she sits, her huge blue eyes apparently unburdened by eyelids. She is expounding on the slippery sensation of being interviewed.
"I'm actually a really gregarious, loud person who laughs a lot but if you get me into an interview, I start playing a role of very serious," she says.
"So these days I'm trying to be less precious, less earnest and not worry about it so much." She pauses, then bursts out laughing. "Oh, God.
I sound earnest about not being earnest!"
star but it's a quality befitting a writer-director, which Polley, at 28, has become. She recently joined the ranks of indie auteurs with the release of her first feature, Away From Her, and this week she sat on the jury at the Cannes Film Festival.
neighbourhood where she lives, Polley is reflective, particularly expectations Hollywood maintains for beautiful blondes. In 1999, actually came from a vintage store in Toronto, purchased by her own hand.
independent film world.
She has worked with a long list of the best milieu. An adaptation of an Alice Munro short story The Bear from Julie Christie, who stars opposite the pedigreed Canadian Fiona and Grant, a long-married couple confronting Fiona's Alzheimer's. Fiona enters a nursing home and Grant watches - helplessly at first, then furiously - as his wife becomes inexplicably bonded to another patient, a mute in a wheelchair budget of $C4 million ($4.
46 million), this thoughtful, measured the Sydney Film Festival.
her husband, a Toronto film editor named David Wharnsby. By the time she landed, Polley had conceived the film version of the story as an investigation into the longevity (and, within that, the cruelty and grace) of love.
to love after the first year. It is difficult and it is painful and it is a let-down," says Polley, who married in 2003. "That first actually left with each other and yourself in an honest way.
It was life had gotten in the way, and what remained."
surprising, sometimes brutal swerves.
headed by a casting-director mother, Diane, and an actor father, Michael.
The family mythology maintains that Sarah was an and demanded auditions, landing her first role at age five in the perform professionally. "When an eight-year-old wants to become a fireman, you go, 'Look, go and play with these toys and pretend you're a fireman.' Why do we let kids who want to act become actors?
"
At eight, Polley played the urchin Sally Salt in Terry Gilliam's Robin Williams and Uma Thurman in small roles. For her, the by an explosion that went off near her head.
independent films," she says.
"There's a real fear in me of never wanting to be in an unsafe environment again."
Post-Gilliam, Polley hit child stardom in Canada playing the Australia.
Two days after she turned 11, her mother died of cancer.
A few months later, Polley developed scoliosis, a severe curvature of the spine. Between the ages of 11 and 15, she wore a fibreglass brace for 16 hours a day, enduring painful welts and humiliating costume fittings to accommodate the bulky, corset-like contraption. Then, at 15, she underwent a 10-hour operation and spent a year in bed "The thing about Sarah is, she's only 28 but she's been through quite a lot in her life," says Olympia Dukakis, who plays the "She seems very sweet and she is, but she's not frivolous.
It's a metaphor: she's got a rod up her back. You can see it in her acting. It's a kind of steeliness.
"
left. In the early '90s, she joined a growing political movement in Toronto, handing out socialist newsletters and organising protests against the Ontario provincial government. After several months, Polley's political obsessions were making her, as she puts it, "boring, dogmatic, narrow".
agreed, expecting to return quickly to her political activities.
with Atom and then it ended up sort of being the beginning of it," she says.
The film was a critical smash hit, earning Atom Egoyan a best-director Oscar nomination.
In short order, Polley appeared in lover of an older Stephen Rea. Then she won the part of Penny Lane, rock'n'roll crowd pleaser. The part of a flighty, used groupie seems about as far from Polley, politically and in person, as possible.
After weeks of rehearsal, she began to feel as if she'd made a huge mistake.
"The part didn't fit me. Every day, it felt less and less like something I could pull off," she recalls.
"You just knew when you certain kind of life and it wasn't one I was ready for." She walked away and Kate Hudson became Penny Lane, earning an Oscar nomination After the Almost Famous incident, Polley fell into a depression about her future.
multitude of small Canadian films, most of which were never released outside Canada, but she questioned whether she wanted to be an actor.
A viewing of the director Terrence Malick's World War II film The Thin Red Line sparked an epiphany.
had no idea movies could do that," she says. So Polley, at the age of 22, signed up for film school at the Canadian Film Centre, where she directed two shorts.
Egoyan, an executive producer on Away From Her, says he finds Polley's transition to director unsurprising. "There are two as to how a film is made," he says. "I always saw her spending a lot of time with the crew, watching the way the camera was moving, absorbing composition, movement.
I could feel her eyes on me."
In this way, Away From Her seems like Polley's effort woman and as a filmmaker in an industry she has known, if not loved, her entire life.
"For a long time, I felt extremely judgemental of the environment I was working in and the people I was working with," she says.
"I don't feel like my politics have softened but I don't more. It's all experience. At this point, I'm open to anything.
Even Hollywood doesn't scare me any more."
Of course, Polley's version of the mainstream isn't exactly a summer blockbuster. She will next appear on Australian screens about the second US president John Adams, produced by Tom Hanks.
"OK, so maybe it's not that commercial," she says, laughing again. "But for me, it's pretty slick."
Away From Her screens on June 14 and 15, as The Secret Life of Words opens on June 28.
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