Jessica Lange, Joan Allen and Kathy Bates in Bonneville Courtesy of SenArt Films

On coming of age later on in life
JOAN ALLEN: You can come of age at many times in your life. I think it's a common feeling. My mother is ninety years old and she still is fortunate to live in her own home. My hope is that she never has to go into a nursing home…in my neighborhood, on [New York's] Upper West Side, there's a nursing home, and I can see in the windows. When I walk past it on the street [and see] all the people having their dinners and [I think]: "So you've lived a certain way for seventy or eighty years, and you have to change again because now you're not living in your home, you're living in a new environment. You've got to make new friends." So life keeps asking things of you no matter how old [you become]. So I think this film really is sort of about that. It's about Jessica's character learning to live by herself. And it's about my character learning to maybe be a little more open and realize that the world is bigger than what she has experienced before.

JESSICA LANGE: Well no, I think each character is on some kind of a learning curve happening. And like Joan touched on, my character…is a woman who up until the time she met her husband twenty years earlier was leading a very, very sheltered life. She met this man who to her was kind of this extremely charismatic, bigger than life person, who took her on these incredible journeys. And she traveled the world. He was an anthropologist. She traveled the world with him and saw [different] cultures. But it was always in the shadow of this man. And I think for a lot of women that happens. Through your marriage or through home and family or whatever, you don't really strike out on your own. And now she is—not by choice, but by circumstances—forced to really strike out on her own. And she understands by the end of the movie that she'll be all right and that she can do it. And she doesn't need all these trappings that are left over from her marriage or from her previous life. And I think that is for my character the kind of monumental life change that she experiences.

On the stresses of celebrity for young female celebrities (as compared with Lange's depiction of Frances Farmer's downfall in her Academy Award-nominated performance)
JESSICA LANGE: Well, with Frances, so many forces conspired against her: the studio system that was in place in the 30's and 40's, her mother who was instrumental in her kind of demise, the fact that she was—and I think this is the biggest problem—alone. She really had nobody to champion her and to stand up for her.

So in relation to the young girls today where you see this happening, where they seem to kind of self-destruct in front of the world, I think [it is] just terrible. My heart goes out to all of them: to be so in the public eye that no matter what you experience, you don't have the privilege of just doing it privately. I really do think it's a terrible system that they're experiencing. When I first started, we weren't scrutinized like that [with] constant paparazzi, headlines day in and day out. Every single move that you make is recorded now, and not only recorded in newspapers and these weeklies but with the advent of the internet, you can be walking down the street one minute and the next minute it's on the internet. I think it's a hard time. And especially for young people [who] don't have anything to fall back on, [that] don't have the family or don't have the foundation of a place that they're from. They really are taking some hard hits out there. And I do have tremendous sympathy for them.