[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] On Story is brought to you in part by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, a Texas family providing innovative funding since 1979.
"On Story" is also brought to you in part by the Bogle Family Vineyards, six generation farmers and third generation winemakers based in Clarksburg, California.
Makers of sustainably grown wines that are a reflection of the their family values since 1968.
[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] [piano gliss] From Austin Film Festival, this is "On Story," a look inside the creative process from today's leading writers, creators and filmmakers.
This week's "On Story," Oscar nominated writer-director Sarah Polley discusses her new film, "Women Talking" and the art of adaptation.
- Sometimes I find it's three years after a film is made and somebody comes up to you and says something and that resonates more deeply than anything you've had words for in terms of what you were trying to say.
So I find that like an interesting process, like how that conversation you have with your own work kind of stays alive and becomes clearer as time goes on.
[paper crumples] [typing] [carriage returns, ding] [Narrator] Polley expands on her vast storytelling career, the art of adaptation, and her process behind tackling stories with difficult subjects.
[typewriter ding] - Let's start at the beginning if you don't mind, you obviously were acting from a very young age, when did writing start?
Were you already writing when you were acting?
- I started acting when I was four or five, so I don't think I knew how to write then.
But when I was seven, I had a teacher in second grade who just really nurtured and supported that passion for me.
And so I was writing stories all day every day and she just like got to the point where she stopped making me do math or anything else and she sort of said, okay, this is your job now, every Friday you have to read a story to the class.
And she would do like little sneaky things like we'd have our grade five/six reading buddies and they'd be walking ahead with her and she'd say to them in a whisper, but so I could hear it, this one's gonna be a writer.
And that landed for me in such a profound way so that even though my life was sort of taken over by acting when I was a kid, I knew there was this other part of me that was more important to me and that I had confidence in.
- When you started writing, do you remember what you were writing?
- I was writing stories about like really naughty kids that were funny, like kids who were just like total pains in the [bleep], but hilarious, that was my brand.
- At what point is, is "Away from Her" on the docket, is that early on in your writing feature length screenplays?
- I read the short story by Alice Monroe and I decided to write "Away from Her."
And because I'd been so bruised and battered around for those years of rejection, I kind of made this promise to myself and I said, if I don't have this financed by March, I'm never gonna try to do this again.
But that energy, that insane energy of like I'm doing it now or never, is actually what it took for me to get a film made.
- So how do you get people to trust you as a younger filmmaker with an acting career?
Kinda like what you said, what was the pitch?
How did you get people to believe that you really knew how to make a story this mature?
- I definitely encountered questions about that.
I had had some firsthand experience with people getting older, I was quite close with my grandmother, so I spoke to that experience a lot.
I really went after cast before I did anything and wrote impassioned personal letters and pulled on people that I knew.
And the thing about, again, our public film funding agency at that time, which is very different now with a different leadership and I can actually say some positive things about it, was they were very into the idea of Julie Christie and they were very into the idea of Olympia Dukakis and that was exciting for them.
So that helped a lot.
- And then when you do get Julie Christie and your cast in here, what's the process of, I mean something I wanna talk about more is it seems like you are able to develop really strong relationships with actors.
- Well I knew Julie 'cause we'd worked together as actors a couple of times, I think by then.
Julie's a really curious person and really in love with the filmmaking process.
And I mean she's a true cinephile and so she's sort of all about figuring out what the director's vision is and how she can serve that.
To have that on your very first film when you're 27 with someone like her was such a gift, just to have this sense that someone was deeply interested in the film you were trying to make and how they could serve it.
- Were there moments of the script or of the directing that were hardest or most challenging or maybe most rewarding?
- You know, if you grow up as an actor, you're sort of there to be malleable.
Like I had a real sense of not wanting to be someone who created conflict or difficulty on a set.
So finding the balance between that which I think comes from a good place and also being unafraid of confrontation when it's healthy and necessary.
