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When the Cellophane dress appeared, Sarah Polley finally said no. This kind of thing is pretty common when an actress is playing the fame game: She finds herself at a publicity / fashion shoot with a pushy stylist and a glossy photographer who want to squeeze her into glam clothes. In Polley's case, it happened a few weeks ago, when she was posing for Elle magazine to promote her latest film, Away From Her.

Unlike many actresses, Polley, 28, has refused to do these kinds of shoots since she was 16. “I couldn't see how the desire to express ideas in films was connected to selling clothes,” she says. “For me it was like an idea born in outer space.” In most magazine photos, she looks the way she does this April afternoon at lunch in Toronto's Little Italy: She wears jeans, a nice jacket, minimal makeup, no-fuss hair. Since she is impossibly fine-boned and wide-eyed and luminous (her skin actually seems to reflect more light than the average person's), that's usually enough.

But Away From Her, which opens next Friday, isn't just another movie Polley is contracted to promote. It's her debut feature as a writer and director. It's based on an Alice Munro short story, and after seven months of nudging, Polley enticed the reclusive Julie Christie into starring. So to get the word out, she broke her own rule and undertook a five-month media siege – chatting up her film in “the most shameless, awful, upsetting way,” she says, laughing – culminating in the Elle shoot, where she found herself “being quite literally hustled into these dresses.”

Until the stylist brought out a Dolce & Gabbana number made of grey, transparent Cellophane, that is, and Polley put her foot down. “The stylist was actually begging, ‘Just one for us, we won't use it in the magazine, just one for you because you're going to look so fabulous,' ” Polley mock-gushes. “This conversation happened six times in two hours. They wouldn't let it go. And the photographer barged in while I was changing even though I said I'd like the door closed. I thought, ‘This is what models go through.' I guess every actress is expected to be a model now.”

Weirder still, she wasn't even there as an actress, but as a director. You don't see stylists pulling that trip on, say, Michael Bay. “Absolutely not,” Polley says. “But they would on Sofia Coppola, and they did on me. My guard was just down enough to let it happen. I haven't seen the photos, but I think they'll haunt me a bit when they come out. It was a good reminder, though. Sometimes at 16 you're way smarter than you are later.”

Polley has been preternaturally smart throughout her career, which began when she was four. As a child actor on the television series Road to Avonlea, she already had those old-soul eyes. As an adult, she has a thrumming stillness that appeals to the art-house directors she admires, including Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter), Hal Hartley (No Such Thing) and Wim Wenders (Don't Come Knocking, in which her angelic character was named Sky).

In May she'll serve on the jury at the Cannes Film Festival; she was also on the jury at the last Sundance, where Away From Her – in which an adoring husband (Gordon Pinsent) watches his vibrant wife (Christie) disappear into Alzheimer's disease — received the kind of ecstatic reception filmmakers dream of.

At lunch, Polley unabashedly eats all the mozzarella off her Caprese salad, leaving a plate half-littered with naked, pale tomatoes. She has a reputation for being ultraserious, humourless even, scoffing at Hollywood films and talking politics to reporters — but in fact, she laughs at herself easily. Asked about adapting a screenplay, she answers, “The usual self-loathing doesn't come into play when it's an Alice Munro story.” Asked about her upcoming projects, she replies, “I'm doing a film called Mr. Nobody with Jared Leto. It's directed by Jaco van Dormael, who did Toto the Hero.” Then she adds, deadpan, “He's my favourite Belgian director.”

Next, she'll play daughter to U.S. president John Adams (Paul Giamatti) in a six-part HBO miniseries based on David McCullough's bestselling biography, directed by Tom Hooper (whose Elizabeth I starred Helen Mirren, and won a slew of awards). “It's the biggest production I've ever seen,” Polley says. “It's so elaborate, it's almost hilarious. I went into the lunchroom on the set in Virginia, and there were 500 people in there. Technically, Hooper is one of the best directors working. I'm so excited to watch him.”

It's a nice change after years of feeling ambivalent about acting, she says: “A lot of my experiences as a child actor were not great. It was like a prison for me. I had a lot of responsibility; I was exposed to things I felt unequipped to handle well. As a child, it's a complicated thing to be forming your own identity while your job is to pretend you're somebody else. Especially for a girl, having generally older men constantly congratulating you for becoming who they want you to be.”

Polley credits her parents – Michael, an actor; and Diane, an actress and casting director, who died of cancer when Polley was 11 – for encouraging her outspokenness. “My parents weren't perfect, but one of the really great things about them was, we were never expected to be nice little children,” she says. “It was not going to win you any points to be sweet or play by the rules. If you started a ruckus because something was unfair at school, that might get you points, or if you were funny, a little bit shocking or nervy. Being out of kilter with society in some way, a bit of a rebel – that was thought of as a necessary part of being a citizen, being in a dialogue with the world.”

