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.”