So I think that was probably my ongoing thing with "Away from Her" was just desperately wanting to be liked by everybody, which doesn't end up serving the process and certainly doesn't serve you as a filmmaker.
But again, finding that balance is tricky because you can care too little about what people think of you as well.
So it's like finding that line, I think, is an ongoing process for me.
But certainly on my first film I was trying to please everybody and there are moments as a filmmaker where you actually have to put your foot down and it cost me a lot personally to not be able to do that.
[typewriter ding] - So this movie does very well, it scores you an Academy Award nomination, correct?
For screenplay.
Once you finish "Away from Her" and once all, all these things happen, where do you go from there?
How do you choose your next projects?
- I did an interview once like during "Away from Her," with this Toronto film critic named Geoff Pevere, I'll never forget it said to me, you know like no matter what your next film is, people will say it's a disappointing sophomore effort from Sarah Polley, so make whatever you want.
And I was like, great.
So I took that as my marching order and I was like, nobody has to like this, I'm just gonna make whatever I want, and that turned out to be true.
[laughing] I mean, it's weird because, so my second film was "Take This Waltz," and it now is having this whole other weird life 'cause it's on Netflix now, so now suddenly people are discovering it and I feel like liking it, although I guess the people who don't like it don't come up to you and tell you that so who knows?
By my own poll, people seem to like it.
I was happy with what we did, I think it was the best film I could have made at that point and I was prepared for it to not be loved.
If you make a first film, if you're lucky enough to make a first film that has that life and I was so lucky to have that, you can't expect that to happen twice in a row.
And it's a really good experience in terms of like just orienting yourself in terms of like you're not actually making films to have successes, you're making films 'cause there's something specific you wanna say, you wanna try to say it as clearly and as well as you can with the skills you have at that moment.
You obviously want it to be in conversation with people and have interesting conversations as a result of it, but it doesn't have to be loved for it to have been worthwhile.
Sometimes I have like inklings and ideas along the way and you obviously have to convey to other people why you're making it, talk about it in interviews.
But sometimes I find it's three years after a film is made and somebody comes up to you and says something and that resonates more deeply than anything you've had words for in terms of what you were trying to say.
So I find that really like an interesting process like how that conversation you have with your own work kind of stays alive and becomes clearer as time goes on.
- Did that happen with "Take This Waltz?"
- I mean I was really interested in the idea of female restlessness, which I hadn't like seen explored a lot.
- What are you gonna do now?
- Nothing.
It's for you to do something, not me.
- I don't have to tell you I'm in love with you again, do I?
- You never did.
- Well in that case.
- In that case, nothing.
[crying] - I'd been reading a lot of Buddhist philosophy and this notion of that there's always a gap in life, there's always a gap and we are sort of in a culture that tells us we need to fill that gap and we need to do that by making different choices or having different relationships or filling it with different people and we still find this gap.
And so I was really interested in following that through that someone begins with a feeling of emptiness and ends with a feeling of emptiness but in a wiser place and they've gone through this entire place of rewriting a life and sort of end up where they began.
I remember in an interview I did about that film, I said something like, you know it's such an amazing thing to get to make film 'cause you're sitting alone in your room and you're staring at the ceiling and you come up with an idea and then there's all these amazingly talented people that help you realize that.
I remember after my dad saw the first screening of "Take This Waltz," he turned to me and was like, you know how you talk about when you think of a film, you just look at the ceiling and whatever comes to you?
Maybe you shouldn't do that again.
Maybe you should like... [laughing] It's like maybe you should read the paper and like come up with ideas that way.
I was like [bleep] you.
[laughing] [typewriter ding] - Speaking of experiment, I feel like I'd be remiss if I don't talk about, I think my favorite of your films, which is "Stories We Tell," which yeah, I think one of the most kind of mind blowing experiences I've had in the theater and just like I think I've never seen anything like it before, I still haven't seen anything like it.
How do you describe it first of all for those who haven't seen it?
