Sarah Polley Quotes
It is important to me to stay in Canada. I used to think it was because I thought it was important to build up an indigenous film industry - but now I realise I'm incapable of living anywhere else. I'm a real homebody.
"I was pretty uninterested in acting until I was about 17. I wanted to go to university and never think about acting again. I'd been very politically involved for a couple of years and I wanted a break, so I did
The Sweet Hereafter in 1997. But I ended up completely falling in love with acting".
I always think it's a bit of a joke when I get described as an activist. Really, for two or three months of my year I organise stuff, but I'm not as involved as I used to be.
I started acting when I was four. My first experience on a film set was in dead of winter. Now I realise that almost every film I've ever been in is like that. It was the beginning of a long career of incredibly cold, sparse, barren landscapes.
The guy who taught me to use the shotgun was a complete gun nut. I asked, 'Is the safety on when it's to the right or off when it's to the right?' And he said, 'The way I like to remember it is right is safe, like the government, and left is unsafe, like the people we are shooting at.' And I'm thinking, 'I'm in a room with my worst nightmare who's teaching me how to shoot a shotgun. How did this happen to me?'
I missed out on a traditional childhood but I had something else that got me to what I am doing today. I can't say I regret it but I certainly wouldn't let my child act at an early age.
On her film
Dawn of the Dead going up against
Mel Gibson's
The Passion of the Christ head-to-head at the box office: "They've got only one guy who comes back from the dead. We've got millions".
It takes terrible things to live well.
{On her marriage to
David Wharnsby} "My relationship is the thing I'm proudest of in my life. I had a lot of opportunities to end up in some pretty bad situations and, despite all my faults, I had the sense to find someone like him and make the decision to be with him. You spend a lot of time wanting to be with the wrong person and I just feel incredibly lucky because I've succeeding at that one thing. I figured that out".
[On filming
The Sweet Hereafter] "I was so young then, 18. I'm really comfortable in sadness so I don't get depressed doing stuff like that. I actually find it invigorating. It was an amazing experience.
Atom Egoyan is a filmmaker who I really respect and I felt like I had his trust".
If you have the opportunity to do things which have some meaning I don't know why you would choose to do other things. I understand that many people don't have that opportunity but I do right now so I'm happy to hold out for the films which have something to contribute.
"I think you have to keep your distance from mainstream Hollywood in order to be a normal human being. I mean, I work there, and I like being there, but I love having an anonymous life. I think there's definitely such a thing as being too famous.
The reason why I stayed in Canada had everything to do with the kind of films we used to make before the commercial mandate came in effect at Telefilm. They were films that asserted an independent vision of the world. They weren't just cheap versions of American genre films...but movies that spoke to the human condition. Now, I'm beginning to wonder why I stayed and if it was a huge mistake.
[On herself and other Canadian actors & filmmakers, such as director-actor-writer
Don McKellar, who stayed in Canada rather than go Hollywood and make movies in the U.S.] "If Canadian films don't have a purpose, then what are we still doing here? We're beginning to freak out a little. Why make a commitment with so little reward? The Canadian films out there have been so weak, it's been kind of depressing".
[On movie critics] "There are a few who are not nice and they say things that are harsh...but they always help me to become a better actor."
It was the opposite kind of love than we usually celebrate in films, which is new love without knowledge and without hardship. It's the whole idea of love after life has had its way with you, and after you have kind of failed each other and things have gone off the rails. Yet love still somehow exists between them." - 2007 AP interview on "Away From Her
That's something I find is really missing in films that portray love between people in their 60s or 70s. It generally lacks chemistry, like somehow that's all died away, and that's just not my experience of people in their 60s and 70s, that that whole part of yourself disappears somehow. It's a really pessimistic and inaccurate attitude that a lot of films have had, so it was really important for me to have that vibrancy between them, because I've seen it in relationships that have lasted that long. And I haven't seen it very often in films." - 2007 AP interview on "Away From Her
[On being nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for "Away From Her"] I'm in total disbelief. I'm thrilled but kind of in shock too. It's been such a strange year and I'm bowled over by the life of the film. It's more than I could have ever hoped. This now adds a very surreal element to it.
I think that what a lot of first-time filmmakers don't realize is that they are the least experienced person on that set. Everybody else has been doing their job for years, so the whole act of playing the filmmaker, playing the person in command, is a charade.
