Sarah Polley
Sarah Polley
Sarah E. Polley OCis a Canadian actress, writer, director and political activist. Polley first garnered attention for her role as Sara Stanley in the Canadian television series Road to Avonlea. She has starred in many feature films, including Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter, Guinevere, Go, The Weight of Water, My Life Without Me, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Dawn of the Dead, Splice, and Mr. Nobody...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionMovie Actress
Date of Birth8 January 1979
CityToronto, Canada
CountryCanada
I want my world to get bigger and not end up in a small corner.
It's not that I don't want to become famous or that I'm obsessed by my work as an actress, but it's all about not limiting myself, such as putting myself in a little jail that I can escape from.
I do tend to take time off. A year and a half ago I went to film school, and before that I had taken years off at a time to be involved politically or this or that.
Some of the funniest moments I've ever experienced have been in the midst of tragic situations in my life.
Plus, doing a zombie movie is quite liberating. It's fun not to take myself seriously all the time.
I think that we need to get along together if we want to survive in the twenty-first century.
I was concerned about that, because I've always been so specific about doing independent films, but I've never done anything that's so genuinely and ridiculously fun. And that's a great thing, for me to discover that that's possible.
Well, because Dawn of the Dead can take place anywhere and it shows that actually the entire planet is contaminated, I would say that it shows the new face of our world - one person, one race, united against the invisible destructive force.
So I decided to make a film about our need to tell stories, to own our stories, to understand them, and to have them heard.
I enjoy doing my more intimate and less commercial pictures and also I enjoy directing.
In fact, there's an entire universe out there that's pretty much indifferent to struggles that big, no matter how serious they've been in your life.
I think that cynicism can often be mistaken for wisdom.
The only disadvantage to directing if you've been an actor is how self-conscious you are. When I'm directing, I'm always so aware when I'm speaking to an actor of how easily I could throw them off by saying something careless or not being clear or concise. So it does make you watch your words in a way that sometimes is unhelpful.
It's hard to give up that amount of control. It's scary to make yourself that vulnerable. Because you might do all kinds of things that are unplanned or are unexpected that maybe don't work, and you have to trust the director to see that and work around those things. I find it really scary.