After years with 'Women Talking,' Sarah Polley is still learning about it

It's fun to speak with actor/writer/director Sarah Polley about "Women Talking" because she clearly believes that although the movie is finished, the process is not.

Polley's films include "Away From Her" (her screenplay was an Oscar nominee) and "Stories We Tell" (a documentary about her family's many secrets), but she is best known for dozens of acting roles, beginning as a child. She read Miriam Toews' novel "Women Talking" when it came out four years ago and has been working on the film, which hits theaters Friday, for two years. But she's still discovering new things in it.

Inspired by actual events in Bolivia, "Women Talking" features Mennonite women gathering in a barn after discovering their husbands and brothers have been drugging them, then raping and brutalizing them in their sleep. The brutality isn't depicted in the film, which shows them debating what to do next: Stay? Leave? Get revenge?

Flashbacks show some of the women waking after their drugged assaults, unsure what happened. We see them in aerial views that keep us at an eerie remove and that resemble recurring shots in "The Sweet Hereafter," which starred Polley and also dealt with the aftermath of trauma.

"When you say that, I completely see a connection. I had not thought of it until this second," Polley said in a phone interview last November. "The images came out of a conversation I had with a psychologist who specializes in trauma after sexual assault. She talked about how many people see themselves from above, like they're observing it."

The subject is difficult, but it's the second word of the title that Polley believes is crucial. The women have been through something awful but talking helps them imagine a future.

"That's the one thing that is most hopeful about the movie: The development of a collective vocabulary around this trauma is what helps them envision a path forward," Polley said.

She's all too familiar with trauma. In Polley's memoir "Run Towards the Danger," published last year, she wrote about horrendous experiences as a child on the set of Terry Gilliam's "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" and about a "bad date" anecdote she often entertained friends with until one of them pointed out that it wasn't a funny story about a date gone wrong but an assault, perpetrated by a radio DJ many other women came forward to accuse.

"We know that, in terms of the brain, details become obliterated and memories are inconsistent but somehow we expect 'the truth' to be told in vivid detail," said Polley, who reckons with her own memory in "Run Towards the Danger," the title of which comes from a doctor who helped her battle a concussion by encouraging her to seek the bright lights and loud noises that other doctors told her to avoid.

The women in the movie also embrace danger. They could be fearful, since leaving their community means turning their backs on their faith, which is exclusively interpreted by men (women are not even allowed to read or write). But instead, they confront the unknown. There's a visual representation of that possibility in the film, almost all of which takes place in a hayloft and includes a scene in which one woman leaps from its second-story window.

"I had to choose between an untenable reality that was at least known and this other reality that was an unknown. So I get it. Some people would rather stay in a [expletive] known place than take a leap off a cliff," Polley said.

The director knows how to prepare actors — including Oscar nominees Jessie Buckley and Rooney Mara, as well as Claire Foy — to take that leap, according to producer Dede Gardner.

"It's all swirling around the concept of safety. That's how I see her conducting her friendships and her family and conducting the movie," Gardner said.

That may be because Polley also was willing to run toward danger, discarding many ideas she planned for "Women Talking."

"There was this sense the film existed and we had to find it, which I've heard people say and never bought before. But it was true," said Polley. "If I hadn't made the documentary I would have been [expletive]. There was a sense of letting go of things and following what was in front of me that I had not experienced before. My other films were very much the script in front of us, but this had a quality of things constantly being revealed."

That included deciding, late in the game, to swap narrators. At one point, "Women Talking" was to be narrated, like Toews' book, by its only male character (played by Ben Whishaw). But when Polley heard him telling the women's stories, she realized she needed a female voice. During the editing process, she also decided that other than Whishaw, there'd be no men's faces on screen.

It also meant being willing to lose performers as she spent months choosing the cast, not just to get good actors but ones who embraced forming a community. That was one of the main criteria Polley required in collaborators, along with another that is no surprise coming from the woman who enjoys talking to folks because it helps her discover what her movie is all about: curiosity.