Jessica Lange in Bonneville Courtesy of SenArt Films

On roles in film for older women:
JESSICA LANGE: I think there is a large kind of void of movies that deal with women. [But] it's a business, so if this does well, they'll make more of these. But I do think that women are interested in seeing movies about themselves and I don't think they often have the opportunity. Those aren't the movies that are playing in the theaters for the most part.

On finding inspiration for their characters:
JESSICA LANGE: Well, the kind of the assignment that I gave myself when I started this film was how to make manifest, how to make physical the process of grieving, without breaking down and weeping and all of that. But I wanted to track this woman and the kind of the ebb and flow of the waves of grief—because grief is so interior, so internal—to try to make a way the audience feel or observe what she was going through without the most obvious kind of choices. So it was a bit of a challenge just on that level.

And I found that there's been a lot of course written about grieving and I read a lot of it. But the most helpful thing to me throughout the whole thing actually was Joan Didion's book that came out about the time we began shooting this, The Year of Magical Thinking. I thought it was very serendipitous to come upon that just as I was beginning this film, because if you remember, her book, the first line is: "Life changes in an instant". You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. I'm paraphrasing. But that was how my character enters the story, having just experienced that. So I really found that the book, her writing, was incredibly helpful to me throughout. And I mean that was what I was looking for: when she talked about feeling invisible and the transparency of it. So it was interesting, an interesting challenge, as an actor.

JOAN ALLEN: I did some reading in New York before I left, but spent time over the course of about a week with three different Mormon families: one was a couple who were sort of assigned by the church to give newcomers to town a tour of Temple Square [in Salt Lake City] and take you around. And then there's this unbelievable store that you can go shopping in that's for Mormons. I was like: "Whoa! This is really wild!" And very expensive. And then I spent time with one family in particular. The mother was very generous with her time, and she took me to a woman's night at the church, which was really interesting. And the two topics that night were making some kind of taco and hairstyles. So you could choose which room you were going to go to. There was a general discussion first amongst the women for like an hour about relevant church topics. And the camaraderie was really amazing, and the women were very intelligent.

I was enlightened, illuminated quite a bit. It's a complex religion. I'm not a religious person that way but it's intriguing to find out about something because I think tolerance is important. And I found it intriguing [that] there are these different levels of heaven and you can baptize people by proxy. It's out there. [Latter Day Saint leader Joseph Smith] found these books under a stump. It stretches my credibility. But one of the great bonuses of being an actor is you get thrown into a world that you just would never imagine yourself in. And you can do it with the safety net of knowing you don't have to live in that world or adopt the belief system or whatever, but you can experience it, which can be really fascinating.