interview | SARAH POLLEY - Polley’s Unforgettable Debut
In adapting a classic Canadian story about a woman losing her mind to Alzheimer’s, actor
Sarah Polley makes her first big-screen directing effort one to remember
By Christopher DiRaddo
Sarah Polley walks into the Café Mélies dressed in black from head to toe, except for a bright pink scarf. The young filmmaker is in Montreal doing interviews for her big-screen directorial debut, Away from Her, and is happy to finally be asked questions she feels she can capably answer.
“[Doing interviews] used to be a really agonizing part of the process for me, and it isn’t any more,” she confides, smiling. “It’s liberating to really know what you’re talking about and have a lot to say…. It’s so much more comfortable.”
At 28 years old, Polley is one of Canada’s best-known talents. With two Genies and two Geminis under her belt, she has already had a long and varied career as an actor and has worked with some of the country’s greatest directors, including Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter) and David Cronenberg (eXistenZ).
Now she can officially count herself among their ranks.
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Above: Sarah Polley directs Away from Her. This picture: Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent in the film
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Based on the short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" by famed Canadian writer Alice Munro, Away from Her tells of one man’s love for his fading wife and the lengths he’s willing to go to for her happiness.
Grant (Gordon Pinsent) and Fiona (Julie Christie) are a childless couple in their golden years. Their bliss, however, erodes as Fiona begins to misplace things. The couple nervously jokes about her absent-mindedness, but it’s soon apparent that Fiona is in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s. Or, as Fiona puts it, “I think I may be beginning to disappear.” The couple reluctantly places Fiona in a retirement home, an action that will ultimately take her further and further from her husband.
The film is beautifully shot, faithful to the original work, and features powerful performances by Pinsent and Christie. Polley says she first had the idea to adapt the short story after reading it on a flight back from shooting the 2001 film No Such Luck in Iceland with actor Julie Christie.
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“I was so unbelievably moved by the story. I had just finished working with Julie Christie, and as I read I kept seeing Julie’s face in the character of Fiona.”
Polley began to cast the rest of the film in her head, but took two years before she actually committed herself to the project.
“I was definitely nervous because [Alice Munro] is somebody who I am quite reverential of myself and I know that whenever anyone else has adapted her work, I’ve been overly critical of it. So it wasn’t something I took lightly.”
This isn’t the first time that Polley has brought one of Canada’s great storytellers to the screen. In 2004, she adapted, and directed, a Carol Shields story for TV’s The Shields Stories.
“I think it is important, culturally, to be telling indigenous stories wherever you happen to be from,” she says, quite proudly. “I’m from Ontario and I feel that it’s good to adapt an Ontario writer. It’s what I know.”
Polley doesn’t see her filmmaking choices as political, but even so, her big-screen directing debut does speak to her personal politics. Throughout her career Polley has been very critical of the Hollywood machine. She has turned down many plum roles in order to appear in independent and locally produced work. Away from Her seems to be an extension of that.
In addition to being based on a Canadian short story, the film was shot in Ontario with a cast that includes many Canadians. The film also features excerpted work by other Canadian authors (Michael Ondaatje and Alistair MacLeod), and big-name Canadian recording artists (k.d. lang and Neil Young) appear on the soundtrack. It would seem, at its heart, Away from Her is an inherently Canadian picture.
“In a strange way I think we go so out of our way to disguise our identity when we’re making films,” says Polley, adding that she thought the film would be much more interesting if it was specific to the place in which it was set. “It comes across as a bit of a political statement but, in fact, I think there’s just no will on my part to disguise the film or make it too universal…. I just didn’t try to hide where we were.”
Having enjoyed successful screenings at such prestigious film festivals as Sundance, the Berlin International Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival, Away from Her is set to open across Canada on May 4th.
“I feel like everything that could have possibly happened to the film has happened and way more,” says Polley, “so at this point I’m thrilled.”
Christopher DiRaddo is a Montreal-based freelance writer.
The WOOING of Julie Christie
Julie Christie is a reluctant actress. “I don’t like making films very much,” she says wryly, during an interview at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival. “It interrupts my life. I have a lack of desire to create except what I want to create, be it a garden or a piece of writing.”
In fact, over the course of her career Christie has built a reputation for turning down roles, and turning her back on Hollywood. The actress lit up the screens in the 1960s, most famously as Lara in Dr. Zhivago, and has spent the better part of three decades eschewing fame, and choosing her roles carefully. So how did Sarah Polley convince her to play Fiona in Away from Her? It helped that the two are friends having made two films together, 2001’s No Such Thing and 2005’s The Secret Life of Words.
“Sarah was embarrassed to ask me because she knows me, and she knows my lack of ambition. But she persisted and persisted, and I resisted and resisted. Eventually I thought, ‘If I don’t do this, someone else is going to have the experience of Sarah’s first film,’” Christie says. “I was becoming jealous of that other person who would be having that closeness to Sarah, having that experience of one of the most important things in your friend’s life,” she says.
When Christie chooses a role, there is a long list of criteria that need to be met. “I look at the script and think: Is the writing good? Does it make sense? Has it got integrity? Is it intelligent?”
According to Christie, Away from Her received ticks in all the boxes. “It is a terribly, terribly good script. But I didn’t realize that until I saw the film. The first time I saw the film I thought, ‘My God, this woman’s a filmmaker.’ And I don’t think that about many filmmakers. But Sarah has it in her gut.”
Christie says doing Away from Her was “absolutely the right decision,” adding that, though she might not enjoy celebrity, film is a different matter.
“Film is a wonderful media, and I’m flabbergasted by good actors. Gordon [Pinsent], Michael [Murphy], Olympia [Dukakis]…are all wonderful actors doing this magic. You are given enormous pleasure with acting, as you are with painting or music. I would never underestimate the arts. They feed the soul.” —Erin Phelan