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Sarah Polley: almost famous after all
Canwest News Service
TORONTO - Ten years ago, Canadian actress Sarah Polley turned down the role of Penny Lane, a groupie who latches on to a band in the rock 'n' roll movie Almost Famous.
The part went to Kate Hudson, who won an Oscar as best supporting actress. Polley went on to act in a series of independent art films - such as John Greyson's The Law of Enclosures, Kathryn Bigelow's The Weight of Water, and Wim Wenders' Don't Come Knocking - that enhanced her the reputation as a talented and versatile performer. They also ensured that she would never be a Hollywood-style movie star.
And she couldn't be happier.
"I haven't yet had a moment of regret about that decision," she said the other day. "Acting for me is something I love doing. I love doing it on exactly the scale and with the kind of people I do it with. I have no desire to do it on a more commercial scale or be more famous than I am."
Indeed, she said, she was recently having a coffee with Hudson, and there were paparazzi hiding behind vans trying to get pictures. Polley said she couldn't have lived that life in a million years.
She is talking about regret because it's one of the themes of Mr. Nobody, her new movie, premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival Friday. It's a large-scale spectacle with a small-scale theme. Directed and written by Jaco van Dormael, and following the ideas of his 1991 movie Toto The Hero, it tells the visually lush, futuristic story of a very old man named Nemo (Jared Leto) who looks back on his life and of all the alternative lives he might have led.
Polley plays Elise, one of Nemo's possible wives. As frequently happens in her movies, she is the best thing in the film.
She said she was attracted by the insane complexity of it. "You get used to films that have something to say on a very small scale, and you get used to seeing things on a huge visual scale that have nothing to say," she said. "It's very rare that you see those two things combined. People won't simply take the risk in investing money in films that take risks or ask big questions."
Risks and big questions are right up her alley, of course, but she emphasized that Mr. Nobody isn't a dark, brooding film. It also has a lighthearted side. Elise is a depressed woman - "I'm basically screaming and crying in every frame," Polley acknowledged - but her most memorable scene, and the hardest to shoot, came when Elise, a burst of manic happiness, begins whirling and dancing at a child's birthday party.
"It's hard to humiliate yourself in front of kids, it doesn't matter what age you are or whether you're an actor or not," she said. "Being surrounded by kids making fun of you is a bad feeling at any age."
She said that Mr. Nobody posits the idea that there is no "wrong" life. "You can make the wrong decision and have the wrong life and there's still things that have meaning in that life."
In her own life, the watershed moment was her decision to turn down Almost Famous, the movie that could have catapulted her to paparazzi-levels of celebrity. A child actor (The Road To Avonlea, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) and star of edgy Canadian fare (Atom Egoyan's Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter; David Cronenberg's eXistenZ), Polley was in her early 20s at the time, and poised for stardom.
She turned it down on purpose.
"I think about it a lot because I think it was such a pivotal moment for me where my life could have gone in one direction and instead it went completely in the other direction," she said. "It was huge and it defined who I became and it defined my life and who I am now. I think the sense of loss I felt after I made that decision - because it was a decision no one understood - I think that sense of loss led to my making (my) own first short film. And then realizing I wanted to direct and write. So in a weird way, it was like the thing I had to do in order to know what I wanted to do."
What she wanted to do turned out to be Away From Her, the 2006 movie that she wrote and directed that won her an Oscar nomination for her adapted screenplay and won Julie Christie a nomination as best actress. She begins directing her next feature film next summer.
Polley says she looks back with a sense of gratitude: she loves acting "on exactly the scale and with the kind of people I do it with. I have no desire to do it on a more commercial scale or be more famous than I am."
She says being famous is a recurring nightmare. "I wake up in a sweat that I'm famous and that I can't live my normal life in Toronto and that life is somehow interfered with, and I'm running into people who know who I am and I don't know who they are. For me, literally, it's my idea of hell . . . Life is really normal and life feels like it's progressing at a good pace. I feel that this is kind of my ceiling and I don't think I would do anything that risks going above that level."
It seems odd that someone who doesn't court fame would wind up in show business, and Polley admitted that when she was seven-years-old, she told her family "if I'm still acting when I'm 25-years-old, I'll be so ashamed of myself." But she's 30 now, and she says she's happy to be exactly where she is. She somehow wound up being almost famous after all.
