As a filmmaker, Sarah Polley, an Oscar-winning writer/director and former actress herself, has avoided the very pitfalls of bean-counter interference the series “The Studio” satirizes.
Her indie features, from “Women Talking” to “Take This Waltz” and “Away from Her,” have evaded executive oversight. Studio heads like Michael de Luca and Pam Abdy, at MGM circa the days of Polley’s fourth feature “Women Talking,” would check in, but they weren’t interrupting the process on her period drama about Mennonite women abused and brainwashed by the men in their community.
In Episode 2 of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s Hollywood lampoon “The Studio,” Polley plays an exaggerated version of herself, a director on a sprawling set with cables everywhere and a video village like ants drawing to a magnifying glass, trying to pull off a oner at magic hour in the Hollywood Hills. Rogen’s upstart Continental Studios chief Matt Remnick drops in to shadow the set one day but ends up mangling a tricky filmmaking feat. Polley’s Polley ends up (understandably) screaming in frustration when Matt pratfalls his way into the shot, a tantrum the indie director could hardly relate to as someone known for facilitating calm, peaceful productions on intimate character studies.
Polley, who in recent years was vocal about her traumatizing experience as a nine-year-old actor on the set of Terry Gilliam’s 1988 “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” hasn’t acted onscreen in six years. As a Canadian, she’s also stayed put in Toronto, resisting the temptation to move to Los Angeles to be closer to an industry she’s had just as much success collaborating with from across the North American border.
“When I first made the decision to stay here, in my early twenties or whenever, there would’ve been any kind of pressure to move to the States; it was a big decision,” she told IndieWire over Zoom. “You really did feel like you were separating yourself somehow. But the world has changed so much now that it just doesn’t feel like a big deal to live elsewhere.”
Polley spoke with IndieWire not only about her “The Studio” cameo, but also where she fits in the economic and creative ecosystem of personal filmmakers who have flirted with commercial projects. Since she won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for her Miriam Towes adaptation “Women Talking” in 2023, Polley has been developing from her Toronto home a film about the experience of awards season, which she knows the ins and outs of after taking “Women Talking” from fall festivals to the Dolby stage. We also spoke about how the male-centered critical confusion over her sophomore directing effort “Take This Waltz” ended up fueling her creatively.
Polley got her start, though, as a director adapting an Alice Munro short story for her film “Away from Her,” where Julie Christie played a woman succumbing to Alzheimer’s in a film that earned Christie a Best Actress Oscar nomination and Polley one for Best Adapted Screenplay. Last year, Munro’s daughter, Andrea Skinner, revealed shortly after the revered Nobel laureate’s death that Munro chose to ignore Skinner’s claims of child sexual abuse against her stepfather, Munro’s husband to the end. Below, we also discuss what that means for Munro’s legacy.
The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity and length.
IndieWire: How much direction did Seth Rogen give you about the version of yourself you’re playing?
Sarah Polley: I just was told it would be “you, making a film.” He described it to me, and I remember having to compartmentalize my stress for him when he described shooting the episode — in a oner, about a oner, that all had to take place at magic hour — and going, “It’s not my job to worry about the logistics of this.” But I just kept going, “How the hell are they going to pull this off?”
Your “Studio” character finally has a tantrum after Seth’s character sabotages the shot one more time. That doesn’t seem very you.
I definitely lose it in a way that I never have on set, but it felt extraordinarily therapeutic to get to do that as an actor. I wasn’t exactly playing myself. I was playing a character of myself that I thought would be more entertaining. Never say never, but I’ve made it through four films [as a director] without a meltdown on set.
How much of your experience as a child actor who transitioned into acting as an adult informs how you manage a set?
If you’ve been an actor for any amount of time, you’ve run into some huge personalities. There was a day [on one of my films] where it felt like a few people were having nervous breakdowns at the same time. I was trying to kind of counsel them, and I remember a close collaborator of mine came up to me and said, “The problem is most directors are the hurricane, and everyone bends around them, but you’ve created a vacuum in not being a hurricane, so it means everyone else is becoming their own personal hurricane.”
