By James Mottram
One minute you’re on the beach in Florida enjoying the very American tradition of Spring Break, and the next you’re the star of the new film from one of the world’s foremost female directors. It’s one of those classic too-ridiculous-to-be-true casting stories, but in the case of Sasha Lane, it’s 100% true. The now seventeen-year-old was soaking up the sun when British director, Andrea Arnold (Red Road, Wuthering Heights, Fish Tank), bailed her up, and invited her to do some improvisation sessions with two actors that she’d already cast in her upcoming film, American Honey. After a few more in-depth conversations, Lane was gifted the lead role of Star, an adolescent girl from a troubled home who runs away with a travelling sales crew who drive across the American Midwest selling magazine subscriptions door to door.
“I think it was because I stood out,” says Lane when FilmInk asks why she thinks Arnold picked her from the hundreds of other Spring Breakers innocently lolling around on that Florida beach. Exotic and dynamic, Lane – who had never previously considered becoming an actress – was born in Dallas, but her mother actually hails from New Zealand. Not surprisingly, the teenager and her friends were more than a little sceptical upon Andrea Arnold’s direct approach. “Some of them were googling it, and one of them was like, ‘Let’s leave,’” Lane Laughs. “But they were so stoked for me from the beginning. I was switching my bags over from their car to Andrea’s car, and they were going back to Texas like I was supposed to be doing. And they were just like, ‘You good? Are you sure? Hit me up, I know where you are’ type thing. They’re still stoked for me, and I couldn’t be more appreciative of that. It’s such a good feeling.”
Lane hadn’t even heard of Andrea Arnold or her work, but the teenager’s gamble paid off, with American Honey receiving acclaim upon its bow at The Cannes Film Festival, where it picked up The Jury Prize. As she has done with much of her work in shorts and features, Arnold hewed fairly close to real life with American Honey, which brims over with a strange brand of dreamy realism. “I didn’t have a script,” Lane says. “After I met Andrea, I had to go back and finish school, and then I just started filming. I didn’t know anything, which was the whole point: there is no preparation. I feel very close to my character in certain ways, particularly with regards to how her state of mind is from the beginning to the end, and how that changed and transformed. It was really cool just being free, and being very caring and looking out for people. She’s trying to find the beauty in everything, even if it seems silly, and she just wants to find it herself.”
Star attempts to find herself through a hard-partying cross-country jaunt with her new magazine-selling colleagues, played in the most part by other young unknowns and non-actors, save for Shia LaBeouf and Riley Keough. Shot largely as it appears to play out, was the filming process as wild as it looks? “Yeah,” Lane laughs. “More! You got the condensed version. But that’s what helped us constantly stay in it. That’s how it flowed. It was really organic and authentic because Andrea kept us in that little zone. We were in that van, we were in that hotel, and we were with these people constantly, going to all these different places. I loved everyone involved. I know people like them, and I love people like them because they are humans in the truest form.”
Loose, freewheeling, vibrant, sexy, and in-your-face, American Honey feels – like all of Andrea Arnold’s previous films – honest and authentic. “I think it’s very present,” Lane asserts. “Definitely for the youth, I feel like it will hit them harder. But I still think that it’s still very present to everything happening in the world, and what is going on. Because it is now, it’s the life. It’s a present movie, it’s not a futuristic or past type thing. So it’s cool when even older generations, who don’t necessarily know about it, ask, ‘Is that real, because it felt very real?’ ‘Yeah man, that’s what’s going on.’ I like that different varieties of people dig it or can connect to it, or that it makes them think.”
Though studying psychology at the time of her casting, Sasha Lane’s direction in life has now been profoundly course-corrected, with a role already booked in the sci-fi thriller, Hunting Lila. “I’d like to continue acting,” she says, “if I can keep doing it, and it feels good with me. It’s cool because I now believe that I can do anything, and that the opportunities are endless. So who knows? It’s really cool. As far as the study, I do that but in other ways. I learn in other ways. School didn’t feel right with me anyways. So I won’t go back, especially now, because I like to learn in other ways.”
American Honey is released in cinemas on November 3.
