Photo: Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty
Sarah Polleyis taking her awards show experience to the silver screen!
The 42-year-old writer/director, who is nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay forWomen Talkingat the2023 Oscars, revealed that the adventure has inspired her next project.
“I’ve been developing a project based on my experiences going through awards season — I’m not kidding,” Polley toldDeadlineat the 95th Academy Awards. “I know all of your names and I have all of your numbers, you will be hearing from me.”
“I’ve had basically a hotline with all the filmmakers and writers in the race, who text and email me things as they happen all night long — I have this informal writers room which has been amazing,” she added.
Women Talkingis also nominated forBest Pictureat the Academy Awards. Polley recently toldPEOPLEfor theWomen Changing the Worldissue why she initially had mixed feelings when Dede Gardner andFrances McDormandapproached her about directing an adaptation of Miriam Toews’s novelWomen Talking.
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“I was really scared of a whole bunch of things. I’d never made a studio movie before. I hadn’t made a movie in 10 or 11 years. I had three kids at the time,” she said.
Gardner, 55, and McDormand, 65, who also appears inWomen Talking, promised Polley could do things her own way. That meant having a therapist available on set to tackle the movie’s sensitive subject matter, offering the cast and crew unlimited breaks and perhaps most notably, committing to working shorter hours — 10-hour days versus a typical film set’s 16.
“Most days we were home to be able to put kids to bed or even sometimes for dinner, which shouldn’t be revolutionary, but on a film set it is,” the mom of three told PEOPLE.
She also wantedWomen Talking’s child actors to feel comfortable.
RELATED VIDEO: Sarah Polley Established Protocols on Her Women Talking Set for Parents: ‘Most Days We Were Home for Dinner’
“With kids on set, we always had a rule that if anyone was unhappy, even if they were just bored, they could just leave,” said Polley, who starred as a child inRamona. “There was always a way to work around things. I worked with enough filmmakers that I saw muddle through things that I felt confident we as a team could figure out how to make room for these things without sabotaging anything.”
And they didn’t.Women TalkingreceivedOscar nominationsfor Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, as well as nods at theGolden GlobesandSAG Awards.
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Polley called her shootingWomen Talking"a euphoric experience."
“I was able to really feel an enormous amount of gratitude every single day,” she added.
The writer and director, who opened up in her memoirRun Towards the Dangerabout her negative experiences on sets growing up, found working on a set likeWomen Talkingto be “tremendously healing.”
“There’s really nothing more healing in this life than to be able to return to an environment in which you were hurt and have a different, better experience,” she explained. “And to have agency in that environment and to be able to construct something that will be better for other people, it’s really the best thing that can happen to you.”
The Oscarsare airing live on ABC on Sunday, March 12, at 8 p.m. ET.
source: people.com