There’s something to be said for a strong personality, but I don’t think the kind of narcissistic cult of personality that has existed around directors in the past really feels necessary anymore. It still gets respected in a way that I find mysterious because I’ve seen so many really decent people who are really grounded, who don’t yell at people, make movies at this point. So it doesn’t feel necessary. But still, we hold in our mind some kind of archetype of the mad unwieldy genius who has no regulation, as that somehow being a symptom of genius, someone completely out of control of themselves. But I do think that’s changing.
Have you had moments in the room of not feeling like you were being taken seriously as a director?
I do notice when I work with people of an older generation, and this goes for people of all genders, if you’re not really forceful and bombastic and take up all the space, there can be a concern that you don’t have a vision. I have encountered that. I have encountered a lack of trust because I am generally not going to be the person who talks the most in the meeting. It’s important to be curious as a filmmaker, too, but I don’t think curiosity is something people associate with a vision, which is a real drag. With artists, people think it’s a symptom of genius if you’re someone who takes over a space and dominates everybody. It’s changing a bit, but we still get bamboozled by that a bit.
Do you recognize the Matt Remnick archetype at all, an executive who inserts themselves too much into the filmmaking process? You’ve probably been insulated from that as a director on independent films.
I was so lucky that I grew up as a child actor and, you know, on “Baron Munchausen.” There were some ways in which I was very unlucky, but I came into directing knowing all the things I didn’t want or wouldn’t tolerate. I was able to craft the environments I was in accordingly and have real boundaries. I think that’s shifting, and I’m getting more confident that I’d be able to handle edgier dynamics. But you’re right, I’ve had very positive experiences as a director. As an actor, I’ve seen insane behavior with studio executives and producers. Absolutely.
Some of your peers start as personal filmmakers and end up making these very impersonal blockbusters. Are you open to more commercial opportunities, where you could still maintain your personal edge?
There’s a few things I’m developing right now. Some have much smaller canvases, and some have much bigger canvases. I really love [how] Gus Van Sant, it seems, from the outside really thinks about what he’s trying to do with a film and structures the size of it accordingly. If you’re making a political film like “Milk,” yes, you want that to reach the widest audience possible. Yes, it’s going to feel more commercial. It’s also a great movie. The other thing is, there have been some great commercial movies made in the past.
I read a great piece of film criticism once a very long time ago by a Canadian film critic named Rick Groen, and it always stuck with me. I saw it when I just made my first short film. I was like 20 or something, and he said [something like], “‘Apocalypse Now’ ended up being a very commercial movie, but nobody ever started that process and went, let’s make a big commercial movie. They just tried to make it really good, and then it became commercial.” So you can make a good movie and have it become commercial, but you’re never going to have a movie where your first objective is, “I’m going to make a commercial movie,” and, by accident, have it become good. It doesn’t work that way. It’s not to say that I don’t think anyone should ever make a commercial movie; I just think that the first objective should be that it be really good.
Your peers, like Brady Corbet, are calling attention to how filmmakers struggle to make a living despite the perception that awards and a high-profile movie mean that you do. Did that resonate with you?
Nobody really talks about that, and it’s interesting. That’s been the fact always. People think when you’ve won an award for a movie, that must mean you’re doing really well financially, and that is rarely the case if you make independent films. It’s interesting to me that that has never been discussed as sort of an economic issue, that creators and artists are often living on minimum wage, basically, if you spread out what they make over years.
Both Michelle Williams and Luke Kirby are on TV right now with “Dying for Sex” and “Étoile.” You directed them in “Take This Waltz,” probably my favorite movie of yours and also co-starring Seth Rogen. The reaction to that romantic drama was perhaps muted, but then you had “Stories We Tell,” a very personal documentary about your own family, which became a sensation in 2012.