Because I don't know how to do it without, I don't know, maybe giving away more than I should.
- So it's a documentary about the discovery that my biological father was not the man who raised me, but the film is told from the perspective of everyone in my family and my father and my biological father.
And it's kind of a chorus of voices as opposed to a single perspective.
- This rumor about Geoff Bowes being your dad.
- You asked him the question, do have you ever heard anything about my mom having had an affair while she was in Montreal?
- You sort of looked up and you said, do you think it was Geoff Bowes?
So I said no.
She said, do you know who it was?
So I said yes.
- No, I know that Geoff Bowes isn't your dad.
- And there are home movies in it and then there are also recreated home movies.
So it's also like kind of unpacking the idea of storytelling and what it means and, and pulling apart the pieces and revealing the construction of it.
And so it's just about many versions of the same story and whether or not we ever can really get to the truth in our pasts.
- And you said, how do you know that?
And he said, 'cause I'm your dad.
- He said it's possible, not probable.
I think those were the exact words you said to me on the phone, were they?
- He said, I thought that's why he wanted to speak to me because your mom and I had an affair.
- In fact, she had an affair with me.
- So how do you find your way making a documentary about yourself?
- I don't think I knew exactly what that film was gonna be when I started it.
I noticed my dad was starting to lose his memory and I really wanted to record him while he still had it, just telling the story of his life but also the way he responded to finding out the news that I wasn't his daughter, which was so magnanimous and kind and generous and it was so unusual.
So I sort of set about interviewing him for three days.
That was the first step with just my best friend, Iris, who's my cinematographer for that film.
And we recorded him and then I sort of mined that material for a set of questions that I would ask everybody just to make sure they were all responding to the things he claimed and to see how that lined up.
So it began with those interviews and then I did this whole documentary lab at the Canadian Film Center, which was hugely helpful, which is very sort of process driven.
But that film really evolved over five years and I felt very lost while I was making it and kind of in the dark and fumbling around, which is now something I seek.
I mean for a control freak, that's a terrible experience, and I've been very controlling with my other films in terms of the films are very natural extensions of the scripts and I kind of know what I'm looking for from very early on.
And in that film, I had to kind of let go and accept that there was always more to learn and more to discover and to not know, and I'm starting to sort of seek that out now.
Like certainly with "Women Talking," I didn't know all the time and I sought that out, that feeling of being a bit lost 'cause for me now it's a marker, okay, well, that means I haven't seen this before.
Like if I have no model, that's not a bad thing, that's not a bad sign.
- Why did you recreate your home movies for the film?
- So I think first of all it was there were gaps in terms of the footage we had and then it became a more interesting project of going, well what if we create these home movies and we then reveal the artifice of it?
I feel like we don't do enough questioning of our own versions of things, I do kind of maybe to a fault, but I think that it's amazing to me how people will tell you the story of their family or the story of who they are, what kind of person I am, and this is what I like and this is what I don't like.
I'm like, you don't know that, like we don't know those things about ourselves, they're always moving.
Your family member sitting beside you has a completely different family history than you do.
The important thing I think for us all to remember is we're not right and it doesn't mean that we don't need to create narratives to make sense of our lives, we do.
But the sort of rigidness around it or the lack of openness feels limiting.
So I was just really curious about like what does it mean to like show the family movies and find out actually it's just someone's like messy memories and they've recreated it with a bunch of actors and like even those memories we can't completely rely on.
It was a weird experience to cast your family and dress them up and like recreate your family home, and don't necessarily recommend it.
But really interesting too in terms of like a filmmaking exercise to say to a bunch of really talented actors who you're shooting on Super 8, this is the scene, go, and not direct it and see what happens.
And that was really good for me as a filmmaker because I realized there's a certain amount of trust and room you can give actors where they're gonna discover things you couldn't possibly imagine if you have people you trust.
[typewriter ding] - Let's talk about "Women Talking" because it's your latest and it's one that we're, I think, very proud to have here.
