Sarah Polley: An Actress With Doubts, but Not About Directing
jaimejeske
April 29, 2007
An Actress With Doubts, but Not About Directing
By Katrina Onstad
IF Sarah Polley were a country, she would be on high alert, code orange.
The fine-boned veteran actress seemed to hover above the restaurant
banquette where she sat, her huge blue eyes apparently unburdened by
eyelids. She was expounding on the slippery sensation of being
interviewed.
"I'm actually a really gregarious, loud person who laughs a lot, but if
you get me into an interview, I start playing a role of myself instead
of myself, and accommodating this image of me that's very serious," she
said. "So these days I'm trying to be less precious, less earnest, and
not worry about it so much." She paused, then burst out laughing. "Oh,
God. I sound earnest about not being earnest!"
Earnestness may not be of much use to the average young movie star, but
it's a quality befitting a writer-director, which Ms. Polley, at 28, has
become. Next month, before sitting on the jury at the Cannes Film
Festival, she joins the ranks of indie auteurs with the release of her
first feature, "Away From Her."
Over lunch in the heart of the fast-gentrifying downtown neighborhood
where she lives, Ms. Polley was reflective, particularly about her
struggle to reconcile a social conscience with the narrow expectations
Hollywood maintains for beautiful blondes. In 1999, she was the one
starlet on the crowded cover of Vanity Fair's Hollywood issue who
publicly scolded the magazine for crediting Tommy Hilfiger as her
clothier when the overalls she wore actually came from a vintage store
in Toronto, purchased by her own hand. With a few exceptions - dealing
ecstasy and hanging with Katie Holmes in "Go," slaying zombies in the
remake of "Dawn of the Dead" - Ms. Polley the actress has rarely left
the borders of the independent film world. She has worked with a long
list of the best studio-free directors around, including Atom Egoyan (on
"Exotica" and "The Sweet Hereafter"), Wim Wenders ("Don't Come
Knocking") and David Cronenberg ("eXistenZ").
"Away From Her" keeps her squarely in the independent milieu. An
adaptation of the Alice Munro short story "The Bear Came Over the
Mountain," it features a rare lead performance from Julie Christie, who
stars opposite the pedigreed Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent ("The
Shipping News"). The pair play Fiona and Grant, a long-married couple
confronting Fiona's Alzheimer's. Fiona enters a nursing home, and Grant
watches - helplessly at first, then furiously - as his wife becomes
inexplicably bonded to another patient, a mute in a wheelchair played by
Michael Murphy ("Manhattan").
Shot in the bitter cold of rural southern Ontario on a modest budget of
$4 million Canadian (Lionsgate has picked up distribution), this
thoughtful, measured film about the slow drift of memory and marriage
has received excellent notices at a string of film festivals, and opens
in New York and Los Angeles on Friday before rolling out across the
country later in the month.
Ms. Polley read the short story in The New Yorker on a plane ride from
Iceland in 2001, where she had just finished shooting the Hal Hartley
celebrity parable "No Such Thing." She was in the early stages of a
relationship with the man who would become her husband, a Toronto film
editor named David Wharnsby. By the time she landed, Ms. Polley had
conceived the film version of the story in her mind as an investigation
into the longevity (and, within that, the cruelty and grace) of love.
"I think we have a really hard time culturally with what happens to love
after the first year. It is difficult, and it is painful, and it is a
letdown," said Ms. Polley, who married in 2003. "That first year is so
much less profound than what happens when you're actually left with each
other and yourself in an honest way. It was interesting to me to make a
film about what love looked like after life had gotten in the way, and
what remained."
High-minded literary adaptations are not the most common conclusion to
the child-star story, but Ms. Polley's short life is a narrative of
surprising, sometimes brutal swerves. She comes from a creative Toronto
family with five children headed by a casting-director mother, Diane,
and an actor father, Michael (currently seen on the Sundance Channel's
theater satire "Slings and Arrows," on which Sarah Polley makes
occasional, uncharacteristically comedic appearances). The family
mythology maintains that Sarah was an acting-obsessed toddler who
grabbed scripts off the coffee table and demanded auditions, landing her
first role at age 5 in the film "One Magic Christmas."
While Ms. Polley does not blame her parents for failing to dissuade her,
she said that she would never allow her hypothetical children to perform
professionally. "When an 8-year-old wants to become a fireman, you go,
'Look, go and play with these toys and pretend you're a fireman.' Why do
we let kids who want to act become actors?"
At 8, Ms. Polley played the urchin Sally Salt in Terry Gilliam's
"Adventures of Baron Munchausen," which also starred Robin Williams and
Uma Thurman in small roles. For her, the experience was traumatic:
18-hour days on a set in Spain, and hospital trips for hypothermia and
an irregular heart rate caused by an explosion that went off near her
head.
"Baron Munchausen," she said, "really defined me in terms of never
really wanting to be on huge films ever, and really focusing on
independent films. There's a real fear in me of never wanting to be in
an unsafe environment again."