I learned over and over in my work that whatever the big shiny thing everyone thinks is going to be successful probably isn’t going to be: It’s probably going to be the little project you worked on for five years where no one understood what the hell you were doing with your time. I was making “Take This Waltz” and “Stories We Tell” basically in chunks around each other. I felt really buoyed by the response to “Stories We Tell” at the time. It was really unexpected, what a life that film had, because it felt like a little project I had to make for myself. For “Take This Waltz,” it’s a film that’s really been rediscovered on streamers, so suddenly it has an audience with a very positive reaction to it.
At the time “Take This Waltz” came out, a lot of critics were older, older men, and older, older men did not necessarily connect with that movie. To be honest with you, I hate it when filmmakers do a thing of like, maybe you didn’t do your best work, but you’ll find a political frame to justify why people didn’t see it as a masterpiece. I’m not doing that. I don’t think it’s a perfect film. It stumbles at the beginning and then becomes something I’m super proud of. I’m not super defensive about it. I remember, after a press screening of that film, running into one of the old-guard film critics, and him going, “Yeah, I usually know within 10 minutes if a film’s not going to work, and this didn’t work.” He said it to me on a street corner. There were so many things about that I was fascinated by, like just saying that to someone really casually who’s worked on something for two years. I don’t know if a movie’s going to work in the first 10 minutes. That’s a special skill!
I remember I ran into Wim Wenders right after I saw some reviews, and I said, “I feel like this movie’s getting misinterpreted somehow.” He said, “You think people are ready for ‘Madame Bovary’? You’re wrong.” Which I know is, like, the greatest validation ever.
You adapted Alice Munro’s short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” for your directing debut, “Away from Her.” What was your reaction to the allegations last year from Munro’s daughter, Andrea Skinner, who claimed her stepfather sexually abused her but that Munro chose to stay with him even with that knowledge?
I live in Toronto. That’s all anyone talked about for months.
Some readers, including myself, went back to her stories to look for clues about this, as Munro put so much of her own life into her work.
I definitely did a lot of that. I think that piece that her daughter wrote [in the Toronto Star], and then subsequently her other daughter [Jenny Munro] wrote, was extraordinarily courageous and useful and interesting and a real contribution. A lot of the reporting that followed was really irresponsible and took things out of context and created a picture of someone who was not what the family was saying, nor anybody else. I thought the New Yorker article that Rachel Aviv wrote was by far the best thing written about it, and until that point, I found myself extremely frustrated by the coverage of it, which was at times sloppy and downright irresponsible.
Did Munro’s daughter’s testimony, which came just over a month after the author died, lead you to rethink the story that became “Away from Her” in any way?
I certainly went back over all of the stories, and specifically the story “Away from Her” was based on, and it’s really interesting to read that story through this lens. It’s a woman sliding into Alzheimer’s or dementia, and she’s left with a lot of memories she’s repressed of her husband’s misbehavior, and those things are suddenly so present and staring her in the face. I would say that my film adaptation made it a lot less sinister anyway, but now it’s dramatic to me how I was crafting basically a love story out of something that I think truly was not. When you read a story that many times, when you’re adapting, you start to see things and smell things that are between the lines and maybe haven’t been written about, and there was some feeling that story left me with where I was profoundly unsettled, and I took most of that out to adapt it. But it stares me in the face when I read it now.
What do you think those claims mean for Munro’s legacy?
I have a lot of feelings about how it was handled, and I really wish people had just stuck to the original text of what the kids were asking for and for this story to be heard and part of a legacy. I don’t think anyone was ever asking for us to decide she was a terrible writer, or never worth reading again. It’s actually a very weird response when you think of all of the things that writers have done over the years and continue to do. It seemed like the renaming of things, rewriting prizes and chairs, that seemed to me not actually what anyone had been asking for. I could be wrong about that. I don’t want to stick to that, but I just felt what they wrote was so pure and so clear, and then everyone had responses that seemed more about them than responding to what that family was asking for. I actually only care about what that daughter thinks and feels. I don’t care what anyone else feels.
“The Studio” Episode 2, which features Sarah Polley, is now streaming on Apple TV+.