What were those early conversations like when you're talking about how your vision was for this?
- Those early conversations were amazing with them because they were so broad ranging and they sort of encompassed what was happening in the world and our personal lives.
And it's funny, like I feel like I both had a very clear vision for what the film was and also part of that vision was the process was gonna tell me what it was.
So that's a really interesting and hard thing to convey.
The model we're used to filmmaking is, this is the vision, this is how it's gonna do and this is how I'm gonna get everyone to fall into line to create this vision.
The vision for this film was, yes, I knew certain things really, really clearly and I could articulate them, but I also knew that this film was dependent on a process, much like the one in the women in the film go through, which is actually about a lot of input and consultation and democracy and a really hopeful, difficult, rich process of working things out and finding something together.
And that's a more difficult thing to communicate in an industry that's used to a dictatorial vision.
So I really love, I love adaptation and yeah, I do think that having done it before served me, but this was unlike anything I've ever written and required far more rigor in terms of finding it and finding the debate, making sure it wasn't repetitive, making sure it was whittled down to its bare essentials.
And that process continued way deep into the editing process, which again, it came I think from making a documentary where you had to be nimble and agile and kind of chase the thread of what was there as opposed to what you predicted would be there.
- How did you handle handling so much dialogue and so few locations and having it still feel like a movie?
Was that a challenge or something you were conscious of?
- Yeah, I mean I knew that there had to be this kind of propulsive spine to it.
I knew that it had to have momentum or it would die very quickly, I knew it couldn't be a long movie, I knew there couldn't be too much repetition in it, I also knew it needed to have a scale and a scope to support what was happening in that loft, that it would easily get claustrophobic if we couldn't get outside the loft and breathe.
And also sense the momentousness of what this conversation is about.
Like these women are gathering to figure out how to move forward after incredible trauma and make a better world for themself, like the stakes couldn't be higher.
So I felt that there needed to be a canvas on which to make sure that was reflected.
I mean, it's not like "12 Angry Men" or "Glengarry Glen Ross" where there's a discreet issue that these people have to work out in a short space of time.
These women are talking about everything, they're talking about their faith, they're talking about the relationship to God, they're talking about forgiveness, they're talking about what guilt is, and who's responsible and what they want the world they're moving into to look like and how to build that.
So that's something where I felt like we had to feel the hugeness of their world and what they were talking about at all times.
So the decisions to sort of go in and out of the barn and to shoot wide screen and to give it a almost formal classic, epic feel at times.
- Did you involve the original author in this?
Were there conversations with her?
How did she come into play?
- I always try to meet with an author before I start an adaptation process and my main question always for an author is, if there's one thing that's most important to you in this adaptation to not lose, what is it?
Miriam's answer on this was the laughter.
And that was a great north star for us, that we cannot let people go too long without having a release.
That there is this sense of community among these women that includes humor and laughter, even in the hardest moments.
It was partly like injecting the humor into it, but it's also help finding it on set and being open to it when it happened and in the editing room.
Jessie Buckley just had this moment where she just started rolling her eyes at every single thing that Rooney Mara's character said.
And then sometimes the things that Rooney says are so beautiful in the film and so meaningful.
And then just, you could either make the decision to stay in that profound moment or you could go to Jesse thinking that it's all [bleep].
- We're women without a voice, we have nothing to return to, even the animals are safer in their homes than we women are.
All we have are our dreams, so of course we're dreamers.
- And you wanna hear my dream?
I dream that people who speak nonsense, who have no grasp on reality are not put in charge of making statements.
- What if the men refuse to meet our demands?
[metal clanging] - Sorry.
[girls giggling] - We'll kill them.
- No Ona.
[laughing] - One of the words I think I would use to describe all your work is gentle.
And I don't mean timid or weak, I just mean I think there's like a lightness and like an empathy to everything you write that doesn't feel aggressive or angry.
But when you're talking about something as traumatic as some of these experiences that you've gone through, is it hard to find that gentleness or do you even see it that way?
