Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The Oscars are this Sunday, and over the course of the last few months, we've spoken to many of the now nominees in all kinds of categories from acting to directing to screenwriting to production design to original score. All this week, we're taking the opportunity to revisit some of those great conversations ahead of the 95th Academy Awards. The film Women Talking is up in two major categories on Sunday, best adapted screenplay for writer and director Sarah Polley, and for the top prize best picture.

Sarah Polley and star Jessie Buckley joined me earlier this year to discuss the film which has some serious themes including sexual assault. Now, if this is triggering for you or if you're someone who needs help, the National Sexual Assault Hotline is 1-800-656-4673. Women Talking follows a group of Mennonite women in an isolated religious colony who must decide what to do as they reckon with the fact that the men in their community drug them and sexually assault them at night. No one, not even a four-year-old girl are safe.

The only man they're certain is innocent is August, who has returned after his parents were excommunicated. He's now a teacher and has agreed to take the minutes of a meeting the women call. None of the women can read and write themselves. A group of women gather in a barn and have 24 hours to decide whether to stay and be forced to forgive the men, stay and fight, or leave the only home they've ever known. It's a debate that gets philosophical, contentious, and emotional. Here's one of those moments from the film Women Talking.

Mariche: What if the men who are in prison are not guilty?

Autje: Mother?

Mariche: Yes, I'll check.

Autje: Are you asking--

Mariche: Shush.

Neitje: We caught one of them. I saw him.

Mariche: But only one.

Speaker 6: Yes, only one, but he named the others.

Mariche: What if he was lying? We must consider this.

Salome: No. No, that is not our responsibility because we aren't in charge of whether or not they are punished. We know that we've been attacked by men, not by ghosts or Satan as we were led to believe for so long. We know that we've not imagined these attacks, that we were made unconscious with cow tranquilizer. We know that we are bruised and infected and pregnant and terrified and insane and some of us are dead. We know that we must protect our children regardless of who is guilty.

Alison: In that clip, you heard Jessie Buckley who plays Mariche, a combative woman who thinks leaving is preposterous and Claire Foy as Salome who wants out and she says she may commit murder if she stays. Sara Polley has already won a Writers Guild of America Award and a Critics Choice Award for her adapted screenplay and the film was awarded the Robert Altman Award at the Independent Spirit Awards this weekend. I began my conversation with Jessie Buckley and Oscar nominee Sarah Polley by asking Sarah when she first read the original novel by Miriam Toews.

Sarah Polley: I read it shortly after it came out. It was given to me by a friend who said, "I think I just read what your next film has to be an adaptation of." I just fell in love with it. I read it in one inhale, I think, like so many people did and really knew immediately I wanted to make it into a film.

Alison: Jessie, when did you come to the book or the story?

Jessie Buckley: Well, I came to the book after the script.

Alison: Interesting.

Jessie: I had never read anything like this. It felt like a foreign prospect to the point where I was like, "I have no idea how to even embark on this or who is this brave warrior who is going to undertake this." Then I met Sarah and watched her documentary The Stories We Tell and was sure that if anybody was going to do it, it was going to be her.

Alison: Sarah, the cast is so strong, Claire Foy, Rooney Mara, Jessie, Judith Ivey, of course, Frances McDormand who is a producer on the project. What was the casting process like?

Sarah: It was really long and really intricate because we had to figure out the dynamics and specific chemistries between all of these characters and how they fit together. It was almost like casting a giant organism, and everyone was a tentacle of it, so we really couldn't cast one person until we cast everyone. It was an amazing experience to be casting this community really.

Alison: Did you bring all the actors in and everybody read for different parts, or did you have people read specific parts? How did it work?

Sarah: I think everyone we talked with about more than one part. I know with Jessie, we talked about a couple of parts and also with Rooney and Claire. It was figuring out where everybody fit, and where everybody also gravitated towards, and what they wanted to express, and who they felt most drawn to or challenged by playing.

Alison: Jessie, what drew you to Mariche?

Jessie: I felt like she was a woman I knew, but I didn't completely understand. I felt immediately drawn to her, and I felt a lot of love for her, and a real kind of-- I guess, I wanted to understand where the source of that pain and wound might come from somebody who's internalized so much violence throughout her life, and also from a past life, the legacy of violence and an education of violence, and how that might make somebody very afraid to imagine a place better for herself in the life that she was living.

Alison: Fear is what I'm hearing you say that is underlying for Mariche. Even though she's tough on the exterior, there's a certain core of fear.

