Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with the first of a few cool interviews from my Sundance adventure! The fest is still going on, I have many movies to see and many more interviews to do, so I’m going to keep the intros short and sweet…
Here’s my chat with Sarah Polley co-star of SPLICE. I conducted this interview before seeing the movie, so there’s a little probing going on in the beginning but we get our feet pretty quickly, I think.
I found Polley to be extremely sweet, extremely smart and, of course, extremely beautiful. Here’s the chat!
Quint: I haven’t had a chance to see the movie yet, so I hope these questions aren’t boring. When you haven’t seen the movie you are kind of forced to do the dull stuff, lik “What’s your character?” and get some of the groundwork there. So, what’s your character? (laughs)
Sarah Polley: (laughs) Yeah, nobody has seen it, so that’s fine. 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 loveable, but totally messed up.
Quint: I love CUBE, I love Vincenzo [Natali]’s style.
Sarah Polley: Visually, he is such a master.
Quint: I get that there is a sci-fi element to it from the clip that has been online. It looks like it’s got a little scariness to it as well.
Sarah Polley: Yeah, 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.
Quint: Let’s talk a little about Guillermo del Toro stepping in as producer. I’ve got to imagine that if he was attracted to the project he must have loved the creature. He’s attracted to creatures with souls. Again, I haven’t seen much, but I have to assume that that’s what you guys were going for.
Sarah Polley: Absolutely and it’s funny, because there are people that haven’t seen the film and they are like “So, is the creature really scary?” It’s like, “I don’t know… The people are really scary.”
Quint: So, the people are the bad guys here. That’s a little Frankensteiny.
Sarah Polley: Absolutely. I think it’s about humans wanting something from something and that’s what makes it horrible.
Quint: I’ve seen pictures of… What’s the name of the creature again?
Sarah Polley: Dren. It’s a pretty good creature.
Quint: It’s very elegant, even beautiful.
Sarah Polley: And the woman who plays it, Delphine [Chaneac] is one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen, so yeah it’s a very complicated story, because there is also this relationship with this beautiful woman, which has some complications. (laughs) Like it does with any parent, when your daughter grows up.
Quint: So how did that work? Obviously there was a lot of CG done to make the creature, was Delphine on set then and working in the scene with you?
Sarah Polley: She was and that’s what was great, that I was almost always working with another actor and a good actor.
Quint: Instead of looking at a tennis ball or something.
Sarah Polley: Exactly. Just having something to play off of made our jobs a lot easier. When it’s a baby it’s a puppet, but a very real puppet like you could actually feel affection to it. It was super cute.
Quint: I imagine it has to help. There must have been a little apprehension when reading the script of creating that emotional contact with something that is not going to be there. That chemistry has to work in movies like this or else people won’t buy the effect.
Sarah Polley: Absolutely. I think I also really trusted Vincenzo. Like you said, he’s a genius visually and I had seen all of his films and combined with this script, he was going to make a really great film.
Quint: So gene splicing is a big part of how you create the creature. Did you do any research into any of this stuff?
Sarah Polley: I did. Actually I was in a genetics lab for about three weeks and I worked with this geneticist and he showed me his entire work and his entire project that he was doing research on and taught me how to use all of the equipment, so I spent long periods of time just playing with vials and droppers, just so that stuff felt organic and real. There’s nothing worse than seeing an actor like phonetically say scientific dialogue that they don’t understand.
Quint: Talk a little bit about Adrien [Brody]. I don’t know him very well, but I’ve been on a couple of movie sets with him. He struck me as a very dedicated actor, like when he commits to something, he commits 110%.
Sarah Polley: Yeah, he’s hugely hardworking. He’s a lot more hardworking than most actors I think. He really commits himself and he’s always prepared and on time and those are qualities that are really underrated. He’s also hilarious. As much as he seems really serious, he’s also hysterically funny and that’s great when you are doing something like this to have someone who can actually make you laugh.
Quint: So you and he are a couple in the movie, right?
Sarah Polley: Yeah.
Quint: So can you talk a little bit about working with him and just what that was like creating this history. I imagine you guys don’t meet at the beginning of this movie…
Sarah Polley: Exactly. I think the fact that we can make each other laugh really hard really helped, because there’s some instant familiarity in that, so because we were constantly having a really good time together, it’s a lot easier to imagine that history and create something out of it.
Quint: Cool, so what have you got next? You must have a dozen things lined up.
Sarah Polley: I’m directing another film in July. I’m also making a documentary right now and so I’m sort of working on both projects simultaneously, so I’m hoping I’ll have two films in a little more than a year and a half.
Quint: Can you say what the documentary is about?
Sarah Polley: It’s so in process right now that I’ll say it’s about something now and then it’ll be about something different.
Quint: So it could change.
Sarah Polley: Vaguely speaking it’s about storytelling and memory. It’s pretty experimental and not necessarily a mainstream film and then the feature film I’m making is about a relationship and I have a cast that I’m so excited about, but I’m not able to announce yet which is driving me crazy. I couldn’t be more excited about it.
Quint: Now that you have directed, is it at all difficult for you to step in as an actor and just leave the director behind?
Sarah Polley: Not at all. I’m delighted to leave the director behind. To actually be able to sleep at night… it’s like why would you ever want to carry around the insomnia that comes with directing? So no. I feel like I’m very happy to not have responsibility for the whole film and to concentrate on my little piece of it and watch another filmmaker realize their vision and go through the hell of making a film.
Quint: Do you pull from your experiences on other sets, working with other directors? You have actually gotten to collaborate with some great filmmakers, so I imagine that’s influenced you as well.
Sarah Polley: For sure it has. It totally has and yet you always want it to be more of a film school than it actually is, because you are doing a job. You want to be observing and learning everything you can, but not at the expense of being focused on your job, so I always hope that I’m going to learn more than I actually do.
That said, yeah I think everything I know about filmmaking I have learned from filmmakers I have worked with and with Vincenzo it’s great for me, because I’m never going to make this kind of a film. I’m never going to make a genre film or a sci-fi film. I’m never going to make the kind of images he can make and I don’t think visually in the way he does, so to be around a filmmaker who has a skill set that you are just never going to have, who makes a totally different kind of film than you do, it’s such an amazing experience.
Quint: I don’t know how Vincenzo works, but just from a viewer’s perspective it seems like he’s not the kind of visual director that just leaves the actors out in the cold. If you look at something like CUBE, there are so many things going on between all of the characters. If all he was was focused on the idea of the movie or the visuals of the movie, it would just be a mess.
Sarah Polley: I think that’s what surprised me the most about working with him. I knew he would be extremely articulate and eloquent with individual stuff, but I didn’t expect that he was going to be so articulate when it came to character. I felt like he was more prepared and more insightful into character than most filmmakers I work with who direct dramas. His real focus is on that to a certain extent, so that was kind of amazing to me that that was part of his vocabulary as well.
Quint: Great. Well, I think that’s about all I have.
Sarah Polley: Awesome. It was really nice to talk to you. Have a great rest of the festival.
Quint: Thanks, you too.
I have one more SPLICE interview hitting in the next day or two, this time with director Vincenzo Natali. Thankfully I had actually seen the movie by the time I interviewed Vincenzo, so we delve a bit more into the mythology of the creature and the inspiration for the story. Keep an eye out for that one, squirts!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
Follow Me On Twitter
