 Chrome, is that no matter where I was or what system i was using, I could immediately call up all my bookmarks and settings with a simple password verification.
Or better yet - Brave team, is there going to be an update to Brave Sync soon?
When will Sync be available again?
Sarah Polley
Some of the funniest moments I’ve experienced have been in the midst of tragic situations. SARAH POLLEY
To call Sarah Polley’s new documentary, Stories We Tell, a “personal” film would be the grossest of understatements—and a little misleading—because the fact is that films in general don’t get much more personal than Polley’s. But beyond that, it’s a piece of work about the fundamentally personal aspect of storytelling itself and the subjectivity—for better and for worse—of truth. Following Polley’s first two narrative features as a director—2006’s Away From Her, which earned Oscar nominations for both Polley (for screenwriting) and leading lady Julie Christie (for best actress), and 2011’s Take This Waltz—Stories We Tell ostensibly explores the nature of family and the way that certain narratives that exist within close-knit groups of people get retold and refracted by the individual perspectives of those involved (or, in some cases, uninvolved). But it’s the story that Polley uses to mine these subjects that makes the film particularly intimate: In a series of extensive interviews with her family, members of her extended brood, and her parents’ friends and acquaintances, she burrows deeply into a secret that she herself only recently discovered—that her father, Michael Polley, is not her biological father, and that she is the product of an affair that her mother, Diane, had around the time that she was conceived, a relationship which, despite various suspicions, Sarah and her family didn’t fully confirm until six years ago.
Michael and Diane, who were both actors, first met in the late 1960s while working together on a play in Toronto. They married, and Michael later moved into the insurance business, while Diane became a casting director. Sarah, the youngest of five children, was born in 1979 and began acting as a kid, appearing in such films as Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) and in the Canadian TV series Road to Avonlea. Diane, though, died of cancer in 1990, when Sarah was just 11, and the void left by her death is very much at the center of Stories We Tell as her children, her husband, her friends, her relatives, and others attempt to triangulate the complicated forces that shaped her and drove her. Through a mix of these recollections, home movies, and recreated sequences (which, remarkably, are difficult to distinguish from the real Super 8 footage), Sarah Polley works to construct a portrait of her parents’ marriage and the events that precipitated Diane’s affair—as well as why and how her mother kept it from her father. The British-born Michael, with a great gift for elocution, provides a kind of ongoing narration, reading from a long letter that he wrote Sarah after learning of her paternity. Her older brothers and sisters also offer insight into not only her parents’ marriage, but also the very particular and endearing mix of humor and empathy that their family deploys in propping one another up at vulnerable moments and in dealing with even the most tragic of circumstances. Surprisingly, Polley’s birth father, who she eventually meets and verifies via a DNA test, plays a large role in the film, as does her decision to make the documentary itself. But it’s the way that these different versions of the story of Polley’s parents, their marriage, and the life of their family accumulate, occasionally contradict one another, and intertwine that remains at the center of Stories We Tell.
Katie Holmes, who worked with Polley more than a decade ago when they co-starred in Doug Liman’s Go (1999), recently spoke with the 34-year-old actress, filmmaker, and new mother (Polley and her husband, David Sandomierski, had their own daughter last year), who was at home in Toronto.
KATIE HOLMES: There’s a quote from Margaret Atwood: “Reality simply consists of different points of view.” When you first sat down and began envisioning this piece, was it important to you to tell the story from different perspectives in order to achieve a sense of reality? Or did this idea evolve throughout the process?
SARAH POLLEY: The original impetus for making the film was the multiple points of view. I think that’s what really excited me about the idea of making it. When the story itself happened to me and my family, we certainly had a lot of people saying, “Oh, this would make a great film.” But it’s a film that I thought that I had seen or read before, you know? Finding out that somebody had a different biological father than they thought... And while it’s really impactful to the people who are directly living that experience, I think that, in terms of subject matter for a story, it can be a little bit tired somehow. But what made me originally think, “Wow, this actually would make an interesting subject for a film,” was watching how we were all telling the story to the people in our lives. I started to notice embellishments on some peoples’ parts—or things that got omitted that were crucial [laughs]—as we all do in families when we’re hearing people talking about the past. It’s often not the past that we remember. So it was really interesting to see how the story was kind of mutating and how everybody was very committed to their version of what had happened. Another thing that was really fascinating to me was that as my dad started writing the story, and then my biological father started writing his version of the story, and then I was thinking about making a film about it—the telling of the story changed the story itself. The relationships among all of us changed as a result of us telling the stories of those relationships. I thought that that was such an interesting comment on the power of storytelling and how transformative it can be—for better or for worse.
HOLMES: It sounds like you could have many movies in this. I also really loved your mother’s friends and their versions of things and how much they were willing to share—and then also keep quiet.
POLLEY: For me, that was the great privilege of making the film that I didn’t anticipate—getting to talk to your parents’ contemporaries in such detail and hear their perspective on your parents. If you’re lucky, then you might get snippets of that if you have connections with our parents’ friends, but you rarely get many hours to ask every question you’ve ever wanted to ask. I learned more about life and relationships from talking to them than I had learned from anything in my life.
HOLMES: Did you look at any other films for inspiration for the look and feel of the recreated footage?
I’ve always felt like I occupy this place in this very bizarre, eccentric, funny, odd group of people, and that’s so much part of my identity. SARAH POLLEY
POLLEY: You know, oddly, our director of photography, Iris Ng, made a 26-minute short film about five years ago about her family called Point of Departure. It was about her family immigrating from Hong Kong, and she used a lot of Super 8 footage in it. So that was one of the inspirations for the feeling of this film. There’s something about the kind of nostalgia and the visceral response that you have with Super 8 footage if you grew up in the ’70s and ’80s. It just triggers so much in me. So it made me really excited about all the canisters that I knew we had in my family of Super 8 footage. I worked really closely with Iris on that look, and she was a huge part of designing it with me. But I think in terms of films I watch for inspiration, it was not so much about the aesthetic, but more the tone of the film. I was looking less at personal essay documentaries than I was at films like The Five Obstructions [2003] by Lars von Trier, where he has Jørgen Leth, one of his favorite filmmakers, remake his film five different times with different sets of rules. He’s also talking to Leth and getting him to record voiceover as they’re doing it, and it’s really showing the relationship between Lars von Trier and his subjects and the filmmaking process. I remember being so inspired by how outside of the box that film was. It made me ask so many questions about the thematic subject matter because of the way it was being made. So I thought it would be interesting to make a film where your actual approach to the filmmaking could raise some of the same questions that the subject matter itself was raising.
HOLMES: Well, I think you achieved that.
POLLEY: Oh, good. [laughs]
HOLMES: It’s a personal story, but you’re able to have an experience outside of it and really explore your own family story and relationships in a different way. I have to say, I didn’t realize that some of the footage in your movie was recreated until the end. I was like, “How did she have all of this footage?” That might have been a problem of mine. [laughs]
POLLEY: No, it’s not. It’s always interesting at what point different people notice it