'Hollywood doesn't scare me any more'
by Katrina Onstad
May 26, 2007


Sarah Polley seems to hover above the restaurant banquette where she
sits, her huge blue eyes apparently unburdened by eyelids. She is
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 says. "So these days I'm trying to be less precious,
less earnest and not worry about it so much." She pauses, then bursts
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 Polley, at 28,
has become. She recently joined the ranks of indie auteurs with the
release of her first feature, Away From Her, and this week she sat on
the jury at the Cannes Film Festival.

Over lunch in the heart of the fast-gentrifying downtown Toronto
neighbourhood where she lives, Polley is 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 - Polley the
actor has rarely left the borders of the independent film world. She
has worked with a long list of the best studio-free directors
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 an 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 $C4 million ($4.46 million), this thoughtful, measured film about
the slow drift of memory and marriage has received excellent notices
at a string of film festivals and will screen at the Sydney Film
Festival.

Polley read the short story in The New Yorker on a flight from
Iceland in 2001 - 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, Polley had
conceived the film version of the story 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 let-down," says 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."

Literary adaptations are not the most common conclusion to the child-
star story but 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. 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 five in the film One Magic Christmas.

Polley does not blame her parents for failing to dissuade her yet she
says she would never allow her hypothetical children to perform
professionally. "When an eight-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 eight, Polley played the urchin Sally Salt in Terry Gilliam's film
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 really defined me in terms of never really wanting
to be on huge films ever and really focusing on independent films,"
she says. "There's a real fear in me of never wanting to be in an
unsafe environment again."

Post-Gilliam, 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 and Australia.

Two days after she turned 11, her mother died of cancer. A few months
later, Polley developed scoliosis, a severe curvature of the spine.
Between the ages of 11 and 15, she wore a fibreglass brace for 16
hours a day, enduring painful welts and humiliating costume fittings
to accommodate the bulky, corset-like 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 desks).

"The thing about Sarah is, she's only 28 but she's been through quite
a lot in her life," says 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."

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 organising protests
against the Ontario provincial government. After several months,
Polley's political obsessions were making her, as she puts
it, "boring, dogmatic, narrow".

When Egoyan invited her to return to acting with the lead role of the
incest-victim narrator in The Sweet Hereafter, she agreed, expecting
to return quickly 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
says.

The film was a critical smash hit, earning Atom Egoyan a best-
director Oscar nomination. In short order, 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 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 recalls. "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, 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 World War II film The 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 says. So Polley, at the age of 22,
signed up for film school at the Canadian Film Centre, where she
directed two shorts.

Egoyan, an executive producer on Away From Her, says he finds
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 says. "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 Polley has made is about emotional endurance and it stars a
cadre of enduring older performers who have navigated the film world
with their senses of self remaining intact (she speaks enviously of
the fact that Christie lives modestly in Britain and has a full life
without acting).

In this way, Away From Her seems like 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 judgemental of the environment I
was working in and the people I was working with," she says. "I don't
feel like my politics have softened but I don't feel like every
single thing I do professionally defines me any more. It's all
experience. At this point, I'm open to anything. Even Hollywood
doesn't scare me any more."

Of course, Polley's version of the mainstream isn't exactly a summer
blockbuster. She will next appear on Australian screens opposite
Christie and Tim Robbins in The Secret Life of Words. And she is
preparing for a part in an HBO mini-series about the second US
president John Adams, produced by Tom Hanks.

"OK, so maybe it's not that commercial," she says, laughing
again. "But for me, it's pretty slick."

The New York Times

http://www.smh.com.au/news/film/hollywood-isnt-
scary/2007/05/24/1179601562905.html