An Actress With Doubts, But Not About Directing

TORONTO

Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie.

IF Sarah Polley were a country, she would be on high alert, code orange. The fine-boned veteran actress seemed to hover above the restaurant banquette where she sat, her huge blue eyes apparently unburdened by eyelids. She was expounding on the slippery sensation of being interviewed.

Im 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 thats very serious, she said. So these days Im trying to be less precious, less earnest, and not worry about it so much. She paused, then burst 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 its a quality befitting a writer-director, which Ms. Polley, at 28, has become. Next month, before sitting on the jury at the Cannes Film Festival, she joins the ranks of indie auteurs with the release of her first feature, Away From Her.

Over lunch in the heart of the fast-gentrifying downtown neighborhood where she lives, Ms. Polley was 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 Fairs 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 — Ms. Polley the actress has rarely left the borders of the independent film world. She has worked with a long list of the best studio-free directors around, including Atom Egoyan (on Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter), Wim Wenders (Dont Come Knocking) and David Cronenberg (eXistenZ).

Away From Her keeps her squarely in the independent milieu. An adaptation of the 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 Fionas Alzheimers. 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 $4 million Canadian (Lionsgate has picked up distribution), this thoughtful, measured film about the slow drift of memory and marriage has received excellent notices at a string of film festivals, and opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday before rolling out across the country later in the month.

Ms. Polley read the short story in The New Yorker on a plane ride from Iceland in 2001, where 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, Ms. Polley had conceived the film version of the story in her mind 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 letdown, said Ms. Polley, who married in 2003. That first year is so much less profound than what happens when youre 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.

High-minded literary adaptations are not the most common conclusion to the child-star story, but Ms. Polleys 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 (currently seen on the Sundance Channels theater satire Slings and Arrows, on which Sarah Polley makes occasional, uncharacteristically comedic appearances). 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 5 in the film One Magic Christmas.

While Ms. Polley does not blame her parents for failing to dissuade her, she said that she would never allow her hypothetical children to perform professionally. When an 8-year-old wants to become a fireman, you go, Look, go and play with these toys and pretend youre a fireman. Why do we let kids who want to act become actors?

At 8, Ms. Polley played the urchin Sally Salt in Terry Gilliams 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, she said, really defined me in terms of never really wanting to be on huge films ever, and really focusing on independent films. Theres a real fear in me of never wanting to be in an unsafe environment again.

Doug Liman, a good friend of Ms. Polleys who directed her in Go, is a victim of her wariness. Ive offered Sarah a part in everything Ive made since Go, including the female lead in The Bourne Identity, and she keeps turning me down, he said. She has a tremendous amount of ambivalence about this profession, but that makes her a better actress. She has no interest in seeing herself in a magazine, but she does have an acute sensitivity to real human beings. Even going out for lunch with her, its hard to scream, Wheres my Diet Coke? when Sarah has just been incredibly kind to the waitress.

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