Yahoo News Director Sarah Polley explains how 'many voices' made Women Talking
Women Talking is a film about collective action. This moving, austere drama follows a group of Mennonite women as they learn they have been drugged and repeatedly sexually assaulted — not by strangers, but by brothers, husbands, and neighbors in their own isolated community. As the men leave to bail out several of the perpetrators, multiple generations of women secretly gather in a remote hayloft. With the clock ticking before the men's return, the women unite with a single goal: to decide as a group whether to stay, to fight back, or to leave and forge a new future.
It's a powerful examination of democracy in action, so perhaps it's no surprise that writer-director Sarah Polley wanted her set to be an equally collaborative place. Polley — the Canadian actress-turned-director known for projects like Go and The Sweet Hereafter — approached Women Talking with a decidedly egalitarian spirit, urging her cast and crew to share suggestions on set. (The film's starry cast includes Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, and Jessie Buckley.) The result is a powerful achievement that grapples with ideas about womanhood, power, and, most importantly, hope.
Here, Polley opens up about bringing Miriam Toews' 2018 novel to the screen.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Take me back to when you first encountered Miriam Toews' book. What was it about this story that made you want to make this film?
SARAH POLLEY: I just felt like the book wrestled with some core questions that I've been wrestling with, both consciously and unconsciously, for my whole life. It did so in a way I'd never seen done before. It raised as many questions for me as it answered, and I think that's the mark of a really powerful piece of writing. The idea of having great actors engage in a conversation like this and making it cinematic, and giving it a large canvas was so interesting to me. But what also struck me was how it was a study in democracy and what it could look like at its best. It didn't relegate democracy to just voting once every four years. It was actually a full conversation between people who don't really agree with each other on many things, but they are forced to come to some kind of action plan.
This film walks that line of hyper-specificity and universality. It's based on a true story from Bolivia, and it's very specific to the Mennonite experience. But like you said, it also gets at these big concepts about democracy. What interested you about that contrast?
I think it allowed the film to feel like a fable. In a way, that feeling is something that can kind of wash over you and allow you to map yourself and your own life and your own issues onto it. The specificity of this very homogenous, isolated community meant that this was an extreme version of something that we see occur all the time in our more secular society. It was a way of looking at it in a more concentrated way, when these are the sort of issues and debates that are swirling around us right now.
You assembled a pretty incredible group of actors. What was the casting process like?
It took a really long time. It was a really rigorous and loaded process because we really couldn't cast one person until we cast everybody. I felt like we were kind of casting an organism, and we couldn't make a decision about any one person until we knew what the rest of that organism looked like.
Everyone has to work as a collective under very intense circumstances. It was basically like doing a play over and over again. I think to work, it had to be harmonious. Which isn't to say there couldn't be conflict, but it had to be healthy conflict. A big part of the casting process was figuring out the right chemistry in terms of the personalities we brought into that hayloft.
Most of the film takes place in that hayloft. What was that set like?
The exterior was outside of Pickering, this little town near Toronto. We kind of replicated it [in a studio], and our production designer Peter was creative about how he created the interior. It was about creating this space that was intimate enough that these exchanges could happen, but we wanted it to feel like a cathedral, like there was something sacred about the space and there were many portals of lights to come through it.
I imagine as a filmmaker, it'd be fun to play with some of those open windows and high ceilings.
Yeah, and you can see out of the window and see what time of day it is. Light became such a strong character in the film because, throughout it, there's this ticking clock, and they have to make a decision in a very short amount of time. So, the passing of time, as reflected in the movement of the sun, was an incredibly important component in designing everything.
Michael Gibson/United Artists Releasing The cast of 'Women Talking,' including Jessie Buckley (left center), Claire Foy (top center), and Rooney Mara (right center)
I wanted to ask about the visual language of the film. It's beautifully shot, but the color palette is very muted and gray. What inspired that choice?
I knew it couldn't look like it was based in reality. This is a slightly surreal experience. They have this debate about whether they would move the colony in this amount of time, and it's what you most hope for, but there's something heightened about the language that they're using. There's something heightened about the premise. It's in the realm of a fable, and I wanted that to be really clear. We're not asking you to look at a documentary about something that's happened. We're asking you to go into a world where you can ask these enormous questions.
The concept was partly this idea of a world that's already passed. So, it has the sense of a faded postcard, a sense of something that you're looking back on with a certain amount of nostalgia and not a hyper-clear memory. So, the world that they're talking about destroying or rebuilding or leaving behind has already passed by, just by the fact of them initiating this conversation. So, that was one of the things that was very much in our minds.
The original concept was to shoot in black and white. But when we started testing that in combination with the costumes and the feel of the film, it felt strangely bleak and judgmental in a way that didn't feel right. So, we ended up playing with the saturation a lot, and that's where we landed in terms of creating this nostalgia for a world that's already passed by.
In the book, Ben Whishaw's character August is the narrator, but you shifted the narration to the young girl Autje, played by Kate Hallett. What went into that decision?
I mean, I loved the way the narrator worked in the book. I loved that August was the narrator, and it was my instinct that would work as well in the film. I think just because of the medium itself, there needed to be more of an immediacy and a more direct connection with the experience that the women had gone through. It became this sort of collective process of discovering that Kate's voice was the voice that needed to carry the film. The youngest person in the room should be the person with the most agency of guiding the story into the future. So, that was a really interesting process that happened in the edit. I sort of went into a second writing process of finding who that voice was, that 16-year-old girl grappling with that trauma and trying to imagine a world beyond it.
