Diane Lane on Married Life: “It’s nice to be married to a younger man – according to the magazine cover I read recently. I said, ‘Do you know what that makes me? Don’t answer that.’ I don’t know. I figure if you go to high school together it’s not an issue. If you could have gone to high school together. I love it. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I feel like we’ve been married either 10 minutes or 10 years, we can’t tell. Which I take as a good sign.”
Diane Lane on the Importance of Her Roles in “A Walk on the Moon,” “Unfaithful” and “The Perfect Storm:” “They each [were important] for different reasons. I mean, ‘Unfaithful’ was just out of the ballpark. That was crazy. I never expected to be nominated in my life. It’s a dream that you don’t admit you dream.
“A Walk on the Moon” was wonderful because it turned out to be such a great movie, and it’s a first time director. He was brilliant and the script was great and every character was fleshed out in that movie, which I think is critical. And ‘The Perfect Storm,’ it’s as though my career began then because a whole other thing happened. I was in a blockbuster, or whatever that title means. ‘Made 10 Million Dollars in 8 minutes.’ When that kind of thing happens to you, you’re the girl in ‘Perfect Storm.’
That can happen to you at any moment, I figured out. Because you’re in a movie that everybody’s seen and it’s a very different experience for me. I made lots of movies. People sometimes didn’t even realize I was still working because I’d just enjoy working and take the jobs I was handed and be grateful to be working, because being an actor is very nervous. You’re always nervous about the next job. So that’s what changed it for me was being in a summer blockbuster and then I was ‘the girl in…’”
On Being Where She Currently is in Her Career: “It’s a glass of water, you kidding? If you’re really thirsty, you guzzle it but at the same time, I take it with a grain of salt because I’d hate to become attached. You know what I mean?”
If She’d Achieved This Success 10 Years, Would It Have Changed Her Outlook?: “I don't know. I think - wow, that’s an interesting question. It’s hard to say. Any level of maturity or wisdom that I can gain is a huge help to dealing and coping with success. What are all these theories that go around? Fear of success and yada yada yada… And people were tired of asking me questions and I was tired of dealing with the questions and coming up with all the answers. So now I can just say, ‘Yes, thank you, and please,’ and get on with it. ‘What’s your next one?’ That kind of thing because I felt like there was a stigma, there was more expected of me and I was quite content to just be working. I felt this pressure. So after ‘Perfect Storm,’ then there was that to live up to. Oh, that’s a different thing.”
Diane Lane on Her Character in “Truth, Justice, and the American Way:” “Her name is Toni Mannix and that is such a great name. I just can’t believe it wasn’t fictitious. It was a real woman named Toni Mannix and she was the paramour of George [Reeves]. She was the wife of the general manager of MGM, but in the ‘50s they found a way to make arrangements. George and she were a couple for nearly a decade. Quite a while, eight years.”
On Ben Affleck as George Reeves: “He’s great. It was interesting because it was right in that moment prior to he and Jennifer [Garner] getting married. He’s just so charming and so in love and so happy. I was just really happy for him because it’s a great role.
He had a really good time. I know he had a really good time delving into this character. The truth is stranger than fiction so we’re making this quasi-nonfiction movie. We’re telling the various possible scenarios of what occurred there. This guy had three autopsies performed on him so that’s why it behooves a movie to be made about his story.”
Does “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” Solve the Mystery of Reeves’ Death?: “I think it’s left up to the audience to form [an opinion], which I think is much more interesting. Even us as actors were going, ‘Do you really think she arranged for him to be killed? I mean, come on.’ So and so saying this and various people, some saying he did kill himself but then why would he arrange his life in such a way right before doing it? It doesn’t seem like an off the cuff decision.”
Ben Affleck and Reeves-isms: “He’d always say ‘faster than a speeding bullet’ and I wanted to tell him, ‘That wasn’t his character talking. That was the announcer talking.’ But he loved the sound of it. He’d say it all the time and he’d crack us all up. We just would crack up. We had a great time.”
