Director Sarah Polley delves into the harrowing tale of “Women Talking”
The disturbing material that serves as the backdrop of Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel, “Women Talking,” might make the average moviegoer reluctant to consider seeing it. It’s loosely based on horrific crimes in a Mennonite community in Bolivia, where women were drugged and raped by men from their community.
But the film, like the book itself, finds light within the darkness and draws its power and inspiration from candid conversations between a tightly-knit group of fictional female survivors as they gather in a hayloft to debate what their critical next move should be – to leave or to stay. “Women Talking” opens Jan. 6 in select Bay Area theaters.
Polley, the versatile 43-year-old Canadian director, screenwriter, author and actor, has won praise for her previous directorial features – 2006’s “Away From Her,” 2011’s “Take This Waltz” and 2012’s piercing familial documentary, “Stories We Tell.” With her latest, she isn’t out to shock, outrage or leave audiences drained and filled with despair.
“It’s not a film to sink you into grief and rage or to trigger you (and) make things harder,” Polley said in early December while she was in San Francisco to accept the SFFILM award for storytelling.
“It’s actually designed as a kind of off ramp, as there’s a sense of thinking about going forward and a way of healing and recovery and what a just world could look like,” she said. “It’s not a trauma dump. And it’s not a beating of fists. It’s something else. It’s like a love letter to survivors.”
Polley’s affinity to the material and her introduction to it came during a book club meetup, when a fellow reader, who wanted to see her adapt the book into a film, “took me aside in the kitchen and said, ‘I’m going to tell you about the backdrop of this book, and you won’t want to make it into a film.’”
“The backdrop is not what the book is about,” the book club member said. “It’s not about the past. It’s about this amazing conversation between these women in the hayloft and trying to figure out what they’re going to do before the men come back.”
Polley was already a Toews fan, so she promptly read “Woman Talking.” Riveted, she began thinking about it nonstop. She wanted to make a film out of it, her first in 10 years, since being sidelined from directing due, in part, to a debilitating head injury. Shortly after finishing the book, she discovered on social media that producer Dede Gardner and actor/producer Frances McDormand – who owned the film rights – were in the gestation process of getting a film off the ground.
“I reached out to them, and within the same hour, they reached out to me. It was really strange,” she recalled.
While the film was shot during strict COVID restrictions, one of the benefits of having a slower timetable was the ability to pinpoint the right actors, who could not only play their own roles but play off each other.
“You couldn’t cast one person until you had everybody,” Polley said, “because everyone is so dependent on each other.”
Polley’s brother, John Buchan, returned as her casting director, and soon, Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, Judith Ivey, McDormand and Ben Whishaw, who plays the notes-taking August, signed on.
While Polley’s screenplay hews closely to the novel, a big change between book and film is the narrator. August narrates the novel, but the teen-aged Autje (Kate Hallett) provides the voice-over in the film.
“It works in a book that it’s a male narrator, but in a film you really need to hear the voice — the voice of someone who has experienced the assaults,” Polley said.
And the decision to not show incidents of sexual assault on film was intentional.
“For me, seeing sexual assaults depicted on screen is so rarely additive, and (it’s) harmful in some ways,” Polley said. “I knew I didn’t want to show it, but also in terms of the film itself, what’s important is the impact it has on these women and how they move alongside it and through it, not the details of the assault.”
Since most characters are female, and the movie highlights women attaining power and insight from each other and then enacting change in solidarity, there was a discussion about “Women Talking” hiring a female-only crew. Polley didn’t like that idea. She didn’t want to leave behind the “guys I have worked with on the last three or four projects who were the kind of men who were supportive and helpful before it was cool…before anyone required it of them.”
As the conversation unfolded, Polley said, “We’re not lugging a bunch of people along with us who have been obstacles to us. We’re bringing along the good guys who actually made this industry bearable in a time when it was mostly unbearable to be female. I just had a real ethical moment around that of bringing these guys with us also because they’re my team and they’re a big part of it.”
The result was a “really nice balance of things.”
Polley started acting at an early age, appearing in the “Ramona” TV series as well as the “Road to Avonlea” series from 1990 to 1996. But she found work on the 1988 set of Terry Gilliam’s fantasy, “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” as an 8-year-old so challenging, she wrote about it in her 2022 book, “Run Towards Danger,” talking about how she felt unsafe during the cult classic filming.
While her three children appear ever so briefly in “Women Talking,” she doesn’t think it’s right to have children in film.
“I don’t think they should be there,” she says emphatically. “But in a way, having my own kids in that group of kids was a good insurance policy. My eye is very acutely trained on kids when they are on set, because I don’t know how ethical it is to have kids in a professional environment.”
That ethical dilemma is particularly acute in the case of child actors who attain fame, popularity and even idolatry at a very young age.
“I had a lot of luck,” Polley said. “I think I would have fallen off the rails, if I hadn’t had that luck. I just don’t think it’s a fair position to put a kid in, to have that kind of attention at an early age. I think so many people I know who were child actors … the rest of their lives were kind of this dull echo of the glory that they had as a child.”
As for casting a child in a lead role, Polley stands firm: “I would never have a kid as a lead in a movie. Never. Not in a million years.”
Meanwhile, Polley is pursuing what she really loves, including writing a novel and continuing to direct. And while she remains committed to pursuing more indie features, she recently discovered a soft spot for one filmmaking genre that’s been criticized by other filmmakers – superhero flicks.
“Oddly now, as I get older, I have more fun going and seeing blockbuster movies,” she said.
During her last pregnancy, when she was feeling tired, depressed and hardly able to move, she started “watching every Marvel movie. I had never seen any Marvel movies” before. “I feel like I’m not an old snob about it anymore,” she said.