Jessie: Yes, I guess there's points in all of this story where we're afraid because, ultimately, we're having to find courage within ourselves, and within a community, and within a new language which all these women are creating for themselves to step into an unknown. None of these women have ever seen a map. They've never left the bounds of where they've grown up, and what they've always understood about themselves and each other, so really, it takes so much courage to be able to imagine and allow yourself to leave the place that you've always lived and understood. Yes, I guess I'd be afraid. I'm always afraid.

Alison: Sarah, when I interviewed Miriam Toews, she said Salome's voice is the one that came to her most clearly. For you in the adaptation, which voice came to you very clearly and which one took a little extra work?

Sarah: I think, I would say the same as Miriam. I think Salome was the one that's easiest to grasp at first because, as Miriam said in her interview with you, it's initially your first response to this, is one of such anger and grief that expresses itself as anger. I found Ona the hardest to write in so many ways, but ultimately, by the end of this process, I probably connected most with Ona's voice. I found Mariche the most exciting character to write because Jessie's character has the furthest to travel. She is so transformed to this conversation, and ultimately leads the way at the end.

I found them all challenging in certain respects, and also I found it interesting. We all talked about this how we had a metamorphosis from one character's point of view to another. We were like, "I'm Salome," star sign, but with an Ona rising, Ona aspirations. We would gather ourselves in the role.

Alison: My guests are Sarah Polley and Jessie Buckley. We're talking about the film Women Talking. I was really interested in the look of the film. I read in an interview, Sarah, and please correct me if I'm wrong because the internet, that you were inspired by the color palette of a photographer that you like. Who is the photographer, and what was it about the palette that you thought this could be really useful in telling the stories in Women Talking?

Sarah: Sure. The photographer is Larry Towell. He's an incredible photographer generally, but he has this incredible series on Mennonites. They're some of my favorite photographs I've ever seen. I saw them long before I read Miriam's book. I wouldn't say the palette was inspired by his photographs, but a lot of the imagery did inspire imagery in the film. In terms of the color palette, we did desaturate by about 75%. We had this idea of wanting this idea of this faded postcard of a world that's already passed.

Even by the very act of having this conversation, these women are already consigning the world they live into the past. It's such a brave and transformative thing to have this conversation. The idea is we're kind of looking back at something and the voiceover is a voice from the future.

Alison: Jessie, Mariche is often physically apart from the other women. She has her back turned. She has a very specific body language, especially in the beginning. I was wondering what your conversations with Sarah were like about the physicality of your character, especially in the beginning.

Jessie: With Mariche, she felt a bit like an armadillo. Just somebody who is this hard shell on the outside and was desperate to belong, but terrified of being that vulnerable because she's been somebody who's had to survive every day. If you ever show any vulnerability, who knows where that might lead. We did. We spoke over email. We spoke constantly throughout filming. Compared to any acting experience, this wasn't something where you would-- well, you never really wanted to do that, but like you would go and do your performance. We were working with such incredible people. With Mariche especially, I didn't want to judge her too much because I wanted to get to know her.

You could just really stand in front of all these incredible people like Claire, Ben, Rooney, Sheila, Judith, Kate, and all of them, and be changed in real-time. Little by little, this armadillo shed its skin, and by the end, could be held and hold and love in a way that she probably never had been allowed to.

Alison: Sarah, so much of the film is about forgiveness. Whether these men should be forgiven, whether women can forgive men, can you force forgiveness. Let's listen to a clip from Women Talking and we can talk about it on the other side.

Scarface Janz: It is a part of our faith to forgive. We have always forgiven those who have wronged us. Why not now?

Salome: Because now we know better.

Scarface Janz: We will be ex-communicated, forced to leave the colony in disgrace if we do not forgive these men. If we are excommunicated, we forfeit our place in heaven.

Helena: How can any of you live with the fear of that?

Agata: These are legitimate fears. How can we address them?

Scarface Janz: The only important thing to establish is if we forgive the men so that we will be allowed to enter the gates of heaven.

Mariche: You can laugh while you like, Salome, but we will be forced to leave the colony if we don't forgive the men. How Lord, when he arrives, find the women if we aren't in the colony.

Salome: Jesus is able to return to life, live for thousands of years, and then drop down to earth from heaven to scoop up his supporters. Surely, he'd also be able to locate a few women left their colonies.

Agata: Let's stay on track.

