Sarah Polley and Francis Ford Coppola Discuss the Political Stakes of ‘Women Talking’ and Why He Thought ‘The Godfather’ Would Flop

Matt Donnelly
Updated ·4 min read
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Five-time Academy Award winner Francis Ford Coppola rings director Sarah Polley from his quaint hotel room desk in Peachtree, Georgia, to discuss Polley’s latest (and perhaps most important) film to date. Polley, the actor-turned-auteur, is in awe as they talk on Zoom through their laptop screens, because Coppola is only days away from starting production on “Megalopolis” — a passion project he wrote in the late ’80s, about an architect in a futuristic New York City.

With family and assistants buzzing all around him, Coppola seems fixed only on Polley, whose feature film “Women Talking” explores trauma among a group of Mennonite women after a sexual assault. Coppola confesses he’s been a fan of Polley’s work for years; Polley recalls how she auditioned for “Megalopolis” 20 years prior. The two longtime mutual admirers compare notes on film adaptation, wrangling ensemble casts and why nerves are sometimes the best sign.

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Francis Ford Coppola: What was your basic idea in adapting Miriam Toews’ book?

Sarah Polley: When I first read the novel, it went through me like a bullet. It was asking so many essential questions about faith, forgiveness, community and democracy. It really complicated a lot of conversations that had been happening in the mainstream when it came out. This was just after the #MeToo movement began, and I loved how big and philosophical and spiritual she managed to make this intimate story about this community of women coming together to figure out how to remake their world.

Coppola: It was of course about a religious group, specifically Mennonites, but I took it as a metaphor for the whole world. That’s what you endowed it with. You turned it into what we call a “thought experiment with actors,” as if this community of women really stood for all the women in the world today. And this attack happened. We know in the novel that it really was an attack of some in that community, who used cow tranquilizer to knock out these women and then raped them. This is a parable of today’s world in which women have not only been enslaved but are still being attacked rather than revered, which is what our species originally did: They revered women as life-givers.

Polley: From the beginning, we spoke about this work as a fable. And that it’s not just this intimate story of women sitting in a hayloft talking; there’s also this sense of the world they need to break and remake. What does it mean to get rid of the structures that have sprung up around your faith that are insidious and corrupting? What does it mean to move forward as a community? What does it mean to blame each other and the kind of lateral violence that emerges when people have been victimized or marginalized? Those massive questions that affect all of us and, really, for me, did exist in the realm of a fable.

Coppola: Your film is an ensemble. You get an ensemble in theater all the time, but in cinema and with America’s unions, there’s no distinction between a rehearsal day or a day of shooting. I’ve always asked for two weeks of rehearsal; I’ve never gotten it. There’s many things you can do with an ensemble involving theater games and improv and all sorts of techniques that allow the ensemble almost to grow together as a whole. I won’t bore you with all of the tricks, but essentially you end up with a group that have become the characters together, and those relationships, both of the actor and the character, start to be “What’s one and what’s the other?” That’s how I approach it.

Polley: Can I ask, you’re about to shoot “Megalopolis,” and this is a film you’ve been dreaming about for decades. Are the stakes higher for you?

Coppola: I wish I were more nervous, because when you’re nervous, it’s an indicator — it means, “I’m going to go all the way.” The fact that I’m not entirely as nervous as I wish I were, it worries me. I don’t know why. It could be that I’m just older, and I’ve been around. If you had told me when I was doing “The Godfather” that that movie not only was going to be remembered but was going to be considered good, I’d think you were nuts, because everyone hated it. So you never know what’s going to happen.

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