Sarah Polley: Actor/Director/Activist/Canadian

By
Bradley Cheyne
Emerson College

Sarah Polley, actor/director, presented to the Boston community her short film I Shout Love on January 28^th at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge. This 23 year Toronto native has wowed audiences with her amazing acting abilities in such films as The Sweet Hereafter, Guinevere, and Go, now she is doing the same with her second directorial project. Polley who has been known to speak her mind and has acted since the age of 4. She moved out at 14 and dropped out of high school at 16 years of age to devote her time to political activism. She cares strongly about public funding for the arts, public health care, and the anti-globalization movement.

Polley’s 37 minute short film I Shout Love is about a woman Tessa (played by Kristen Thomson), who about to be abandoned for another woman, persuades her boyfriend (played by Matthew Ferguson) to stay one night so she can videotape poignant moments in their relationship, such things as looking at old pictures, reading the newspaper, a paint fight, and more. The movie is a brilliant examination of the break up and the closure of a relationship. Kristen Thomson is riveting displaying gut renching emotions, jealousy, anger, making what might have been an unsympathetic character sympathetic. The film takes place during the Quebec WTO anti-globalization protests. Throughout the film the political events are echoed and compared to Tessa’s fight for something she know she won’t get.

The film has been shown at the Toronto and Sundance film festivals. Polley presented I Shout Love at the opening night of the Women in Film and Video/ New England festival. After the screening, she sat down with the audience at the Brattle for an informal question and answer session part of which follows.

On the making of I Shout Love:

"I made this film for no money, for seven days with really long hours with 20 or 30 people on the crew who weren’t getting paid and who were acting as though they were and caring and pouring their blood and love into and by the fifth or sixth day there were 70 people on the crew. The whole film takes place in one room, there’s two people. And the crew grew and grew and grew."

Asked about the development of the film Polley said, "Kristen [Thomson] was involved from the first draft. I wanted to get her feed back. So she was quite involved in the first draft and the character development. And I had a four day workshop with the actors, really intensive before we started shootings. First of all we went through every scene talking about it, reading it, and getting it on its feet. So everything was totally blocked before we started shooting, but it wasn’t my blocking it was their blocking with adjustments from me. Because it’s always very frustrating as an actor to walk on to the set and you know the blocking has been totally mapped out without any sense of what you were going to do with the scene. It might not make any sense of what you’re going to do, but at the same time you can’t give actors that freedom. There is no time for an actor on set. There just isn’t. And that’s what I’ve learned as a director. There’s no time for you to not only remember your lines. There’s no time for you to be bad even a little bit. It’s just not in the budget. That is one of the big lessons I learned on my first short film. So on this film, I wanted to give them that freedom and we did it sort of out of school hours, where everyone didn’t have to sit around and wait."

When asked about her experiences as a director as opposed to an actor, Polley said, "I’ve been on set since I was four and I thought I knew everything about making films because I was on set. And to find out how totally isolated an actor is from the filmmaking process is really alarming. To find out that you actually don’t necessarily know anything, even if you’ve been on set your whole life. That all the really important work is done before the actors are there. All the decisions, all the discussions, all the ideas, or a lot of them, a lot of them anyway. And I just found it kind of emasculating. It was like, ‘I don’t know anything.’ That was really scaring realizing that I have to learn over what I thought I knew the best. I think that maybe a lot of directors don’t realizing this, but actors don’t necessarily think you do anything as a director. They don’t see your work. And that is really terrifying when you are on set with a couple of actors who you really respect, who you think, ‘Do they think I’m working? Do they think I’m doing anything?’… I think if you’re a good director, you don’t yell a lot. You’re not a presence but you know, that shot was my idea. And you sort of feel invisible and I think that a lot of the tension between actors and directors can come from that. Actually a stage actor I knew once said that she didn’t understand what a film director did. She felt a director stood between her and the audience. On stage you are talking directly to the audience, in film you should be speaking directly to the audience through the camera. ‘Who is this person who is standing between you and it?’ And it totally made sense to me. That’s probably how I felt, a lot of the time. So that’s really difficult thing to swallow your pride and know that you’re doing good work and not getting congratulating for it."

When asked if she would ever consider directing herself, "To me I don’t really understand it actually because I sort of feel like if you’re a good director you’re being an observer and you’re asking questions and you’re really staying outside of it. And as actor you feel like you have to put on blinders and think about your one specific thing and throw your heart into it and not be self conscious. And to be able to divide your brain in that way seems so incredible. I can’t believe how you can do it. Like I worked with one director, Don McKellar [Last Night (1998)], who’s in his own film. It’s really weird watching him do it. And he always insists on saying action and cut. So you’ll being sitting there talking to him and he’ll go cut. You’re finishing a scene and he’ll be crying your eyes out and he’ll run over to playback to watch himself critically and then he’ll go back and cry. It’s just a really strange. It kind of seems like you have to be a little bit upset to do it."