Salome: All right, I'll stay on track. I cannot forgive them. I will never forgive them.

Alison: That is from Women Talking. My guests are Sarah Polley and Jessie Buckley. Sarah, what did you want to explore about forgiveness? Possibly the limits of forgiveness.

Sarah: I think Miriam asks so many interesting questions in her book about forgiveness. For me, throughout the course of this film, I think the meaning of forgiveness changes. I think at first in the clip we just heard, it's introduced as an almost simplistic notion that we can just jump ahead, do no work and forgive when harm is still ongoing. I think what the women ultimately unpack throughout the course of this film is the idea that if for forgiveness to be meaningful, there might be quite a process in getting there.

Part of that might be getting out of harm's way. Part of that may be looking towards what distance you need to create between yourself and that harm before forgiveness is truly possible, and not just misinterpreted as permission for the harm to be ongoing. I think what's been really interesting is looking at this idea of forgiveness, which I'm very intrigued by and very compelled by and addressing the complicated nature of it.

Alison: What does Mariche feel about forgiveness, Jessie?

Jessie: For her, there's so much-- she has to come to terms with in actually acknowledging that it's not okay to forgive when you're hurt physically. You can't just give that away. There's that beautiful moment between her and her mother where her mother says, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry." Actually, the chain of allowing a certain kind of violence to continue, which between women is something that is an unspoken thing, and to be able to accept that apology and forgive that and really allow that to caught a

chain of, I call them stone women.

These women who've been able to keep their barriers up because they've been too afraid to say sorry or to acknowledge the things between each other. Sorry, my phone was going during that.

Alison: That's okay. Somebody's calling and tell you, "Hey, you're on the radio, you're on."

Jessie: I'm sorry.

[laughter]

Alison: We heard it in that clip and earlier that Mariche and Salome, who was played by Claire Foy, they really get at each other. There's something about the other that really grates on them each. When you think about your character, why is that, Jessie? What is behind that conflict?

Jessie: I think there's a lot of them that's quite alike. I think Claire has the external rage that Mariche has internalized. In a way, Claire's passion and ability to have some chaotic and agency with where she has this emotion is now on the outside of her skin. The thing that was somewhat interesting about this project was actually to explore the complexities of female relationships, are kind of base nature, sometimes to nurture, but actually where the growth really comes from is from the conflict and these different heightened perspectives of a similar experience in life.

We both got under each other's skin so that we-- I don't know. What do you think, Sarah? I don't know. I never know what the hell is going on with Sarah. I'm going to be completing honest. If someone is like, I can hardly remember what happened two seconds ago and you don't really want to know what's going on. You just want to like be it, and then somebody be like, "That was great," and you're like, "No idea what happened." I think that's better question for Sarah.

[laughter]

Sarah: You did just fine.

Jessie: I was thinking.

Sarah: I agree. I think you did just fine.

Alison: My guests are Sarah Polley and actor Jessie Buckley. We're talking about Women Talking. Stay with us. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All Of It. This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest this hour, Sarah Polley, the writer and director of Women Talking, as well as actor Jessie Buckley. So much of this film is about the different ways people cope with trauma, Sarah, and some women are angry, some have panic attacks, some have internalized it, some have gotten hard or tried to be hard, like Mariche. What was something that you read or learned about trauma that helped you make this film?

Sarah: One of the things that I love about Miriam's book is there are so many different responses to the same set of events and no one is more valid than the other. I love democracy of that and the equality of that. One thing I learned about trauma very recently that I found really helpful in the making this film is that the thing about trauma is it's always just about to happen. If you've had trauma, what the experience of that is and how it manifests if you are traumatized and there hasn't been a recovery process, is that thing that happened to you.

Some part of you subconsciously always believes it's on the verge of happening again right now. That's what the experience of being in trauma is. I found that enormously helpful, both in my personal life and in understanding the characters in this film, is that what they're dealing with isn't something that happened, it's something that might happen again in seconds. Whether that's the reality or not, in their case, it is the reality. In the case of a lot of people walking around, it's a subconscious sense.

Alison: Jessie, before the break, you were describing what it was like to be in the moment doing your job as an actor, inhabiting a character. You have to have rehearsal, I guess you have to have rehearsal before that. Some people do, some people don't. What was the rehearsal process like?