And she thanks her husband of three years, David Wharnsby, a film editor (he worked on Away From Her), for renewing her love of film. “To meet somebody who really knew and loved it, to have something that was oppressing to me become magical, it's such a gift,” she says.

She calls marriage in general, “a lot more interesting even than I thought it would be. When you have someone who's sticking with you, it's a real opportunity to get to know things that are uncomfortable about yourself. And to know somebody else that intimately is such an amazing privilege. I've known David since I was 20, and I feel like I've become who I am in that time. I'm not sure I would have had the strength or confidence to make a film if it wasn't for him.”

Both Polley's writing and directing in Away From Her are confident, unafraid of subtleties and silences. She never doubts that her smallish story is enough. “In a first feature, there is this temptation to do cartwheels, to make sure everyone sees every facet of your skill set,” she says. “But it's not about you any more; it's about the story you're telling.”

Still, there were a few moments during the shoot when she held her breath. Christie and Pinsent play avid cross-country skiers, but neither had skied before. “During their lessons, they'd take really hard falls, and I'd wonder, ‘Is this worth it?' ” Polley says. “But Julie got really into it. The instructors wanted to teach her the safety stuff first, but she'd put the skis on and instantly be a speck in the distance. Terrifying.”

Then there was the crane shot, the camera looking down at Christie lying on her back in a wintry glade. “The crew had to dig a trench in the middle of the woods in 10 feet of snow to put the crane track in, and they had about 30 minutes to do it, because we only had the crane for one day, and they'd already had to disassemble it from our last shot on a frozen lake,” Polley says. So in the middle of this hushed, snow-angel moment, she couldn't shake the horrible vision of a crane toppling onto Julie Christie. “For such an intimate, character-driven movie, there seemed to be a lot of physical danger,” she says, laughing ruefully.

Undaunted, Polley is working on two new scripts. (She writes at a desk in her bedroom, looking out over the street, “because it's important to me to see things go by. To remember that what I'm writing about is not the centre of the world.”) She wants to buy a place up north; she plans to have children “definitely but not immediately.” She looks happy.

“I'm in a good place right now,” she says. “I haven't always been, but at this moment I'm really comfortable with what I don't know. It was weird for me to be in my 20s, but doing my job for 20 years. To be 28 and at the beginning of something, figuring out what it is to be a filmmaker – that feels like where I should be. It's a relief.

“What's hilarious is, as an actress, I probably have three or four good years left,” she continues. “I'm glad to have another profession lined up where I can have some control over my lifespan. When I was 23, someone actually said to me, ‘You know, you're not 18 any more' – 23! I get shocked anew every time I hear how prevalent that is in the film industry.” Not in her film: Pinsent is 76; Christie, 66; their co-star, Olympia Dukakis, 75.

Polley is still working out her relationship to fame. “For me it's always been a visceral fear, the idea of walking on the street and somebody knows who I am and I know nothing about them. That feels like such a strange, unequal relationship. I can understand people wanting a lot of money – you can get stuff.” She laughs. “I don't know what you get out of fame, exactly. I guess you get acknowledgment, affirmation that you exist, that you're approved of, worthy. These are things we're all seeking.

“But generally, when there was intense tabloid interest in people, I felt they were getting what they deserved. Recently, though, with the whole Britney Spears thing, for the first time I found myself quite upset by it. Here's this little girl who was forced to be this sex symbol painted with a virgin brush – how confusing was that when she was probably trying to figure herself out? Now she's clearly troubled, as anybody would be, and harassed. It's the first time I haven't felt, ‘Whatever, she walked into it.' All of a sudden it's not so funny to me any more.”

But if anyone can sniff out something worthy in self-promotion, it's Polley. Back at the beginning of this publicity blitz, she thought that her fascination with Away From Her's story sprang from her new marriage. “Being at the beginning of it, I was really interested in what happens down the line,” she says. But just the other day, she ran into a former co-star from Avonlea, and they got to talking about how their mothers both died of cancer when they were young.

“I suddenly realized that watching my father lose my mother, the love of his life, was a central emotional experience in my life,” Polley says. “I went, ‘Oh, I guess that's a huge part of [Away From Her].' It had never occurred to me that my obsession with Grant, who for me is the centre of the film, is that I was interested in what it means for a man to lose his wife.

“The promotion process is strange,” she sums up. “But if you try your hardest not to become a broken record, there's a possibility to open new pathways into what you think.” No Cellophane required.