On her life, "I moved out when I was 14 years old, actually on good terms with my dad. My mom died when I was younger. It wasn’t… I can’t explain to you my father. There is no way of doing it. It was a naturally thing. It was also fine that I dropped out of school. I didn’t drop out because I was sick of school, in fact I really loved it. Actually I dropped out when I was 16, I moved out at 14. I was really involved at that time, with this political movement in Ontario. The conservative government was elected in Ontario and they were cutting welfare by 22%, slashing arts funding, slashing health care funding. So I got involved in organizing demonstrations and public awareness. And that took over my life. At that time I thought I just wanted to be a political activist or involved in politics in some way. I felt like I was being exposed to everyone I ever wanted to talk to. And I felt that I was getting an amazing education from them. They were giving me books and I felt that at that point I didn’t need it. I’m not ever sure that it was the right decision in some way because I feel like… I don’t know, I look at high school students now hang out on street corners and I’m just really jealous."

About the politics in her film, "I wanted to make a film that was a tribute for people who fight for things that they don’t know they’re going to win or that they won’t win. And it ended up becoming a personal story. But for me, one of the most inspiring things for me to do is that I’ve been to several of the WTO protests in Quebec City and in Washington. It’s this amazing energy of 50,000 people who are not going to end globalization that day who got on a bus anyway, who are dedicating weeks or months or years of your life to this struggle where the end is not quite in sight yet. It a really on going battle. The sense that when you are there, and I think that the movement is so special (the anti-globalization movement) is there is not a sense of needing to see that victory right away. It’s about opening up a dialogue. I find that very, very inspiring."

The struggle of being an actor and an activist, "I used to find it kind of agonizing that we’re split between worlds and that we’re so far apart. That I was acting on the one hand and being a political activist on the other. I had this really dumb ass way of bridging it and that was by talking about politics in the press, which is fine and everyone says to you, which I think actually is a really shallow notion, "you can use your celebrity as an actor to talk about politics." Which I just think is kind of ridiculous, it’s playing into it. It’s something that I fundamentally hate that actors get a lot of time and political activists that are actually doing the work don’t, who know about the issues. It kind of grossed me out… Someone once said to me, ‘You should be using what you do to talk about things. You should be using your art. It’s like undermining your art to not being using that to talk about what you need to be talking about politically.’ I think I was really fortunate to find now writing and directing. I feel like that is the way I should be speaking about things, because I am not an expert, but I am a citizen. And you have the right as a citizen to speak. It is not just as a pundit."

About the struggle of financing a film, comparing the US and Canada, "[In Canada] we have a lot of public programs. And I would say that as young woman, it’s our responsibility to fight for public funding and these things. Because then you can make the kind of films you want to make. You don’t have to convince anyone that it is commercial or make a good trailer. I think that is why you see so many good films coming over from Europe or France where they have a lot of public money to make films. It’s the same with public health care or anything else. It’s just one of those things, I think that you are at an advantage in society when you are collectively deciding to support people being creative or to support another person getting health care. I think that it creates a more artistic place. Canada is a little bit of a nightmare right now because unfortunately a lot of the private companies are shutting down or making decisions to make bigger and bigger films. That’s a big problem. In terms of making short films, there’s a lot of places to go for funding in Canada. There is a Canada council. There is a Toronto council. There is a Ontario council. There’s a lot of different exhibits. It’s hard money to get, it’s very competitive, but they’re there."

On the first film she directed, "I made it [Don’t Think Twice (1999)] when I was 20 because I was very depressed and I just wanted to do something. So I did that and through the process of doing it, it was terrible. I mean it had great actors and great crew, and it was awful. I did a terrible job. In the process of doing it I realized it was what I wanted to do. It’s one of those things where if you can actually know you want do something, even if your experience with it is terrible, aggravating, and the result is a failure, it is definitely what you should do. I’m glad I did it, because it let me know that this is something that I’m really serious about."

What she likes and aspires to in film, "I just think that the moments in film that move me the most are the ones that are a little bit hard to watch. I’m one of those people who really loves watching the surgery channel. Actually my best friend said to me when I was writing this, when she saw the first draft ‘It’s a little bit like watching eye surgery. Make it more like watching eye surgery.’ If it’s good, it’s because it’ll be like watching a horrible operation. So those moments where they’re uncomfortable to shoot and uncomfortable to watch, they are what I like watching in films."