Sarah Polley wrote and directed her first feature film, Away From Her, when she was 27. It chronicles the life of a couple as one of them grapples with Alzheimer’s. As he slowly loses his wife, Fiona (Julie Christie), Grant (Gordon Pinsent), a retired professor, reflects on the impact of his past infidelities with students.

It’s surprising subject matter for a young filmmaker, even for the preternatural Polley, a former child star who dropped out of high school to work for Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. 

After a screening at the County Adaptation Film Festival last weekend, she told interviewer Zoe Whittall that if she were to make it today, it would be a very different film.

Now in her forties, Polley has two other adaptations of major Canadian writers under her belt, has directed original scripts, made a documentary about her family, and experienced losing a parent to dementia. 

After directing six shorts in her twenties, Polley still struggled to get feature film financing. 
Away From Her was to be her last endeavor before throwing in the towel. 
Fortunately, the film was a great success. 
Polley’s career as a writer/director reached new heights last year, when she won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for Women Talking.

On the other hand, Polley noted, “in a strange way, I think it was good to be young and naive in combination with that story.”

Indeed, there is levity in the film and the wistful romance in Pinsent and Christie’s performances brings out a youthful glint in their eyes — even in the face of their profound losses, his of his wife, hers of her mind. 

If Polley’s interpretation of the film has changed since it was released, so has her reading of the Alice Munro story behind the film, in light of the revelation that Munro’s second husband, Gerald Fremlin, sexually abused her daughter, Andrea. 

Polley noted that she was surprised the story, “The Bear Came over the Mountain,” wasn’t discussed more when the news broke shortly after Munro’s death in 2024. In distinct Munro form, the story examines its character’s versions of the past. Grant’s “affairs” are not really with willing participants, but fraught abuses of power. His conquests, Munro writes, “had collaborated because they were helpless and bewildered, and they had been injured by the whole thing, rather than delighted.”

“When I read that short story now, there’s something a bit flinty about it, and a bit ruthless, actually,” Polley said. “I think I let some of that in, but I also really wanted to smooth it out by the end.”

The way the film came together felt fated. Polley felt a deep connection to Christie after acting with her in the film No Such Thing, shot in Iceland. An issue of The New Yorker she read on the flight home featured the first published version of Munro’s story. Polley instantly saw Christie in the role of Fiona. 

Getting movies produced is a struggle. Approximating your vision is nothing short of a miracle — Polley’s return to the screen to play herself as a harried director in The Studio makes the compromises clear.

After directing six shorts in her twenties, she struggled to get feature film financing, even as a Canadian household name. Away From Her was to be her last endeavor before throwing in the towel. Fortunately, the film was a great success. Polley’s career as a writer/director reached new heights last year, when she won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for Women Talking.

“First and foremost, I’m a reader, not a writer or a filmmaker,” Polley says. She understands reading as the creative work that activates adaptation. 

She begins that process by writing out what she thinks are the moments of central importance — often finding that many of them are not written on the page. 

“I actually think we’re all doing it, we just don’t know we’re doing it,” she said.

In that sense, all reading is a work of adaptation, and all readers adapt over time.