Storieswetell Interview 2

knowing you, knowing me Sarah Polley turns her camera on her own family and lets contient dictate form with Stories We Tell BY JOSÉ TEODORO T WAS ALWAYS GOING TO BE MORE THAN ONE STORY. Diane fell in love not with Michael but with the char- acter she saw Michael embody on stage—or so he says. Actors both, Diane and Michael married, had chil- dren, and set up house in Toronto. Diane was viva- cious, seductive, and mercurial, Michael undemon- strative and withdrawn. Diane sacrificed her career for family, grew dissatisfied, and then one day went to Montreal to act in a play, and when she returned, marital bliss Iseemed reborn for a spell. Another child, Sarah, was born, and when Sarah was 11, Diane died. By then Sarah had already estab- lished an acting career that Diane could only have dreamed of. Over time Sarah heard hints about her mother having perhaps had an affair and the possibility of a father other than Michael. Eventually Sarah became a writer-director, and made two remark- able features about infidelity, long-term love, and the vagaries of desire, about elusive women and sturdy men. Now she has made a third, decidedly nonfiction film, her finest yet, an investigation » IN FOCUS: Stories We Tell opens May 10. 52 filmcomment May-June 201} May-June loi} filmcomment 53 The process of making this fiim was very much about discovering why i was making it. 55 into the identity of Father X and into Michelle Williams is torn between old love my version, the way I experienced this Diane's secret life. Everyone who appears and new longing and finally faces the more story, is actually in there. In a funny way, before PoUey's camera—friends, family, vertiginous mystery of her own self and her that was less interesting to me—I already colleagues—offers his or her own story, uncertainty about how to be alone. Balanc- knew that part. and they disagree, both with each other ing taste and nerve, malleability and rigor, and with Sarah's stubborn refusal to interweaving interviews, Super-8 home One sequence finds you revisiting your dad's draw conclusions about which story was movies both actual and artfully fabricated, home movies in which he tends to stray from true. That refusal is the masterstroke in and other, quietly mischievous material. the famiiy members he's supposed to be Stories We Tell, a choral work that grad- Stories We Tell demonstrates its author's memorializing. His camerawork seems to ually becomes a self-portrait. Sarah turned pecuhar combination of strengths. reflect his own wandering mind. It vaiidates a the camera on everyone, until the only theory that the camera inevitably becomes a one left was herself. You told me a few years ago that you were sort of psychic mirror. Perhaps, in a parallel As an actress PoUey has excelled at mak- making a film about memory and narrative. way,you don't feel a need to provide your ver- ing internal struggles captivating: the tran- Which sounded interesting in a detached sion because you're controlling the camera. quil teen who susses out an adult's thorny sort of way. How did this project shift from I do feel that there's some level of intent pathology of grief and projection in Exotica that essayistic conceit into something with in the way you convey everything. You (94), or the paralyzed survivor of a tragic very high stakes for you personally? might think you're grabbing things and accident whose testimony dashes her I was interested in the way we depend on putting them together in a way that sim- father's hopes of a lucrative court settlement narrative to make sense of our lives. How ply helps the big picture make sense, yet in The Sweet Hereafter (97). She was a human a need that was. But the process of on some subconscious level there's an young woman, seduced by a much older making this film was very much about dis- agenda. Maybe making my version of the man, who discovers tremendous inner covering why I was making it. My father truth explicit while also getting to author resources in Guinevere (99). She was a asked if I was making a film about the the movie is just getting too obviously secretly dying matriarch making an ephemeral nature of truth and memory self-involved. Better to let the others eleventh-hour stab at freedom and exhilara- because I was trying to avoid actually feel- speak for themselves. tion outside the confines of marriage in My ing its impact. There's something to that. Life Without Me (03), a role that antici- But it was interesting, trying to play the That text your father reads aloud, the one pated PoUey's work as director (she drew detective in one's own life, as opposed to woven throughout the film, begins in the upon at least one idea of her mother). She someone directly affected by the events third person and ends in the first, which was the nurse in Zack Snyder's remake of under scrutiny. somehow reflects the film's structure, it Dawn of the Dead (04), traumatized yet also reminded me of Bob Dylan's "Tangled ready for zombie massacre, and easily the if we were discussing a piece of literature, i Up in Blue," another work dealing with most reasonable person in the movie. Her think we'd feel comfortable calling Stories painful memories and marital malaise. In directorial output has been celebrated for a We Tell a memoir. When pressed to ciassify the earlier, demo version ofthe song, Dylan wisdom beyond PoUey's 34 years: Away the film, does that handle work for you? shifts between— from Her (06), in which Gordon Pinsent I suppose, but only if we allow for a —between first and third person. He witnesses Julie Christie succumbing to Rashomon-\\kt memoir, in which we find switches perspectives in the verse about Alzheimer's (or is she really engaged in some conflicting versions of the same events. I loading cargo onto a truck. Another is the perverse act of revenge for old marital griev- ultimately control what ended up in the one about chopping down trees. It's my ances?); and Take This Waltz (11), flawed film; the context in which things appear favorite song. I know both versions yet almost unbearably moving, in which was my decision. But I don't know that extremely well. I've always been obsessed 54 filmcomment May-June tf I never really knew why I was doing these things. Most of the time I wished I wasn't doing it at ail. 5 J with that earlier version that no one seems in Stories We Tell is the fact that she's the one wisdom, and compassion. Before this I to know. Cameron Crowe gave it to me. who isn't there. She's a ghost, a composite, hadn't realized that I was mining stories I'd never heard it before then. No one's an aggregate of ail these impressions. from my own life. Now that I've made a ever brought that up with me before. It's She was a star, in the old-fashioned sense. film that deals directly with those figures an enormous source of inspiration. She walked into a room and lit it up. She in the cave that the other films were shad- was dynamic and mercurial. People knew ows of, am I going to keep exploring the While making Stories We Tell, did you sense different people when they knew her. She same territory? Letting that unconscious that you could shift perspectives in a similar was unable to keep herself to herself—she thought hit the air makes it hard to make manner? was incredibly generous. I got to know more art about it. I wonder if we always While working with [cinematographer] her better through making the film. That's have to have some sort of mystery sur- Iris Ng and [editor] Mike Munn, we spent probably why I made it, on some level. If I rounding why we write, why we make a lot of time figuring out how to develop was so miserable, why didn't I quit? The the films we're making. characters for the camera. We'd be looking only reason I can think of was this pursuit at images of my mother's funeral, for of intimacy with a mother who died 20 That's the thing about Stories We Tell: we example, and decide that the camera had years ago. Obviously, she's a mythic figure sense the filmmaker's competing impulses. to feel like me at age 11. So Iris was, in a in my life. I discovered that she was larger One impulse wants to summon more mys- sense, playing me at 11, while Mike had to than life for others, too. tery, while the other seeks resolution. pretend he was an editor who just hap- I once asked Sam Shepard why he wasn't pened to find this footage and had to cob- I also left with the impression that, ironically writing screenplays anymore. He said it ble something together to make sense of it. perhaps, it winds up being a kind of gift to was impossible to write anything decent I had to play the detective, while beneath your dad. these days because the funding process that role there's the daughter and the sib- In an odd way he inspired what the film involves a million questions about what ling of the people on screen.

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