The Toronto native discusses debuting sophomore effort Take This Waltz with The Hollywood Reporter at her hometown film fest.

Indie It-Girl Sarah Polley launched her second feature, Take This Waltz, at the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday night.

The comedic relationship pic is a departure from the her 2006 debut Away From Her, which launched her feature directorial career after extensive acting credits with indie auteurs like David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, Terry Gilliam, Hal Hartley, Wim Wenders and Michael Winterbottom. The Hollywood Reporter caught up with Polley as she readied her world premiere at Roy Thomson Hall in her home-town Toronto.

As an actor, you’ve helped launch movies at the Toronto International Film Festival. You’ve debuted your short films and features here. Does it feel like Toronto is more than your hometown?

TIFF is the best possible launching pad for a film. For Away From Her and this film, they both have a strong sense of place. So it would have felt strange to premiere the films at any other festival besides Toronto. Read the full story

Canadian actress and director Sarah Polley said she had no second thoughts about casting two off-the-wall comedians in her new drama Take This Waltz.

In fact, she was surprised how smoothly performers Seth Rogen, known for The 40-year-old Virgin and Knocked Up, and Sarah Silverman, of The Sarah Silverman Program, adapted to the script.

“When I look at the actors here, I realized that each one of them I was always a huge fan of, but I had never seen them play a role quite like this. So it was also a selfish thing, as a fan, to want to see Seth and Sarah play dramatic roles,” said Toronto-based filmmaker Polley.

“It doesn’t seem like a different process to me and there is an authenticity and honesty and bravery in their work that just translates so obviously and naturally to dramatic roles. It was so thrilling to see that and to totally exceed my expectations of the performances.” Read the full story

Sarah Polley has tied the knot — and a baby’s on the way.

The actress, director and screenwriter, 32, is “really excited, super excited” to be 3½ months pregnant with her first child with new husband David Sandomierski, she tells Toronto.com.

The pair wed two weeks ago in a small ceremony attended by immediate family members, Polley shares.

After turns on-screen in movies such as The Sweet Hereafter and Go, Polley headed behind the camera and was nominated for an Oscar for the screenplay of her directorial debut, Away From Her.

Her latest film, Take This Waltz, starring Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen, premieres Saturday at the Toronto International Film Festival.

– Sarah Michaud

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Indie darling Sarah Polley is at the Toronto International Film Festival this week to promote Take This Waltz, her second feature as a writer/director after 2006’s acclaimed Away from Her. Practically a household name in the city, Polley made her TIFF debut in 1997 with Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter, and has attended the fest almost every year since, with films such as Guinevere (1999), The Weight of Water (2000), My Life Without Me (2003) and Mr. Nobody (2009). The day after revealing she was three-and-a-half-months pregnant, Polley spoke with the Post’s Barry Hertz about the press, pressure and puke.

Q During TIFF, your schedule must be managed down to the half-hour. How do you mentally prepare?
A If you have a film in the festival, it’s an intense schedule. You never have that much time to sleep, and it’s definitely morning till night. But it’s not stressful. You’re not doing a real job — you’re talking to people who all act like they’re really interested in you, and so I never feel like you have the right to complain about a TIFF schedule. If you’re an actor or director, people are basically pandering to you all the time, so it’s a bit princess-y to complain about the festival. Read the full story

Sarah Polley swears her new film, Take This Waltz, is not autobiographical. Honest. Yes, she has some things in common with her heroine, Margot (Michelle Williams). Both women are nervous fliers who live in funky downtown Toronto. Both regretfully ended marriages to men they met young – in the movie, Lou (Seth Rogen); and in Polley’s life, the film editor David Wharnsby. And both found happiness with someone new: Margot with Daniel (Luke Kirby); and Polley with David Sandomierski, a PhD law candidate at the University of Toronto, who has clerked with Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin. They got married Aug. 23 at chef Michael Stadtlander’s Eigensinn farm near Singhampton, Ont., followed by an intimate reception at his restaurant, Haisai, and a honeymoon at Arowhon Pines in Algonquin Park. And they’re expecting their first child in March. But just like her film, Polley’s story is more complicated than any details.

“Any time a young woman makes a film, people think it’s autobiographical,” Polley, 32, said on Monday, laughing and shaking her head. “I don’t know why they don’t think the same thing about dudes, but they don’t.” Read the full story

Let’s state the obvious right away: Personally and professionally, Sarah Polley is blooming right now.

The Canadian filmmaker, 32, is expecting her first child early next year.

She’s also just delivered a terrific new movie she wrote and directed called Take This Waltz. It opens later this year.

Starring Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen as a married couple and Luke Kirby as the handsome neighbour who comes between them, Take This Waltz is an intense look at the workings of love and loyalty in a relationship. (The performances are stunning; this is going to mark a whole new chapter for Seth Rogen.)

But everyone thinks the movie is autobiographical. Polley was married and divorced and then recently remarried, a series of events that gives rise to comparisons with Take This Waltz. But, nah: “I would never in a million years write a film that had to do with my own life,” said the filmmaker yesterday, during an interview at a Toronto hotel.

“I would make a documentary, maybe, but I would certainly never expose myself in a way that I would want to have other people dramatize.”

Polley added, “Every short film I’ve ever made and my two feature films are all about long relationships, and another person, and the end of the long relationship. It’s material I’ve been returning to every since I was 20 years old, so for about 12 years. If it had been autobiographical, I would have been much more prepared to answer questions about myself and my life than I am.” She laughed.

