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.”

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.