Sarah Polley Interview

May 8, 2007 2:31 PM
by [email]

Canadian actress Sarah Polley might be best known (in the US, anyway) for playing a drug-addled supermarket worker opposite Katie Holmes in “Go.” That character is a far cry from Polley, disarmingly sweet and smart when she shows up - hair pulled back in a half-ponytail, dressed down in simple cranberry top - to talk about “Away from Her,” which marks her debut as a screenwriter and director.

Based on Alice Munro’s short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” and starring Julie Christie as an aging wife with Alzheimer’s disease, it’s a film about the last leg of a lengthy marriage – not the first subject most twenty-eight-year olds would choose for their first full-length feature.

CJ: The question everyone has probably been asking you – why a story about aging?

SARAH POLLEY: It was ultimately about love and marriage, in the context of having been with someone for a long time. I think their age is incredibly integral to the story, but for me it was a portrait of a kind of love that I think doesn’t get explored in film. It’s a lovely idea – they’re redeeming themselves in their own life and finding out that they are capable of and what they weren’t capable of, late in life. I think what struck me personally was imagining being in a marriage for that amount of time when I was just at the beginning of one.

CJ: Relationships are tough.

SP: (Laughs) Yeah.

CJ: Was there anything you discovered while making the movie – or after – that surprised you?

SP: I felt like my reason for making this film was solely because I was at the beginning of a relationship and was interested in a love story. A couple of weeks ago I ran into a friend of mine, and our mothers died around the same age, (when we were) eleven, and she talked about why it was so obvious why I had made the film. (She) watched her father lose the love of his life. That never really occurred to me.

CJ: Did you do research?

SP: I had been spending a lot of time in retirement homes because my grandmother was moving into one, and I was put in charge of finding one. SO I spent a lot of time getting to know them, spending a lot of time with her…

CJ: Are any characters based on people that you met?

SP: Eliza is based on my grandmother, who would never have said “cluster fuck,” in a million years. A lot of people in the home were based on my grandmother.

CJ: The hockey player guy? Who sounded really professional…

SP: I think that can happen with Alzheimer’s; you get stuck in the past. That was based on my uncle, who had Picks disease, and he was the hockey commentator for the Buffalo Sabers.

CJ: As an actress, is it hard to get funding?

SP: I did try to make a film about three or four years ago in Canada; I didn’t get anywhere with it, and I did feel at that time that my career was not an asset. It does take a certain amount of determination…I had to toughen up quite a bit. I had an idea for a short film when I was twenty and that got me hooked.

CJ: What’s next for you?

SP: I’m going to act again for the rest of the summer and hopefully start writing in the fall. I’m doing a film with a Belgian director, and then I’m doing an HBO series with Laura Linney and Paul Giamatti. “John Adams.” It’s so interesting.

“Away from Her” opens in limited release on May 4th.