At twenty-nine, Sarah Polley is in a funny position as the writer-director of Away from Her. She's a first-time filmmaker who, as a child actress, has been involved in moviemaking for most of her life, and an actress who, as a director, will probably get to see her lead actress, Julie Christie, take home an Academy Award for a performance that she guided her through, after dragging her kicking and screaming out of semi-retirement. Speaking to John Horn of the Los Angeles Times, Polley makes it clear that, if she has an edge over most new directors, it's because she's spent enough time on film sets to know just how little she knows. Polley, who calls herself "the least-prepared person who has ever been nominated for an Academy Award," says, "I've spent a lifetime working with disorganized first-time filmmakers who don't get the support of their crew because they feel they are wasting their time. And I knew how badly I needed their support. You know as an actor so acutely what destroys morale, what creates complaints, and that can be good and bad, because when you're directing you can become hyper-aware of that. I think that what a lot of first-time filmmakers don't realize is that they are the least experienced person on that set. Everybody else has been doing their job for years, so the whole act of playing the filmmaker, playing the person in command, is a charade. So the best you can do is work your ass off and admit what you don't know and ask for help when you need it."
One of the most striking scenes in Away from Her, a love story (based on Alice Munro's short story "The Bear Went Over the Mountain") about a long-married couple (Christie and Gordon Pinsent) who are torn apart by the wife's descent into Alzheimer's, comes when a young nurse named Monica (Nina Dobrev) suddenly interrupts the husband, chips in her two cents, and then slips gracefully back behind her mask of nonjudgemental concern. That was one of the few additions that Polley made to Munro's text. "That was my entrance into the subject matter," she says now. "That's sort of me, as someone half the age of these people, looking up to these people: not quite understanding how they got there, being in awe of them, being curious about them. There's a kind of presumption in making a film about people who have an experience that is so far beyond your own that I felt like I needed to make that my connection somehow." Polley may have already felt there was an element of presumption in her begging Munro to let her film the story, and trying to get Christie to appear in it. "It felt like the bane of my existence were these women who were older than me and I was chasing them. I had some Freudian analysis of it, to do with the fact that I lost my mother when I was young and I'd created a life for myself where I was chasing these maternal figures around the world, begging them to be a part of my life."