Or is there like anger you have to work through before you can write it in that style?
- I think it actually is important to sort of get in touch with all of the incredible diversity of feelings and thoughts that come along with difficult experiences.
And I don't think you get to skip over that part.
I think if you skip over it now, like it comes back and bites you later.
So for me, like it was important to work through a lot of those things.
And then for me, and it's not for everybody, but for me it then became important for me to also be able to not just let it sit and exist in just that domain.
And I find that curiosity is helpful for me in terms of moving through the world as not an angry person all the time.
But I think anger is healthy and is part of the process.
For me, I kind of need to find my way through it and move beyond it at some point though, like I can't live there.
- What were the moments of "Women Talking" in the book that were most sacred to you and that you didn't wanna change at all?
And which were the moments that you wanted to put yourself into more?
- I found the relationship to their faith fascinating because I think we can be really cynical when we portray faith in films.
And I found their process of parsing out what were the insidious structures that had sprung up around their faith from the faith itself and how do we feel that with them, even if we don't have faith ourselves was really like an awesome challenge and project just to be able to honor their faith on their own terms.
- We have always forgiven those who have wronged us.
Why not now?
- Because now we know better.
- We will be excommunicated, forced to leave the colony in disgrace if we do not forgive these men.
And if we are excommunicated, we forfeit our place in heaven.
- How could any of you live with the fear of that?
- These are legitimate fears.
How can we address them?
- The only important thing to establish is if we forgive the men so that we will be allowed to enter the gates of heaven.
- You can laugh all you like Salome, but we will be forced to leave the colony if we don't forgive the men.
How will the Lord when he arrives, find the women if we aren't in the colony?
- If Jesus is able to return to life, live for thousands of years, and then drop down to earth from heaven to scoop up his supporters, surely he'd also be able to locate a few women who left a colony.
- Let's stay on track.
- All right, I'll stay on track, I cannot forgive them.
I will never forgive them.
- I loved how complex that debate was and how sometimes uncomfortable and some of the things that get raised were not necessarily questions we wanted to ask maybe at the beginning of the Me Too Movement.
And I just loved how squeamish that made me.
And so kind of like not shying away from how uncomfortable some of those questions were was really important.
I'd been reading a lot about apologies and what makes a good apology and forgiveness, and so a lot of the work of Harriet Lerner.
And I got really curious about the transformative nature of what an apology might look like.
And in the context of this film, something needs to propel them towards consensus.
I mean, they're a group of women who don't agree on many essential things, having to figure out a way forward together.
So what is that thing that can move that last person on side?
And so constructing what that apology might look like was really interesting process that involved not just my experience, but then there were crew members who weighed in on whether the apology was working and what they would've needed to hear as people who had experienced abuse whose parents hadn't protected them.
Like what would a good apology from their parent look like?
And so it became this very collective process of many people's lived experience coming into play.
And so I think all of my favorite moments of the adaptation happened that way and sort of a collective sense of us as a community having conversations that found their way into pieces of dialogue and into moments in the film.
- So what would today's Sarah tell 27-year-old Sarah the day before you start principal photography of your first project?
- I think that like the doubts that you have about yourself are kind of your superpower.
Like I don't think, like for me, the message isn't like, don't doubt yourself, you're great.
It's like good for you for being curious and for wanting to improve and it doesn't have to be something that sinks you and it's not something you have to eradicate.
Like be curious and hope other people are curious as well about how to do better, that's the starting point.
But I'm gonna write a lot about that tonight, I'm gonna be journaling.
Thank you.
[typewriter ding] [Narrator] You've been watching a conversation with Sarah Polley on "On Story."
On Story is part of a growing number of programs in Austin Film Festival's On Story project that also includes the "On Story" radio program, podcast, book series, and the "On Story" archive accessible through the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University.
To find out more about On Story and Austin Film Festival, visit onstory.tv or austinfilmfestival.com.
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