'Making this film was a constant process of letting go'

Filmmaking insights from Sarah Polley, plus Triangle of Sadness, The Fabelmans and The Quick-Kershaw Connection

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Sarah Polley’s words about writing

The superb Oscar-nominated writer-director of Women Talking, Sarah Polley, wrote a first-person piece for the Los Angeles Times that struck an interesting chord about the process of creating characters and telling her story.

The film had to move like a bullet while simultaneously giving us necessary breaths to think.

At some point in the writing process, I realized that in order to track their trajectory respectfully, I had to write two passes from each of the nine main characters’ point of view. Even if a character wasn’t active in a scene, they were affected — and sometimes fundamentally changed — by the exchanges happening on the other side of the room. I needed to give each of these women a chance to be the only important character in my mind for a couple of drafts, to track the minutiae of each of their emotional and intellectual responses to the unfolding conversation.

In order to capture the spirit of the novel, I often found myself having to resist my desire to hew too closely to it. I began with a board of index cards on my wall, each of which described a “non-negotiable” moment from the novel that could not be cut from the film version. As I look up at that bulletin board now, with its yellow and blue cards, emphatically declaring the moments I loved too much to ever part with, I see that more than half of them either weren’t shot or were cut in the editing room. …

… Making this film was a constant process of letting go. Letting go of the structure and many details of the novel I loved so deeply in order to spiritually hew closer to it; letting go of the idea that I was ever going to be finished with this conversation; letting go of earnestness in favor of humor and joy; letting go of things I dearly loved but that no longer belonged. It was liberating and it was painful.

There’s a lot here for me personally, but of my many faults as a writer, “letting go of earnestness in favor of humor and joy” is high, high on the list. I’m conscious of it but often feel powerless against it.

Read the entire piece, as they say. I’ve been reading this kind of stuff during Oscar season for years — it has the tendency to feel like the same story over and over again — but right now, I can’t think of any offering such fine insights the way Polley does.