One of the things I love about the film is how you have all these different generations of women. What was it like on set, working with this group of actors?
It was amazing. It was a really beautiful community that developed among those actors, and there was a sense of it being very egalitarian. There wasn't a hierarchy. There was a lot of generosity from both the younger actors and the older career actors. There was a very strong sense of respect amongst them and support and warmth. They had a green room that they shared, and no one was ever really in their trailer. They were in a shared space all the time, even when they weren't shooting. So, there was a lot of occasion for that community to develop.
For you as a filmmaker, how have your own acting experiences affected your approach to directing?
I think I'm aware of some of the things I would've liked to experience as an actor more often, and that I did get to experience occasionally — which is a sense that it's a safe environment, and your well-being is actually more important than the film. The mental health of everybody on a set is more important than whatever product you're trying to create together. [When you] keep that in mind, I think people do actually give more of themselves anyway. It doesn't create a lesser thing because you value the experience people have making something over the thing itself. I think that actually, people become more invested anyway, which is a nice byproduct. It's not the goal, but it's a really nice byproduct. So for me, that is always first and foremost in my mind. I'm not claiming to always be successful at that. I'm sure there are times I fail, but that's my strongest intention.
Especially with a story like this, where you're dealing with difficult subject matter, I imagine it would be helpful to build that supportive creative environment.
Yeah. We're asking people to be very vulnerable and open and generous with their experiences. You can't have that happen in an environment where people feel like they're not safe or taken care of. Again, do I think I was 100 percent successful at it all of the time? Absolutely not. But I do think that this film couldn't have been made any other way.
This film goes to some very harrowing places, but there are also these moments of catharsis and laughter. How did you want to thread that needle and find the right tone for this story?
Well, I feel like there is no tragedy in my own life that hasn't come with a lot of comedy. [Laughs] I just have never experienced something traumatic that couldn't be a funny story later on, one way or the other. So, I never really buy a film that's very intense and sad and difficult if it doesn't give you the opportunity to laugh at it every now and then. For me, that's my experience of being human.
When you think back to filming, what was your most memorable day on set?
There's a scene in the film that's an apology from one character to another. One character hasn't protected the other person. The directing of that scene became this collaborative effort between me and crew members who had experienced abuse and not had their parents protect them. It became this collaborative effort between me and Sheila [McCarthy] and other crew members who were generous enough with their own experiences. We got it to a place that one of us couldn't have done alone. That, to me, is one of the most important moments in the film, where many voices and experiences were coming to the table. That was an experience I hadn't had before. I was just so grateful that we had a crew that was that invested, and they were willing to come forward and let those experiences help shape the film.
I imagine that would be so rewarding, especially for a film like this, which is about a multitude of voices coming together.
Yeah. Another moment that occurs to me is that we had an actor who was having a hard time. We had a rule that if we need to stop, we can stop. It was early in rehearsal, and one of the actors was having a hard time with a very intense scene. We went outside for a while, and I was like, "We can go home. We don't have to keep going." The actor said, "I'd like to stay. I just need a few minutes."
Then, when she came back into the room, the whole cast had left their places, and they'd formed a circle on the floor. She just got kind of folded into this circle of actors. That was the very first week. It just stands out to me as this moment, like, "Oh, this is going to be a very unusual experience with a very unusual group of actors who are really going to take care of each other." It just stood out to me as something I hadn't seen before, and it was something I was so grateful to get to witness.
For you, what was your biggest challenge on this project?
I think it [can be hard] when you're doing things differently, in terms of a process. We're really used to a very strong, dictatorial auteur male filmmaker, and there's a sense of [the director] knowing exactly what they want, and everybody has to figure out how to bend around the hurricane that is that person. What I learned on this film is to be more declarative about what my process is. I actually do have a vision, and it's very clear, but it's the result of a collective process. That isn't to say I don't have really strong ideas, or I wouldn't guide or shape the process, but the process is an inherently feminist one. It doesn't look like what a loud, dictatorial male director's process looks like, and that doesn't make it less. I think the challenge was articulating that and standing behind it.
I think in the future, that'll be a lot easier for me because I'm really thrilled with where that process got us [on Women Talking]. There are things I discovered and things other people contributed that I never would've known about if I had just been barking my vision at everybody the whole time. [Laughs] I think my main challenge was my own nervousness about introducing the novelty of that, and I don't think I'll have that again. This was my trial by fire, and I feel really great about how it turned out on a personal level. It's something I would absolutely do again.
That makes a lot of sense. When you're making art, it helps to have a single voice guiding everything, but you also have to leave room for collaboration.
Yeah, and I prep for ages when I make a film. I don't make a lot of films, and I spend a lot of time deciding what every shot is going to be. There's no lack of figuring out what I want to see. But the thing about the filmmaking process is we lie about it, in a way. I put a lot of emphasis on being very collaborative on this film, but the truth is, every film is really collaborative, and most of the ideas that directors claim are theirs are not. I've seen it with my own eyes as a director. I've seen DPs and production designers and actors and crew members suggest things that become the best moments in the film, but it doesn't get talked about because we love the mythology of the single-vision genius that everybody is following. And that's always been a bit of a lie. So, on one hand, I did want to put an emphasis on the more feminist process with this film. But on the other hand, I think we're sort of just being open about something that's always existed. This is an inherently collaborative art form with many voices, and nobody should be taking credit for ideas that weren't theirs.
Related content:
