Canadian actor Sarah Polley, at 28, has just directed Julie Christie in a powerful film about Alzheimer's. Michael Dwyermeets her in Dublin
The audience was understandably subdued and moved by the time the closing credits rolled on Away From Herat the recent Dublin International Film Festival, and quite clearly surprised when the director, Sarah Polley, came on stage afterwards. Having turned 28 this year, she is younger than anyone in her movie, which deals with the dilemma faced by a couple married for 44 years when one of them gets Alzheimer's disease.
Her film is admirably mature by any standards, in its sensitive and unsentimental treatment of such a difficult theme, and all the more impressive an achievement given that it is the first feature film Polley has directed, although she has been acting since childhood in Toronto.
Julie Christie gives one of the great performances of her career in Away From Her, subtly capturing the alarming changes in Fiona, who lives in a rural Ontario cottage with her husband, Grant (Gordon Pinsent), a retired college professor. The first signals of her illness seem almost incidental, as when she absent-mindedly puts a frying pan into the fridge.
"That's part of the dilemma for people living with someone who has Alzheimer's," Polley says. "The signs can be so subtle for so long, and some of them really do feel like magnified versions of the person you've always lived with. You can ignore it. You can stay in denial about it for very long periods of time. Sometimes you notice dramatic changes, but often it's just tiny details."
As Fiona's memory lapses become more obvious and dangerous, she checks into Meadowlake, a retirement home. It is her decision, although Grant is reluctant to agree. The film is thought-provoking as it explores this institution, which is depicted as comfortable but forbidding, and there is a sharp contrast between its bureaucratic, patronising manager (Wendy Crewson) and a dedicated young nurse (Kristen Thomson) who genuinely cares for its residents.
If Polley had to decide about putting a loved one into a place such as Meadowlake, what would she do? "Well, in fact, I've gone through this with my grandmother and with an uncle, both of whom ended up in retirement facilities," she says. "I was very close to my grandmother and it was really a struggle for me. My husband and I asked for her to come and live with us, and she didn't want to. She preferred to go into this facility. They are incredibly difficult places for you to wrap your head around as a family member. And there's a lot of guilt attached to it.
"Like the place in the film, the place where my grandmother was staying had staff who were overworked, callous and insensitive and people who were extremely empathetic and went way beyond the call of duty. At the same time, in so many cases these places are essential. It's such a complicated process. It's fine if you have someone at home all the time, but as women are spending less and less time at home, it becomes more difficult to decide what happens then to our elderly."
In a touching early scene, Grant is taken on a tour of Meadowlake and introduced to the routines of daily life there for its residents. "That's based on what I saw when my grandmother decided to go into one of those facilities," Polley says. "I was in charge of finding a place for her and I took about 20 of those tours, so that scene is composed of details from all of them. There was always a woman who would take me through and say things like, 'We get a lot of light' and 'Oh, look, there's a puzzle on the go,' as if she was taking me on a tour of a nursery school. She really treated them like children, forgetting that they were all older than her."
Apart from dealing specifically with Alzheimer's, the film addresses matters of human frailty and mortality. "The whole concept of ageing is something we are so uncomfortable with - the whole idea that we are mortal and we are going to lose people, the people we love and are attached to, and not just the generation above us. We know that one of us is going to be left alone. It's something you try not to think about a lot."
Polley adapted her screenplay from Alice Munro's short story, The Bear Came Over the Mountain. Was she drawn to the subject matter because her own mother died from cancer when Polley was just 11 years old? "I don't think so, although that probably played a part in it in some subconscious way," she says. "I read the story and I found it the most profoundly moving love story I'd ever read. And it occurred to me that when we tell stories about love, we always seem to come back to the most boring part of love, which is the beginning. Anyone is capable of doing that.
"I thought it was far more interesting to deal with this really romantic story about people who have really failed each other and who are in the process of falling apart. That seemed far more urgent a story to tell than one of the many stories about that kind of chemical crash that we keep going back to over and over."
Nevertheless, those stories about the beginnings of relationships can mean so much to so many people. "That's true," Polley says. "When I wrote the screenplay, I was at the very beginning of my marriage and it was very interesting to look forward and think about how it would be after 44 years, when life has had its way with us." Her husband, David Wharnsby, was the film editor on Away From Her.
Adapting a short story for a feature film is, I suggest, less complicated than taking a full-length novel as source material, given that there is much less filleting involved in shaping a short story into two hours of cinema.
