New photos of Sarah attending Canada’s Walk of Fame on October 16, 2010 have been added to the gallery.

New photos of Sarah attending the Trigger premiere at the 35th Annual Toronto International Film Festival on September 12, 2010 have been added to the gallery.

Michelle Williams and Sarah Polley on set of their new movie “Take This Waltz” filming in Toronto, Canada.

New photos of Sarah and her co-stars attending the Splice premiere held on May 26th in Toronto have been added to the gallery.

Splice is set to open on June 4th from WB and Dark Castle.

She’s pulled her name from the project though…

In a statement, the Toronto-based actress and director said she is pulling her name from the two-minute short The Heart, which she created for the Heart and Stroke Foundation, because she’s learned it will also promote “a product.”

The foundation’s healthy living campaign is sponsored by margarine and oil company Becel.

Initially, “I was thrilled, as I was proud to be associated with the work of this incredible organization,” Polley said of her involvement with the Heart and Stroke Foundation.

“However, I have since learned that my film is also being used to promote a product. Regretfully, I am forced to remove my name from the film and disassociate myself from it.”

A longtime political activist, Polley added that she’d “never actively promoted any corporate brand, and cannot do so now.”

The Heart, filmed in late 2009 and starring Sarah Manninen and Jean-Michel Le Gal, is set to air Sunday night as part of CTV’s broadcast of the Oscar gala. It is scheduled for broadcast during a commercial break.

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/film/story/2010/03/02/polley-heart-short-oscars.html#socialcomments#ixzz0jQuQb5QR

by Nicole Sperling

Finally, Sarah Polley is making a new movie. The indie queen from Canada who blew everyone away with her thoughtful, poignant drama Away From Her back in 2007, is set to direct a romantic comedy called Take This Waltz, from an original screenplay of hers that landed on 2009’s Black List. The film, about a love triangle in which Michelle Williams’ character struggles with infidelity will have her starring opposite Seth Rogen and another man, yet to be cast. Williams is fresh off a buzz-making turn in Blue Valentine, which debuted at this year’s Sundance. That film, in which she plays a wife in a marriage gone bad opposite Ryan Gosling, is already generating early Oscar buzz for the two leads and Weinstein Co. purchased it for just over $1 million.

Polley, who was at Sundance to promote the movie Splice, which she stars opposite Adrien Brody, is thrilled to get back into the director’s chair. She began writing the screenplay while she was editing her feature directorial debut Away From Her, but abandoned it for a few years. She went back to it recently when she needed to write something to make her happy. “This script was written with so much ease and so much joy and I loved every second of it,” she says. “It’s so rare for writing to not be a tortured process, so you have to go with that.” Waltz will film in Toronto this summer. Financing is not yet complete and the film has no distribution yet.

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Sarah Polley’s influence on Hollywood is nothing short of stunning, from her strength as a child actor fighting against Disney, to the prime roles she plays (The Sweet Hereafter, The Weight of Water), to the surprising pulp she picks so well (Dawn of the Dead). But she really made her mark when she slipped into the directorial chair for her first feature, Away From Her. Adapted from an Alice Munro story, the film earned not only critical success, but also two Oscar nominations. And now — no joke — she’s gearing up for a feature with Seth Rogen and Michelle Williams.

Deadline Hollywood reports that she has secured financing for her 2009 Black List script Take This Waltz, with Rogen and Williams starring alongside one more, yet unpicked, actor. Centering on a romantic triangle, Williams will play a 20-something woman whose eyes wander towards her neighbor after 5 years of marriage. “The two begin an awkward flirtation, which soon threatens to blossom into something more.”

The project is zooming forward quite quickly, and Polley plans to start production this July in Toronto — with, one would assume, the classic Leonard Cohen song leading them along. It might be another romantic triangle for the director, but they still sound worlds apart. Gordon Pinsent to … Seth Rogen? I don’t know about you, but I’m dying to hear her elaborate on that choice. Do you think Rogen can pull off an indie romance?

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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