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Sarah Polley: the industry muzzle doesn't stand a chance against her chops
Interview, Oct, 2003 by Elizabeth Weitzman
There's a well-trod route that wilt--if you have the right combination of talent and luck--take you directly to Hollywood. After her striking turns in The Sweet Hereafter (1997) and Go (1999), Sarah Polley was handed the map. In response, she ran swiftly in the other direction. A former child star in her native Canada, the iconoclastic 24-year-old lives in Toronto rather than L.A., peppers her interviews with liberal opinions, and most often chooses to be in complex, micro-budget movies that remain well below the popular radar.
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Is this enough to make her a daring doer in our eyes? Sure. But as befits a woman who never fails to surprise, there's more. She's still making films that challenge both audience and actor: Witness her layered performance as a dying young mother determined to make the most of her remaining time in this month's My Life Without Me. But if there's anything Polley hates, it's getting stuck in a groove, no matter how high-minded. So next year, she'll be taking a new kind of chance--battling big-budget zombies. And if that isn't daring, well, we don't know what is.
ELIZABETH WEITZMAN: Given the nature of the film's subject matter, My Life Without Me must have been a very difficult film for you to make.
SARAH POLLEY: Mm-hmm. I was really scared beforehand. But there are moments in your life when you find the perfect place to unleash a certain amount of crap. My mom died of cancer when I was really young. I'm not someone who tries to work out their own stuff with a role, but I think that happened despite my best efforts to keep myself separate from it.
EW: Only a few years ago yon were playing daughters. Now you're playing the mother of two little girls. Do you feel significantly more mature these days?
SP: In a lot of ways I feel more balanced, and maybe less extreme than I was. But I'm pretty confused about what my role should be. Until very recently I was disdainful of anything that wasn't striving to be great art or make a political statement. But I was part of this big event in Europe recently, where all these journalists were saying "It's so great how you're so anti-Hollywood, and you're anti-this, and you're anti-that, and that you make decisions based only on the filmmaker and the script!" I listened to myself agreeing with them and getting more smug and more precious, and then I thought, What are you getting precious about? Is it worth turning into a prim little integrity-seeking monster? [laughs] I don't know. I think there has to be a balance somewhere, and I'm still trying to find it. I mean, I'm currently working on a remake of Dawn of the Dead, so, clearly, I'm much more fluid about my choices right now. [laughs] Have you seen the original?
EW: Oh, sure.
SP: I love that it's this commentary on consumerism in the guise of a goofy zombie movie.
EW: Is it a big studio movie?
SP: Yeah. It's the first one I've really done. I was concerned about that, because I've always been so specific about doing independent films, but I've never done anything that's so genuinely and ridiculously fun. And that's a great thing, for me to discover that that's possible.
EW: When you were younger, did you assume that integrity and tun were mutually exclusive concepts?
SP: Yeah, absolutely. I still feel that a movie has to attempt to say something--even if it fails miserably. But I've sort of given up on believing that I'm going to change the world with every film I choose to act in.
EW: Have your feelings about Hollywood also changed as you've gotten older?
SP: Well, I used to think it was a very organized place run by very evil people. And now I think it's a really disorganized place run by a lot of evil people and a few really great ones who somehow found their way in there. I still would never live there, and I'll probably always focus primarily on independent films, but I don't hate Hollywood as much as I used to.
EW: Your films have, on the whole, been pretty intense thus far, Do you deliberately set out to challenge yourself?
SP: Playing roles that are intense and damaged has always come more easily to me than doing comedies or lighter stuff--that would be taking a huge risk for me.
EW: So is there any chance you'd audition for, say, Charlie's Angels 3?
SP: [laughs] A year ago I would've said absolutely not, that it's the furthest thing from my mind. But I've realized that I've stuck to a very specific kind of film and a very specific style of acting, and I would like to shake things up for myself. So it's conceivable I'll do something insane, or more insane than Dawn of the Dead. If that's possible.
EW: [laughs] Do you think of yourself as someone who's a daring actor?
SP: No. But I am very independent. After The Sweet Hereafter came out, there seemed to be a sense that I would do big Hollywood films. But all I could see was that if I did, I might forget why I was acting in the firSt place. Or my life might have become a fishbowl, which would have been a living hell.
