Diane Lane stars as FBI Agent Jennifer Marsh in the dramatic thriller Untraceable. Although her character is an expert at investigating criminals on the internet, Lane admits she’d be perfectly happy living in the dark ages, back before cell phones and text messaging. Learning to speak the ‘language’ of a cybercrimes investigator was just as hard as learning a foreign language. “I’m lousy at it. I’m allowed to hang out in the room with these people,” laughed Lane. “I can’t really participate. It’s different. They are born into it. I very reluctantly started paying attention when I was 30. I just don’t have the brain cells to rub together fast enough, you know?”
Lane’s character patrols the internet in search of sexual predators and other criminal activity. When Marsh and her partner Griffin Dowd (Colin Hanks) are made aware of a horribly creepy website – killwithme.com – they don’t initially take the concept seriously. That quickly changes when the site’s owner progresses from killing an animal on camera to human victims. The more users log on to his site, the faster his victims die. It’s up to Agent Marsh and her team of experts to determine the man’s physical location before more men die at the hands of this sick serial killer.
Lane worked closely with an expert in the field in order to get into character. What she learned while doing her research for the film left quite an impression on the actress. “The more I got exposed to the need for these people to exist, they’re angels,” said Lane. “They’re paid to do intervention against malicious attempts on the internet. I’m so naïve I didn’t know that viruses do not spontaneously occur, like in nature. I mean, doesn’t the term virus imply it just grew in a petri dish? We don’t know how. Oh no, some brainiac sat down and figured out how to make everybody miserable, like an arsonist. Why? Do you have nothing better to do with your life? I guess not. I don’t know what to say. I’m so disappointed in human beings and myself for not knowing better.”
Lane has teenagers at home - teenagers who do spend time on the internet. As a parent, Lane has set down rules for using the internet but she realizes, more so now after working on Untraceable, that there’s no way to be too cautious when surfing online. “The concern is in this story people fall victim to what they’re solicited,” explained Lane. “That’s automatically not the smartest choice, you know? You can fall uphill and get lucky or you can fall in the black hole and never come out again in this story. “
“A lot of people online the whole point, certainly when the internet was invented – even before the internet itself – being on computers in the 80s, we would invent a new identity,” said Lane. “And, ‘I’ll be so sexy online,’ and , ‘I’ll be 20 again,’ or whatever people have in their heads. Or, ‘I’ll get all the babes and I’ll have all my hair back,’ whatever people want. This was the vapidity of the original fantasy that people created about what being online was going to do for them. I mean, it’s just the lowest common denominator possible. So, it’s interesting what comes. We think it and then we make it real, to a certain degree. And then we have all these cautionary tales that grow out of it. I’m so glad the FBI exists I can’t tell you, after seeing what’s on the internet and how they’re stopping the bad guys.”
Lane was initially drawn to Untraceable because of the film’s social commentary. The basic premise is both relevant and disturbing. “There’s a couple of different co-existing, I guess, metaphors, if you will, that the film deals with,” explained Lane. “I wanted to know so much what they were going to be having on the radio in my character’s car when I was going to be driving to and from work because, as you can well imagine, it would be the talk everywhere. It would be a global issue. I’m saying here we are in one city dealing with this issue, but it would be global pretty quickly and what would you do to try and shut down and stop people from paying attention, if by paying attention it increased the problem? Therein lies the rub and the indictment of people and the anonymity that people [think] it’s okay. I don’t know what to say. I think there’s a pretty good, not litmus test, of who you are by seeing what you would choose to do alone in a room with a computer for four days. You know who you are by your tastes. You know who you are by that sort of thing, and there you are.”
Lane continued, “The indictment within our story too [is] that this online bad guy is excluding other people, so it’s really just an American indictment issue. He’s accomplishing a lot with one blow; [he has] many agendas. I like movies that make me think. To do a thriller like this, I wanted it to be smart enough to make me think, and it does.”
