Shooting stars Alice Englert and Elle Fanning will have a blast in upcoming film Bomb

 Fashion forward: Elle Fanning at the Chanel show during Paris Fashion Week

Hollywood ‘veteran’ Elle Fanning and relative newcomer Alice Englert are about to go nuclear.

The teenagers will lead Bomb, director Sally Potter’s new film about two young rebels at the forefront of political, social and sexual change.

Bomb is set in London in the early Sixties at a time when the Cold War met the sexual revolution.

Filming on the BFI and BBC Films production begins in early February in and around London and the South Coast, with Elle (who appeared in this summer’s blockbuster Super 8) playing Ginger, described as the ‘brainy’ one who wants to get involved with the anti-nuclear movement.

Alice, as Rosa, is more interested in boys.

Elle will play a more grown-up 16 on screen than her real-life 13 while Alice, 17, daughter of Oscar-winning director Jane Campion and film-maker Colin Englert, will play a year younger than her age.

Potter, best known for her celebrated movies Orlando and The Tango Lesson, confirmed the casting, noting that Elle has a ‘subtlety and range beyond her years’. 

‘She can move you to  tears, then light up the room with her radiant smile.’

She said Alice ‘is a beautiful, intelligent young woman with the movies in her bones. Together, playing teenage rebels, they are sure to be a pair of firecrackers.’

Elle has more experience, having made her first major film, I Am Sam, opposite Sean Penn when she was two.

Her credits include The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button and Cameron Crowe’s forthcoming drama We Bought A Zoo.

Co-star: Alice Englert will star alongside Elle Fanning in the upcoming film Bomb, set in London

Alice started as an open-mic performer in Sydney and started acting when cast in Roland Joffe’s movie Singularity, which is shooting now.

And she walked the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival (not her first visit) this year with her mother, so the art of cinema is very much in her blood.

Potter and her producer Christopher Sheppard used Facebook to get candidates to audition.

In all 1,500 girls sent in videos of themselves and Potter and her team met 30.

But, in the end, the two leads were cast the old-fashioned way using gut instinct and a casting director.