Doug Liman, a good friend of Ms. Polley's who directed her in "Go," is a
victim of her wariness. "I've offered Sarah a part in everything I've
made since 'Go,' including the female lead in 'The Bourne Identity,' and
she keeps turning me down," he said. "She has a tremendous amount of
ambivalence about this profession, but that makes her a better actress.
She has no interest in seeing herself in a magazine, but she does have
an acute sensitivity to real human beings. Even going out for lunch with
her, it's hard to scream, 'Where's my Diet Coke?' when Sarah has just
been incredibly kind to the waitress."
Post-Gilliam, Ms. Polley hit child stardom in Canada playing the
precocious lead in the television series "Avonlea," a prairie period
drama that eventually ran in the United States on the Disney Channel.
Two days after she turned 11, her mother died of cancer. A few months
later, Ms. Polley developed scoliosis, a severe curvature of the spine.
Between the ages of 11 and 15, she wore a fiberglass brace for 16 hours
a day, enduring painful welts and humiliating costume fittings to
accommodate the bulky, corsetlike contraption. Then, at 15, she
underwent a 10-hour operation and spent a year in bed recovering (the
rods still in her back occasionally set off alarms at airport security
checkpoints).
"The thing about Sarah is, she's only 28 but she's been through quite a
lot in her life," said Olympia Dukakis, who plays the pragmatic wife of
Fiona's mute boyfriend in "Away From Her." "She seems very sweet, and
she is, but she's not frivolous. It's a metaphor: she's got a rod up her
back. You can see it in her acting. It's a kind of steeliness."
Ms. Polley never finished high school, but she read widely, and to the
left. In the early '90s, she joined a growing political movement in
Toronto, handing out socialist newsletters and organizing protests
against the neoconservative provincial government.
After several months, Ms. Polley's political obsessions were making her,
as she put it, "boring, dogmatic, narrow." When Mr. Egoyan invited her
to return to acting with the lead role of the incest-victim narrator in
"The Sweet Hereafter," she agreed, but expected to quickly return to her
political activities.
"It seemed like a nice little ending to my acting career to work with
Atom, and then it ended up sort of being the beginning of it," she said.
The film was a critical smash, earning Mr. Egoyan a best-director Oscar
nomination. In short order, Ms. Polley appeared in "Go" and "Guinevere,"
in which she played the young lover of an older Stephen Rea. Then she
won the part of Penny Lane, head "Band-Aide" in "Almost Famous," Cameron
Crowe's rock 'n' roll crowd pleaser. The part of a flighty, used groupie
seems about as far from Ms. Polley, politically and in person, as
possible. After weeks of rehearsal, she began to feel as if she'd made a
huge mistake.
"The part didn't fit me. Every day, it felt less and less like something
I could pull off," she recalled. "You just knew when you read the script
that whoever played that part was going to have a certain kind of life,
and it wasn't one I was ready for." She walked away, and Kate Hudson
became Penny Lane, earning an Oscar nomination and a permanent place in
the tabloids.
After the "Almost Famous" incident, Ms. Polley fell into a depression
about her future. She continued - and still does - to pop up as a player
in a multitude of small Canadian films, most of which were never
released outside Canada, but she questioned whether she wanted to be an
actor. A viewing of the director Terrence Malick's "Thin Red Line"
sparked an epiphany.
"It literally lifted and carried me out of this depression, and I had no
idea movies could do that," she said. So Ms. Polley, at the age of 22,
signed up for film school at the Canadian Film Center, where she
directed two shorts.
Mr. Egoyan, an executive producer on "Away From Her," says he finds Ms.
Polley's transition to director unsurprising. "There are two types of
actors on a set: those who are very consumed with their performance, and
those who are taking advantage of a front-row seat as to how a film is
made," he said. "I always saw her spending a lot of time with the crew,
watching the way the camera was moving, absorbing composition, movement.
I could feel her eyes on me."
The film Ms. Polley has made is about emotional endurance, and it stars
a cadre of enduring older performers who have managed to navigate the
film world with their senses of self intact (she spoke enviously of the
fact that Ms. Christie lives modestly in Britain and has a full life
without acting). In this way, "Away From Her" seems like Ms. Polley's
effort to imagine some kind of future happiness for herself: as a
married woman, and as a filmmaker in an industry she has known, if not
loved, her entire life.
"For a long time, I felt extremely judgmental of the environment I was
working in and the people I was working with," she said. "I don't feel
like my politics have softened, but I don't feel like every single thing
I do professionally defines me anymore. It's all experience. At this
point, I'm open to anything. Even Hollywood doesn't scare me anymore."
Of course, Ms. Polley's version of the mainstream isn't exactly a summer
franchise: she is preparing for a part in an HBO mini-series about John
Adams, produced by Tom Hanks. "O.K., so maybe it's not that commercial,"
she said, laughing again. "But for me, it's pretty slick."
Jaime