Diane Lane Unfaithful

DIANE ON THE FAST LANE

Diane Lane/Unfaithful Interview by Paul Fischer in Los Angeles.

Diane Lane is a remarkable 36. It seems that the older she gets, the more alluring she becomes. "I would hope that'd be the case, otherwise, you know, you'd just jump off a bridge at 35, right?" she questions laughingly. As exemplified in her latest film, the erotically-charged drama "Unfaithful", Lane has no fear about being full-on sexy on screen, as she shares some sizzling moments with her French co-star Olivier Martinez in Adrian Lyne's latest extramarital thriller. "I think you get better at things, old things," she explains when asked why she still revels in doing sex scenes as she gets older.

Lyne's film, a loose remake of Claude Chabrol's 1969 thriller "La Femme Infidele", centres on a couple living in the New York City suburbs whose marriage goes dangerously awry when the wife indulges in an adulterous fling with a suave and charming young Frenchman. Lane is no stranger to extramarital affairs - on screen at least, having also cheated on her husband in the acclaimed "Walk in the Moon". "It's called being cast against type", she responds laughingly. "Unfaithful" is a searing, chillingly honest look at the psychology of infidelity through the eyes of a seemingly happily married couple. Lane sees the piece as, "a case study of the human frailty of human being. In that when you're unguarded in your convictions, you become lax and I think it takes a lot of vigilance to remind yourself of why you made the choices you made and go with them or be true to them," Lane explains.

She has difficulty deciding whether or not she can relate to any of that. "It's different when you live day-in and day-out with someone versus my history. I mean, time and preparation can create this relationship that's in your mind and then you show up for it before you're like: Hey, wait a minute, I spent too much time with you in my life. You're a disappointment. You tend to disappoint yourself in a relationship because you had too much time to think about it and not enough time to actually live it, so that's the opposite problem. I don't really know how to relate to a long-term day-in day-out kind of comfortable relationship," she says, having been once married to French actor Christopher Lambert. "Things do tend to get traded; comfort gets traded for passion for instance. Of course it doesn't have to be that way and in this movie, Adrian is really good at telling these cautionary tales of, you know, keeping your knickers buttoned up," she adds with a chuckle.

Lane's other attraction to working on "Unfaithful", was the chance to work with the director of "Flashdance". "I really wanted to see it because it was so bloody popular, and I just thought, what is that about somebody who can have the gift of being so timely in what they're telling." In "Unfaithful", Lane plays a wife and mother, and of course found it interesting to draw on her own maternalism. "It's instinct. I mean it's all you can do to say: well this is MY version, but everybody's got a version of their mother who they want to see, but I think I did the best I can with that."

Throughout the course of her career, the alluring actress has done her share of nude scenes, and "Unfaithful" is no exception, but at least in the case of THIS film, they are relevant, she insists. "I think in this story it's so necessary. There is no way of telling or making a sexy movie without sex in it, without it being sexy or whatever; it's part of the context of what it's about: Sexual infidelity and its repercussions."

Times have changed since the incredibly youthful 36-year old burst onto the screen as a child actress in the sweet romantic charmer "A Little Romance". Since then, audiences have watched the star transform herself, first into adolescent, then sexy young adult and now as a still beautiful on-screen wife and mother, while off-screen, the ex-wife of Christopher Lambert has only introduced her daughter [Eleanor Jasmine Lambert] to "A Little Romance". "Despite the fact that my character runs away to kiss a boy in Venice," she laughingly adds. Clearly she won't be in a hurry to screen "Unfaithful" to her any time soon.