Jessie: It was in the middle of COVID, first of all. Once we'd arrived in Toronto, we had two weeks of rehearsals mapped out. The first week was on Zoom, which is really weird but it was useful just to talk and to get to know each other's families and the different dynamics that might appear as we got into shooting it. Then we had a second week, where we were allowed to go on set and go into the hayloft. It was still COVID so we had masks and visors. As an actor, it was like, "Oh my God, this is really weird. I can only see somebody's eyes, what's happening beneath. How am I going to do this?" You're both-- It was rich. It was such a huge canvas. It almost felt like you were speaking a foreign language because the language that was there was something-- People keep me saying this is like a theater. It could be a theater piece in some ways, and I've been thinking about that a lot. I just did a piece of theater. The thing about theater is that you have those intense relationships with an audience. You could meet one person in the audience and feel like you could fall in love or broken up or something, but you equally are sharing to 1,500 people.

I think with this piece is that actually you were exploring the most intense, immediate, cataclysmically changing relationships, but the context of it was so much broader. It was beyond the bounds of that hayloft. What we were discussing was way bigger than anything that we could actually contain or articulate or be objective about as people or as actors in that situation. I think in a way to act it, it allowed you to just stand and step into the water of it and be taken. When you get to work with such incredible people like we did on this job, it was a thrill. You never knew where you were going to go. In real-time, you were being changed. By people in that hayloft.

Alison: Sarah, I understand that you were able to have a certain limitation on hours of the days on shoot days, so that you could have time with your family. How did having those limitations and also just time to be with your people, your people-people. How did it affect the film and how did it affect how you worked as a director?

Sarah: I don't think I would've come back to directing if I hadn't been able to work shorter hours. By shorter hours, I mean 10-hour days. There's still long days compared to people's jobs. I think the industry standards of 15 to 17-hour days at least in North America, are so absurd. I think in general, the idea was to create a safe, healthy, nurturing, working environment. You can't do that if people are not able to see their loved ones. People who they have caregiving responsibilities for, whether that be parents or kids or a dog, or people have to have some access to their connections and their lives.

I think in terms of creating a space at work where people felt like they could take risks and they could be daring and could be brave, I think feeling taken care of was a really big part of that. While we probably weren't always successful, we put a lot of energy into trying to make sure we had a working environment that felt healthy.

Alison: Have either of you gotten to see the film in a theater with normal human civilians, not just industry peeps? What have you observed or even heard?

Jessie: I think lots of things. I think what you always hope for it doesn't always happen is that it genuinely affects people. Whether that means that it starts a conversation or a debate or emotionally connects something to someone that they haven't really had time to do or haven't wanted to do. Also, one of the most inspiring and beautiful things about this is to hear the younger women in this and the younger actress whose first job it was at the age of 17, 18, to be able to articulate and know things and to want things and expect more from the world that they're stepping out into.

Having had this experience in this film. It's been so inspiring and beautiful to see these young women do that and fly that flag. That's just the best.

Alison: The name of the film is Women Talking. I've been speaking with this director and writer, Sarah Polley and Jessie Buckley. I want to also point out that Sarah has a book out, a memoir called Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory, after she had a pretty traumatic concussion. Jessie, last time you were here, you were sitting right across from me in the before times for Wild Rows. For people who don't know, Jessie Buckley has an amazing singing voice, has been in cabaret, released an album earlier this year. We went back in the archives and we dug up the performance that you did.

Jessie: Oh, no.

Sarah: Yes.

Alison: Let's listen to Jessie. This is Glasgow (No Place Like Home). Let's take a listen.

Jessie: [singing] I've worn out the stones in front of your doorstep,

Coming and going, coming and going,

You kept the lights on, I always knew that,

I should've said thank you a thousand miles ago,

But I pushed you away, put a pin in a map,

Then I got lost in the storm

Had to find my own way, make my own mistakes,

But you know that I had to go,

Ain't no yellow brick road running through Glasgow,

But I found one that's stronger than stone,

Ain't no place like home, ain't no place like home,

Alison: She's good, isn't she, Sarah?

Sarah: She's so good. I want to lie and say she sings in our movie, so we'll come. There's all these musical numbers. It's just Jessie singing.

Alison: Jessie Buckley and Sarah Polley, thanks a lot.

Sarah: Thank you.

Jessie: [singing] Moon hanging low over my window,

Shoebox of dreams hid under my bed,

Alison: That was my conversation with actor Jessie Buckley and writer and director Sarah Polley about their film. We've been talking, it's been nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, and Sarah Polley is up for best-adapted screenplay.

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