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Who would think a spring break trip would turn into this?
Oct 7, 2016, 8:34 AM | Updated: 8:34 am
Like a lot of 19-year-olds, Sasha Lane wasn’t sure what she was going to do when she grew up.
“I was in school. I was studying psychology and social work. I was just aimlessly walking around trying to figure out what I was doing in life,” she explained.
But while she was spring-breaking with friends in Florida, she got offered the chance of a lifetime. Veteran director Andrea Arnold approached her out of the blue.
Sasha would spend that spring and summer starring in one of the best films of this year, “American Honey.”
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Sasha plays one of an oddball collection of drifting teenagers who travel the country, mostly the Midwest and the South, selling magazine subscriptions to well-meaning suckers.
Director Andrea Arnold specializes in films with non-professional casts — Shia LaBoeuf is the only “name” actor in this cast — so Sasha found herself mostly surrounded by people who had as little experience as she did. The camaraderie captured on film was no accident or cinematic trick.
“That is my family, that is my heart,” she said. “We bonded really hard immediately.”
Sasha traveled with the film when it premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, a trip she still can’t quite get over.
“It’s so weird to be taken care of,” she said.
And what was it like to see herself on the big screen?
“Super mind-blowing,” she said. “It was such a surreal moment.”
Sasha says her character, Star, learns a great life lesson over the course of the movie.
“I think now she knows there’s a world and life outside the world she grew up in,” she explained.
That turns out to be parallel to her own life. She now knows anything can happen, because it already has.
Movie trailer below.
