At its core, director Griffin Dunne's Fierce People is largely a movie about class and cultural clash, so it’s no wonder that a conversation with Diane Lane about the predominant themes under the microscope in the film — the collision of haves and have-nots, with almost everyone screwed up in their own way — revolves largely around the sociological differences, real and perceived, between the rich and the rest of us. “I think people tend to group together with whoever makes them feel more accepted, and water does seek its own level,” Lane says during a recent interview, decked out in a fashionable red dress, accentuated with a smattering of gold jewelry. “So within any level you’re going to find subgroups; the self-destructive types, the philanthropic types, the types who are obsessed with other people or people obsessed with themselves.”



“People who have more money to spend like to hang out with people who have more money to spend, because they don’t feel like freaks,” Lane adds. “ So people do hang out… in order to feel included and not excluded. And if you start to spend that much time together, you wind up excluding anyway, just a certain group of people. But I don’t know which came first, the chicken or the egg.”

The conundrum of privilege is a matter of which Lane has seen both sides. At 13, she made her film debut opposite Laurence Olivier, and the following year was on the cover of Time, emblematic of Hollywood’s younger generation of so-called “Whiz Kids.” After the one-two punch of The Outsiders and Rumble Fish in 1983, Lane appeared poised to write her own ticket for pretty much the rest of the decade. But then, Streets of Fire and The Cotton Club bombed, she turned down Splash, and suddenly Lane’s rising star took a hit. Apart from the 1989 miniseries Lonesome Dove, for which she was nominated for an Emmy Award, Lane spent the better part of the next 15 years working in mostly forgettable fare. “I always was working, but never in things that were necessarily aiming high in terms of the money they would make,” Lane says. “No expectation was attached to me, I was just allowed to work, which was fine with me, because then there was no burden on me to deliver.” It wasn’t until 1999’s A Walk on the Moon, opposite Eastern Promises star Viggo Mortensen, that people remembered she could act, Lane says. “That was good, because then I was afforded movies that people would see,” she recalls.

For Lane, it was the cracked characters and some unanticipated narrative twists that made her want to sign on for Fierce People in the first place. “It reminds me a little bit in my most enthusiastic, hopeful way, of Little Miss Sunshine, in that you visit all these characters, you see all these points-of-view, and it’s not a feel-good movie, but it’s a complete journey. Every character has an arc, more or less.” For the full interview, from FilmStew, click here.