The disturbing material that serves as the backdrop of Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel, “Women Talking,” might make the average moviegoer reluctant to consider seeing it. It’s loosely based on horrific crimes in a Mennonite community in Bolivia, where women were drugged and raped by men from their community.
“It’s not a film to sink you into grief and rage or to trigger you make things harder,” Polley said in early December while she was in San Francisco to accept the SFFILM award for storytelling. Polley’s affinity to the material and her introduction to it came during a book club meetup, when a fellow reader, who wanted to see her adapt the book into a film, “took me aside in the kitchen and said, ‘I’m going to tell you about the backdrop of this book, and you won’t want to make it into a film.’”
“I reached out to them, and within the same hour, they reached out to me. It was really strange,” she recalled. Polley’s brother, John Buchan, returned as her casting director, and soon, Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, Judith Ivey, McDormand and Ben Whishaw, who plays the notes-taking August, signed on.
Since most characters are female, and the movie highlights women attaining power and insight from each other and then enacting change in solidarity, there was a discussion about “Women Talking” hiring a female-only crew. Polley didn’t like that idea. She didn’t want to leave behind the “guys I have worked with on the last three or four projects who were the kind of men who were supportive and helpful before it was cool…before anyone required it of them.
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