The disturbing material that serves as the backdrop of Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel, “Women Talking,” might make the average moviegoer reluctant to consider seeing it. It’s loosely based on horrific crimes in a Mennonite community in Bolivia, where women were drugged and raped by men from their community.
But the film, like the book itself, finds light within the darkness and draws its power and inspiration from candid conversations between a tightly-knit group of fictional female survivors as they gather in a hayloft to debate what their critical next move should be – to leave or to stay. “Women Talking” opens Jan. 6 in select Bay Area theaters.
Polley, the versatile 43-year-old Canadian director, screenwriter, author and actor, has won praise for her previous directorial features – 2006’s “Away From Her,” 2011’s “Take This Waltz” and 2012’s piercing familial documentary, “Stories We Tell.” With her latest, she isn’t out to shock, outrage or leave audiences drained and filled with despair.
“It’s not a film to sink you into grief and rage or to trigger you (and) make things harder,” Polley said in early December while she was in San Francisco to accept the SFFILM award for storytelling.
“It’s actually designed as a kind of off ramp, as there’s a sense of thinking about going forward and a way of healing and recovery and what a just world could look like,” she said. “It’s not a trauma dump. And it’s not a beating of fists. It’s something else. It’s like a love letter to survivors.”
Polley’s affinity to the material and her introduction to it came during a book club meetup, when a fellow reader, who wanted to see her adapt the book into a film, “took me aside in the kitchen and said, ‘I’m going to tell you about the backdrop of this book, and you won’t want to make it into a film.’”
“The backdrop is not what the book is about,” the book club member said. “It’s not about the past. It’s about this amazing conversation between these women in the hayloft and trying to figure out what they’re going to do before the men come back.”
Polley was already a Toews fan, so she promptly read “Woman Talking.” Riveted, she began thinking about it nonstop. She wanted to make a film out of it, her first in 10 years, since being sidelined from directing due, in part, to a debilitating head injury. Shortly after finishing the book, she discovered on social media that producer Dede Gardner and actor/producer Frances McDormand – who owned the film rights – were in the gestation process of getting a film off the ground.
“I reached out to them, and within the same hour, they reached out to me. It was really strange,” she recalled.
While the film was shot during strict COVID restrictions, one of the benefits of having a slower timetable was the ability to pinpoint the right actors, who could not only play their own roles but play off each other.
“You couldn’t cast one person until you had everybody,” Polley said, “because everyone is so dependent on each other.”
Polley’s brother, John Buchan, returned as her casting director, and soon, Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, Judith Ivey, McDormand and Ben Whishaw, who plays the notes-taking August, signed on.
While Polley’s screenplay hews closely to the novel, a big change between book and film is the narrator. August narrates the novel, but the teen-aged Autje (Kate Hallett) provides the voice-over in the film.
“It works in a book that it’s a male narrator, but in a film you really need to hear the voice — the voice of someone who has experienced the assaults,” Polley said.
And the decision to not show incidents of sexual assault on film was intentional.
“For me, seeing sexual assaults depicted on screen is so rarely additive, and (it’s) harmful in some ways,” Polley said. “I knew I didn’t want to show it, but also in terms of the film itself, what’s important is the impact it has on these women and how they move alongside it and through it, not the details of the assault.”
Since most characters are female, and the movie highlights women attaining power and insight from each other and then enacting change in solidarity, there was a discussion about “Women Talking” hiring a female-only crew. Polley didn’t like that idea. She didn’t want to leave behind the “guys I have worked with on the last three or four projects who were the kind of men who were supportive and helpful before it was cool…before anyone required it of them.”
As the conversation unfolded, Polley said, “We’re not lugging a bunch of people along with us who have been obstacles to us. We’re bringing along the good guys who actually made this industry bearable in a time when it was mostly unbearable to be female. I just had a real ethical moment around that of bringing these guys with us also because they’re my team and they’re a big part of it.”
The result was a “really nice balance of things.”
Polley started acting at an early age, appearing in the “Ramona” TV series as well as the “Road to Avonlea” series from 1990 to 1996. But she found work on the 1988 set of Terry Gilliam’s fantasy, “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” as an 8-year-old so challenging, she wrote about it in her 2022 book, “Run Towards Danger,” talking about how she felt unsafe during the cult classic filming.
While her three children appear ever so briefly in “Women Talking,” she doesn’t think it’s right to have children in film.
“I don’t think they should be there,” she says emphatically. “But in a way, having my own kids in that group of kids was a good insurance policy. My eye is very acutely trained on kids when they are on set, because I don’t know how ethical it is to have kids in a professional environment.”
That ethical dilemma is particularly acute in the case of child actors who attain fame, popularity and even idolatry at a very young age.
“I had a lot of luck,” Polley said. “I think I would have fallen off the rails, if I hadn’t had that luck. I just don’t think it’s a fair position to put a kid in, to have that kind of attention at an early age. I think so many people I know who were child actors … the rest of their lives were kind of this dull echo of the glory that they had as a child.”
As for casting a child in a lead role, Polley stands firm: “I would never have a kid as a lead in a movie. Never. Not in a million years.”
Meanwhile, Polley is pursuing what she really loves, including writing a novel and continuing to direct. And while she remains committed to pursuing more indie features, she recently discovered a soft spot for one filmmaking genre that’s been criticized by other filmmakers – superhero flicks.
“Oddly now, as I get older, I have more fun going and seeing blockbuster movies,” she said.
During her last pregnancy, when she was feeling tired, depressed and hardly able to move, she started “watching every Marvel movie. I had never seen any Marvel movies” before. “I feel like I’m not an old snob about it anymore,” she said.
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