A s Oscar buzz builds for Sarah Polley’s most ambitious feature yet, it’s hard to believe the Toronto director once thought her filmmaking days were over.

Polley suffered a debilitating concussion in 2015 and doctors told her she would never be able to multitask at that level again. Fast forward to today and Women Talking, which Polley wrote and directed based on Canadian author Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel, has, well, people talking.

The film hit theatres in December and has critical acclaim, the backing of Toews and several honours, including first runner-up for TIFF People’s Choice and nominations for the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards. Meanwhile, Polley’s new book Run Towards the Danger – which addresses how she dealt with her concussion – won the recent Toronto Book Award.

Women Talking is a harrowing story about women in a remote religious community grappling with trauma, abuse and the decision of how to take back power. It was filmed at a farm outside of Pickering, Ont., on an estimated $15 to $20 million budget. There, Polley and the crew built a colony and planted soy to bring the fictional Mennonite community of Molotschna to life.

“I loved doing something that felt ambitious and scary and out of my depth,” says Polley, whose previous three features as writer-director include the smaller-budget Stories We Tell (2012), Take This Waltz (2011) and Away From Her (2006), which earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. “It just made me braver to make a film like this, where I had to take a leap and a risk and not be assured that everything was going to work out.”

Polley also felt that way in reading Toews’ book. When she learned Dede Gardner of Plan B Entertainment (Brad Pitt’s prodco) and Academy Award winner Frances McDormand had optioned the rights, she reached out to her manager, who also represents McDormand. Unbeknownst to her, McDormand and Gardner had already asked him if Polley was free.

“I talked about it feeling epic and wanting to get outside the barn to feel the impact of nature and how seismic the stakes were in terms of this conversation and the kind of world these women are talking about wanting to create,” Polley recalls of that initial pitch. Plan B then brought on Brooklyn, N.Y.-based HearSay Productions and MGM’s Orion Pictures, who “gave the film both the space to develop but also the scale on which we wanted to make it.” They cast an ensemble of women including Claire Foy, Rooney Mara and Canadian Sheila McCarthy.

Polley was intent on “not missing anything” during filming, she says. “If something was happening in the corner of the room that didn’t seem central to the scene but it took on its own importance, I wanted the flexibility to follow that thread.”

One thing Polley believes benefitted Women Talking was skipping test screening, a practice she’s been told is now an “unavoidable part of the process.” While the filmmaker believes in soliciting honest feedback, she feels many of the film’s nuances would have been lost through a test audience.

“A lot of the complexities and things people are responding well to would have been taken out,” she says. “People like multiple meanings and different interpretations and something to talk about when they leave the theatre. I worry this template of always test screening can eliminate a lot of what’s rich and most interesting in our films.”

This story originally appeared in Playback‘s Winter 2022 issue

Photo credit: Derek Shapton