As for her other big project, Polley seems surprised people are as interested in her pregnancy as they are in her movie. She’s a bit embarrassed about that.

“I just told someone I was pregnant. Then it was reported that I had announced I was pregnant, which is pretty weird if you’re not famous enough to be announcing anything,” she said, laughing. “This is all new to me. I’ve always been open about whatever is going on in my life, but nobody’s ever cared. That’s one of the great things about living in Canada and not leaving,” continued Polley, who grew up in the public eye as a child actor known for her role in TV’s Road to Avonlea, and still lives in Toronto. “People don’t care that much about your personal life.”

“No one reported when I got married or divorced or remarried so it’s funny to me how the pregnancy has been such news,” she said, cheerfully. “I’m not sure what to do with it.”

By Liz Braun

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“She’s amazing,” said Polley. “I don’t think there are many actors that talented in the world right now, and she’s constantly surprising and unpredictable and fascinating and poetic, and she’s also incredibly collaborative and kind of made the whole thing a joy.”

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It’s hard to put a definitive label on actress-turned-filmmaker Sarah Polley; at various stages of her career she’s been a child star, indie darling, political activist, genre movie leading lady, and Oscar-nominated writer/director. This intentionally-eclectic body of work has endeared her to fans around the world, but now Polley’s been officially stamped with a label that’s about to be laid in cement: she is one of the most famous Canadians. Ever.

The 31-year-old actress was honored with a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame on Saturday, an annual event created to celebrate Canadian achievement, now in its thirteenth year. Unlike its American counterpart in Hollywood, the award isn’t restricted to the entertainment industry. It acknowledges excellence in a variety of fields, including science and innovation, as well as sports and the arts. Read the full story

What happens when after a couple of ambitious young scientists throw caution — and ethics — to the winds and create the world’s first animal-human hybrid? Splice, which debuted at Sundance this weekend, aims to show you the answer. And ultimately, it is the stuff of nightmares, with one early review by the horror aficionados over at FEARnet calling the movie “a true Frankenstein tale for the modern age.”

The story is not so easy to pigeonhole though, says Sarah Polley, who plays one of the not-so-cautious scientists, in an interview with AICN:

… it’s kind of a bit of everything. I think if you go in expecting a horror film, that’s not what you are going to get. If you expect sci-fi, it’s not totally what you are going to get, but it’s kind of a mix of a lot of different things and also I think just pulls off this very specific relationship, both between a couple and also their “child.” You see all the stages of parenthood played out in an extremely short space and time in their most nightmarish version. I guess it’s kind of a Freudian nightmare and it’s also got these horror elements and these sci-fi elements and stuff.

And, she adds, her character is complicated as well:

I play Elsa, who is an extremely ambitious, energetic, dynamic, and playful woman who loves to milk every second out of life. She’s also a little bit terrifying, because she is really manipulative and controlling. She wants to get what she wants and she usually does. I don’t think I have ever wanted to play a character as much as this one. She is so complicated and lovable, but totally messed up.

There is a suitably terrifying creature of course, played, in its adult form, by Delphine Chaneac. But when asked how scary the creature is, Polley insists that in this movie, it is not so much the creature, but the people that are truly scary.

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January 23, 2010
by Brandon Lee Tenney

When Vincenzo Natali introduced Splice — his latest film after Nothing, Cyper, and his cult-smash Cube — tonight at its world premiere, he simply said that this “film has no moral boundaries.” Instead, it’s probably more accurate to say that Splice has reset the moral boundary. This creature-feature is both an homage to and a worthy entry in the monster flick catalog. It’s horrifying, mesmerizing, and always spine-tingling. There are images in Splice that will haunt my dreams. Some of them for very different reasons than you might expect. And that’s the most entertaining piece of Splice; it’s just so unexpectedly unimaginable. Read the full story

Movieline caught up today with actress/writer/director Sarah Polley, the Canadian powerhouse who last dropped by Sundance in 2007 with her eventual Oscar nominee Away From Her. She’s back this weekend — in front of the camera this time — in the psychological horror entry Splice, starring alongside Adrien Brody as a scientist whose attempt at genetic engineering goes slightly (OK, a lot) haywire. That premieres tonight in the Park City at Midnight section, and I’ll have a full-length chat with Polley later on in the fest. For now, it’s time for another round of the age-old Movieline classic My Favorite Scene, featuring an oft-overlooked classic from one of America’s greatest filmmakers.

“I think it’s the scene in The Thin Red Line when all the villagers are walking and singing together,” Polley said. “I think that’s my favorite moment in any film. Read the full story

Canwest News Service

PARK CITY, Utah – She’s been here. She’s done this. Many times. But Sarah Polley says there’s something unique about the Sundance two-step, no matter how many times you find yourself on the indie film dance floor in mukluks.

Looking perfectly fresh in a jam-packed hamburger joint substituting as a schmooze lounge during the film festival, Polley says it’s still a thrill.

“There’s the whole Sundance thing, but the festival itself still has a ton of integrity. It’s managed to maintain its soul. The programmers are so committed to emerging filmmakers and independent filmmaking. It’s fantastic, but it can also be hell. This many people from Hollywood jammed together on a snowbound street might be some people’s version of a nightmare,” she says with a mischievous smile. Read the full story

Many thanks to Stef for sending in scans from Fade In!!!