Diane Lane is sharing how being a mom to her daughter, Eleanor Lambert, helped shape her performance as matriarch Ellen Taylor in new psychological thriller Anniversary.
“Once you are a parent, you don’t feel like you have to pretend as much,” Lane, 60, exclusively told Us Weekly at the film’s New York City premiere on Tuesday, October 21. “I understand the need for each generation to have its own set of identity that feels as though it cannot be understood by the previous one. So with great patience and hope as a parent, you’re going to be able to bridge the quote on quote ‘divide.’”
Lane, who shares Eleanor with first husband Christopher Lambert, continued, “But at the same time, I think every 80 years, we achieve a blind spot to our own history, which is probably why we tend to repeat it in an 80-year cycle where each generation seems surprised. And yet if you look at history, it’s not so surprising.”
Anniversary, which hits theaters on Wednesday, October 29, follows the close-knit Taylor family as they find themselves caught in the tumultuous rising movement known as “The Change.” Lane plays Ellen, a college professor who discovers that her son, Josh (Dylan O’Brien), is dating her former student Liz (Phoebe Dynevor), with whom she had a complicated past.
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As the film progresses, Liz’s radical political views spawn the “Change,” which promotes a one-party government system, and the increasingly popular movement begins to threaten Ellen and her family’s lives, as well as the fabric of the nation itself. Kyle Chandler, Zoey Deutch, Madeline Brewer and McKenna Grace also star.
While speaking with Us on Tuesday, Lane explained that “nobody is untouched by the word ‘change,’” which is why Anniversary felt like an important story to tell.
“[Change] has been promised by politicians every time we have a voting cycle,” she said, noting that “the war for people’s hearts and minds and the vitriol that gets utilized” is something that the film’s director and cowriter Jan Komasa “knows a lot about.”
“As a Polish citizen, his country has certainly been yanked around and survived a lot of invasive ideologies, to put it mildly,” she continued. “So I felt like we were in good hands with [him] here. He knows exactly what he’s doing, and I’m a fan of his previous work. We were his first English-speaking film, so it was an honor.”
Lane certainly has an eye for projects, as she has scored an array of Oscar, Emmy and Golden Globe nominations throughout her illustrious career. According to the Unfaithful star, there have also been “plenty” of regrets she and her friends laugh about when it comes to their choice of roles.
“You go with the flow and you roll with the punches and you say, ‘Well, next time I’ll know better,’ ” she told Entertainment Tonight in a Monday, October 20, interview. “I don’t mind making mistakes as long as I don’t lose the lesson. For actors, sometimes it’s on film forever and you’ve got to enjoy that too. It keeps you humble.”
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Lane pointed to Jack, the 1996 Francis Ford Coppola film she starred in opposite Robin Williams about a boy who ages four times faster than normal, as a project that may not be critically acclaimed, but still holds a “special place” in her “library.” (Lane played Jack’s mother, Karen, in the dramedy.)
Lane credited her love for the film to Williams, who she called “a breath of more than fresh air” who “set the bar so high in terms of good energy.” (Williams died by suicide in 2014 at the age of 63.)
“He brought all of it with him,” she recalled. “So in that way, I thought that the gift was very appropriate coming from him, because he could play all the parts in all the plays.”
Anniversary hits theaters on Wednesday, October 29.