"I actually have no idea how anyone can adapt a novel as a film," Polley says. "Even with this short story, everything she writes is so concise and loaded. There is so much in every sentence she writes. I still felt I was stripping away huge sections of her story as I was writing the screenplay, but yet, because it's a short story, there was room for fleshing out things."
Has Alice Munro seen the film? "Not yet, but hopefully she's going to see it over the next few months. She's very reclusive and really hard to reach. In fact, all the women in this film are quite reclusive and difficult to reach. It was very hard to get Alice to read the script, and she finally did just before we shot. We got her blessing. She really liked what we were doing."
The other woman who was reclusive and difficult to reach was Julie Christie, with whom Polley had acted in two movies, No Such Thingand The Secret Life of Words. "I don't know if I would even have optioned the film rights to the story if it hadn't been for Julie," Polley says. "When I first read it, I had just met Julie, and I couldn't stop imagining her face in the part. She was a huge motivating factor in doing it.
"Then there was the question of whether she would do it or not. With Julie, that's always a very big issue. She doesn't like working that much. That took a really long time. I was so fixed on getting her to do it that I forgot about how daunting it could be. I only realised that just before we started rehearsal. It suddenly felt so intimidating and I was asking myself, 'Who on earth do I think I am to be directing Julie Christie?', but she was great."
Polley admits to being terrified on the first day of the shoot, and that she didn't sleep for more than a few hours a night for the first three weeks. "I was operating completely on adrenalin. But it was also the most fun I've ever had. Julie really made me be the director. She was constantly asking for my input and I'm not sure I would have had the courage to give it if she had not welcomed me so much into her process. That was a great way to make your first film."
In one particularly poignant scene, Grant asks if Fiona isn't too young to have Alzheimer's. "That's another reason it was so important for me to have Julie play the part," says Polley. "She is such a good actress and she is so iconic, but she also looks so young. She looks forever young, and she comes from that generation that was defined by its youth. It seems inconceivable that somebody like her could have this disease." The tone of the film is subtle, low-key and sensitive from beginning to end.
"It was strange," Polley says, "but I didn't realise it was such a quiet film until we were doing the sound mix. There was an outdoor scene when a truck is pulling away, and the wind sounded so loud that I was covering my ears. And I realised that was the noisiest scene in the film."
Similarly, the music is effectively understated and never bombastic, just as the movie avoids histrionics. "The subject matter is, in a way, very dangerous territory in that you can start desperately trying to provoke emotion and pull people's heart strings. I was lucky enough to have actors who didn't do that, and I wanted to be sure that none of the other elements in the film did."
In addition to taking a short story by Munro as its source, the film contains several Canadian cultural references, quoting Michael Ondaatje and featuring Neil Young's original recording of Harvest Moonand kd lang's version of Young's plaintive song, Helpless.
"I think the thing with Canadian films is that we spend so much time trying to be American," Polley says. "I don't believe I was consciously trying to make this film Canadian, but as long as you don't avoid being Canadian, it really stands out because we don't do it very often. I felt all of those things you mentioned just seemed organic to the film and not as a statement."
Atom Egoyan, one of Canada's outstanding film-makers, was executive producer on Polley's film. He had directed Polley in his own films, Exoticaand The Sweet Hereafter. "He was the reason I got really interested in making films," she says. "I've been in films since I was a kid, but he had such a big impact on me. When I was about six, I did a part in a Christmas movie and then I did a few TV things. When I was eight, I did Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. That really turned me off big-budget films for good. It defined my path into independent productions." She later turned down the role that went to Kate Hudson in Almost Famous.
"Making that decision was the best thing that ever happened to me, because it was immediately after that I decided to direct the first of my short films. Both my parents were actors at one point and then moved into other areas, and my brother was an actor for a while before becoming a lawyer. So they all got out of acting except for me.
"I always had a very complicated relationship with film because it was this thing I had spent my childhood doing, and I felt ambivalent about what that experience had meant to me. It wasn't until I got older that I realised what a magical thing it is, and how lucky I am to be involved with it."
Polley is working on two screenplays she intends to direct - one is an original script and the other another adaptation of a short story - and she will continue to act in movies for other directors. She is committed to starring in Mr Nobody by Toto the Hero director Jaco van Dormael, and Cry of the Owl, a Patricia Highsmith adaptation by English film-maker Jamie Thraves. Neither is a mainstream movie.
Away From Heropens on Friday, April 27th