Q&A: Sarah Polley
by Bilge Ebiri
May 4, 2007
Sarah Polley has grown up before our eyes. It seems like only yesterday she was playing a teenage piano student in Atom Egoyan's masterpiece Exotica. But in the intervening years, the lovely, supremely talented Canadian actress has taken on tougher and more complex roles, including a club kid in Go, a mother of two struck with a terminal illness in My Life Without Me and a Balkan war victim in The Secret Life of Words. Perhaps it was an obvious next step for her to start directing, and to choose for her debut the moving, understated drama Away from Her, a faithful adaptation of Alice Munro's short story "The Bear Came Down the Mountain." A study of Alzheimer's and the strange nature of romantic devotion, the film is an astonishingly mature achievement — for anyone, let alone a twenty-eight year old. We spoke to Polley about the difficulties of adaptation, and about the peculiar experience of directing, after so many years on the other side of the camera.
— Bilge Ebiri
What made you want to adapt this story?
On a basic level, it was the most profoundly moving love story I'd ever read. It was so honest, and I was drawn by the couple at its center. It was interesting to see an exploration of love when it's not at its beginning. It was extremely rich and insightful about these people who had spent decades together, and who had these very tangible bonds. It's rare enough in literature, but it's extremely rare in film.
When you decided to make a feature, were you looking to adapt someone else's work?
Not at all. I had been working on some original screenplays. I didn't think of adapting something, and I was pretty torn after reading this. On the one hand, I thought it would be the worst thing in the world to wreck a story so beautiful. But at the same time, I couldn't stop seeing Julie Christie's face when I thought of the story. The cinematic images in the story kept growing in my head. Also, at the time I read the story, I'd just finished acting in a Hal Hartley film [No Such Thing] with Julie, which we shot in Iceland in 2001. The character of Fiona in the story is from Iceland, as well, and the fact that I kept thinking of Julie really meant that there were so many connections with this story. That was another motivating factor, for sure. I resisted for a couple of years, and finally I asked my producer to look into the rights.
This is an extremely faithful adaptation. How did you go about it?
Compared to a lot of adaptations, the story didn't really need much changing. Which was lucky for me, because Alice Munro is a national treasure in Canada — it would have been horrible not to be able to do justice to her work. Structurally, there were things I added, and characters I fleshed out. The trickiest part of writing the script was to find a way to put [Munro's] voice into it. I knew it had to be there. But I didn't know how much, or how little. I experimented with putting some of it in as dialogue. I assumed it'd have to go at some point. But at every read-through of the script, the actors kept making it work as real dialogue, and it kept staying in there.
Was it a strange experience to give up so much control, to leave so much of Munro's story in the finished film?
When you're working with a story that you love, it's actually harder to let go of things. This was a world that I didn't invent; it already existed, and I walked into it. If anything, it made me more control-freakish about how certain phrases were delivered. For example, there's a scene where Grant comes back to the rest home for the first time, to see Fiona, and they have this conversation on the sofa. The scene is pretty much exactly as Alice wrote it in her story. To have that world come alive around you, and to be able to taste and smell what you've been reading, was kind of an incredible experience. When we were shooting it, the light was this strange afternoon sunlight, and it felt perfect. It felt like we had truly wandered into the story.
What are some of the new things you felt you were able to bring to the story?
I think I was able to bring a bit more depth to the world of the retirement home. I remember my experiences looking around for my grandmother's retirement home, and my research into Alzheimer's. I toured lots of facilities while looking for a retirement home, and you always find both incredibly empathetic people working there as well as people who are overworked. Not everybody can have this kind of compassion for everybody. And I also wanted to create more of a cross-section as far as the residents were concerned. A lot of the people in the retirement home in the film are based on people in my grandmother's retirement home.
Did you feel any trepidation at making your first feature film about old age, being fairly young?
I did. I mean, it was especially intimidating to work with people who are so experienced, like Julie, and Gordon [Pinsent]. But luckily, they were incredibly welcoming to me. They wanted me to be a part of their process and were extremely supportive. I think it helped that I was also an actor, and I was able to be a part of that process without feeling too much like an intruder. And of course, I'd worked with Julie before, so that made it a bit easier.
Your film is very austere. There are lots of quiet scenes, for example, where another filmmaker might have put in lots of music.
I think music is a dangerous thing in films. Sometimes, it can feel like an afterthought, like it's just there because someone thought it should be there. In a film like this, you're always in grave danger of manipulating people's emotions too much. I didn't want the music to feel like it was there because I had made a decision for it to be there. I wanted everything to feel more organic. And frankly, music can sometimes wreck a great performance. It can push it a notch over the edge of good. I've seen many great films out there that were wrecked by music. I won't name names, but I see it in mainstream films all the time.
You've worked with a lot of great directors over the years — who would you say are your influences?
Actually, my influences, or my favorite filmmakers, aren't necessarily the ones I've worked with. I'm obsessed with Terrence Malick, and Ingmar Bergman, and Krzyzstof Kieslowski. Atom Egoyan was certainly the first person who introduced me to the idea that film could be meaningful. And he's given me incredible support as I've made my own films. So he's certainly a huge influence.
How do you think having directed a feature like this will affect your acting career?
I don't know. I have to see how it changes me. Obviously, acting requires a lot of energy, both just to do it and to keep your career going. I didn't act during the time I was making this film. I'd like to be able to juggle directing and acting in the future, but at this point, it's hard for me to tell.
©2007 Bilge Ebiri and Nerve.com