Filmmaker Sarah talks about the film ‘Women Talking’ and her experiences as film maker.
Canadian Filmmaker Sarah Polley who has won the Best Picture nomination for “Women Talking” and feels there is a utopian dream at her heart which is right in the title.
Polley while talking to Indie Wire feels excited about the fact that she has been getting reports of strangers being thrown out of the theatre because they were found talking, this particularly feels exciting because of the feeling that people who didn’t know each other or didn’t agree with each other are suddenly talking because of the film. She says it feels like a Utopian dream for her.
And it is not just about women talking anymore but it is people talking she says while she reveals the screenplay that has been nominated for Oscar it may sound confrontational but the film’s title has also been adapted by her from the novel of the Miriam Toews novel for the screen.
“In a way, I think we left the title the way it is as a kind of challenge,” she said. “There used to be a line in the film where Judith Ivey’s character is asked by a man at some point, ‘What are you doing here? Are you trying to burn down my barn?,’ and Judith Ivey’s character goes, ‘Oh, don’t worry, we’re only women talking.’ So the title actually had this reference to something in the film, and once that wasn’t in the film, I was like, ‘Maybe we should talk about the title,’ and then [producer] Dede [Gardner] was like, ‘Hell no.’”
“It is throwing down the gauntlet: Are you really not going to see this movie because it’s called ‘Women Talking’?” Polley said. “I have found there’s very little difference in terms of the responses from people of different genders. I have found incredibly emotional responses and vibrant conversations coming from young men. There’s such generosity and openness in so many of the young men I’ve talked to afterward, which gives you real hope and faith in the future, which is a nice feeling.”
The script first started in 2020, from the novel written by Toews’. Before starting the discussions Polley engaged herself in the conversation with the characters. The novel had a debate among Mennonite women about the colony’s future which had men drugging and raping females.
“Always when you’re beginning something, there’s a sense of being daunted,” Polley said. “It’s also really joyful when you’re adapting something because you’re starting, hopefully, with the material you love. You’re getting an opportunity to walk around inside a book that you love and get to know its nooks and crannies and uncover things you didn’t see before.”
Polley who had written and directed the film “Stories We Tell” wanted to go deeper into the characters and started reworking them by approaching them newly with a better perspective each time as women.
Talking about the process she said she had to work twice in the case of some characters and three times in the case of others while writing a draft. She thought of all of them were the main characters in the film and that impacted them and made them be present, and active and hear everything that was going on irrespective of whether it was their scene or not. She hopes that they must have transformed.
The exercise helped her answer the actors’ questions better as they were going to be questioning the impact of the film and it was needed to inhabit every actor, it was not just an important exercise for the scripting stage but also during the set with the ensemble.
The process opened up all sorts of “nooks and crannies” for specific characters, Polley said, like the angry Mariche, played by Jessie Buckley.
“She’s the most adversarial in so many ways, so [I needed] to track for her what we find out about her by the end and what she’s been carrying and the fact that she’s been living with domestic violence and there’s been this complicity from the community and even participation in the act of forgiving this person over and over again,” Polley said. “To figure out where she ends up, I [needed to] know that that’s in her from the beginning and track the character with that knowledge from the beginning.”
“I just saw this little spark in her eye and I suddenly went, ‘Are you more attracted to Salome?’” Polley recalled. “There is something in Claire, it was really interesting to get to see her express it through the character of Salome because I hadn’t seen her do it as an actor. I think that the most exciting thing when you’re casting, is not thinking of what you know a person can do, but what have they not had the opportunity to do and what would they be amazing at? What would they be excited to try? What’s the challenge for them? What’s the excitement for them?”
Direction and Film making seems to be in Polley’s blood as both her mother and brother were casting directors. She says she grew up with conversations about casting with them and about the work and combinations of actors playing unpredictable parts which were risky sometimes.
Polley also start as an actress at the age of four and being an actress knew the way characters came to life on screen. She knew the characters and story but want the cast and crew to add their own insights and feel more involved while the characters took shape.
“We discovered stuff in the rehearsal process, there would be things that would feel right or wouldn’t feel right or words we realized we could drop or lines we realized we could drop or something that was missing,” she said. “The script felt like a very alive document and an ever-evolving one that also encompassed the experiences of a lot of people on set.”
She made sure that the schedule for the shoot was flexible and didn’t involve kids working the whole day and constantly feeling pushed to do more,
“I have always hated the emergency room mentality of film sets, it’s so absurd to me,” she said. “I have family members who are medical professionals and they don’t have the same amount of time pressure at work when they’re saving lives as we put on ourselves on film sets. So one of the policies was, if anyone needs a break at any time, we just take one.
This is hard. Stuff might come up for crew and for cast. It never, ever hurt the production. I think, in the end, we broke two, maybe three times for the whole shoot. It was great and everyone got a breather and everyone came back and there was more energy and a sense that it was OK to have a moment and people had your back.”
It is difficult and many times it even went wrong says Polley, she explains how it felt after moving it a little bit forward and experiencing good working conditions on set which made her feel unsafe otherwise, and hence it was an amazing experience even for her personally.
Talking about awards and film festivals and Oscar nominations Polley says,
“I’ve definitely had a couple of times where I hit a wall, but mostly I’m enjoying it, I think because I don’t do it ever,” Polley said with a laugh. “There are people who do this all the time and they’re so tired. But I’m still getting used to the fact that every day I’m in a room with interesting people who I’m really excited to talk to, and they’re adults and there’s usually OK food.”
She and her strong bond with the Prince-Bythewood made it very clear that they are not going to go with the outdated notion about only one can be in the best female filmmaker slot and that there is no competition between them. Polley also acknowledges her to be mentor instead of mere competitor.
She also said that awards cannot be everything but their impact on someone’s career and film can be everything. She wants the same admiration for “The Woman King” and “Till” as the other films.
