesting people doing more important things.&amp;quot; She hopes to have her TriBeCa apartment, which she purchased in 2007, ready in a year. &amp;quot;I haven&amp;#039;t really started it, and I&amp;#039;m very hands-on. I&amp;#039;m not someone who hires someone to do their houses for them.&amp;quot; The move would keep her close to one of her favorite hangouts, the Beatrice Inn. &amp;quot;They keep people out who will write stuff and blog about it,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;But I&amp;#039;m not going to go there if what I do is written about. I&amp;#039;m very aware. I&amp;#039;m like an eagle eye. I&amp;#039;m not free as a bird [when I&amp;#039;m there], but I love to dance. And I literally have gone up to people and said, &amp;#039;Did you just take my picture?&amp;#039; I have to protect myself.&amp;quot; She protects herself in other ways, too, like not speaking about her romantic entanglements. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t look around. If it happens, it happens. If it doesn&amp;#039;t, it doesn&amp;#039;t,&amp;quot; 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&amp;#039;s ex and the &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m a Mac&amp;quot; guy) are &amp;quot;the funniest thing on the planet Earth. I don&amp;#039;t know him from Adam. I met him once, and he and his friends were kind enough to walk me home. I&amp;#039;ve never seen him since.&amp;quot; Still, Kirsten would love to start a family. &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t wait to have kids one day. I want to have kids and a farm with lots of animals on a lake,&amp;quot; she says. At that point, she&amp;#039;ll maybe even put to music some of the lyrics she&amp;#039;s written in the several years that she&amp;#039;s been teaching herself guitar. For the moment, however, it&amp;#039;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.  &amp;quot;Listen, I&amp;#039;m happy single or not single,&amp;quot; Kirsten says with authority and a twinkle in her eye. &amp;quot;Everyone has to get to the point where they love themselves. Now I love me, so I&amp;#039;m okay.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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