SPLICE directed by Vincenzo Natali, written by Natali, Antoinette Terry Bryant and Doug Taylor, with Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley and David Hewlett. 104 minutes. Opens Friday (June 4). For venues, trailers and times, see Movies.
Sarah Polley is freezing. She’s toughing it out, but it’s pretty clear that the waifish actor and filmmaker just isn’t built for a full press day in overactive A/C.[rssbreak]
The frigid setting – a lab in the University of Toronto’s Medical Sciences Building – is at least appropriate to the movie we’re discussing. Vincenzo Natali’s Splice casts Polley and Adrien Brody as Elsa and Clive, a pair of married geneticists whose dangerous experiments result in a human-animal hybrid they must care for like a new baby.
(Full disclosure: I’ve known director Natali casually since our college days. I went to York with André Bijelic, with whom he wrote Cube.)
Polley doesn’t take a lot of leading roles these days, developing directorial projects and appearing in smaller parts in movies like Jaco Van Dormael’s Mr. Nobody. But as she explains between shivers, Splice was a project she couldn’t refuse.
“It was one of the best scripts I’d ever read,” she says. “I knew it was sci-fi/horror, but dramatically it stood on its own. And Elsa was absolutely the most dynamic female character I’ve read. She’s so ambitious, focused and full of life and energy, determined and set on getting her way. And she’s brilliant, so she’s able to get her way with something extraordinary that no one’s ever done before, which ends up being really harmful.”
The underlying metaphor of the script was a grabber, too.
“This creature gets born,” Polley says, “and these two people have to go through all the stages of parenthood in a few weeks – from the loving, adorable stage into the defiant stage into the teenage stage. And that awful process of letting go as a parent, which most parents are fairly unsuccessful at, Elsa is really, really, really unsuccessful at.
“For her, the point of all this was to achieve and control something, and that’s not something you can do with kids, let alone a kind of kid-slash-animal. So I think watching that struggle and that pain is something that, while it’s so exaggerated in this kind of sci-fi-ish movie, is something that’s really familiar to a lot of people, especially if they’re parents or the children of parents – and that’s all of us.”
Polley isn’t averse to genre movies – she did star in Zack Snyder’s Dawn Of The Dead remake, after all – but she wants people to understand that Splice’s most intense elements are the character’s heads and hearts.
“It’s all about the scariest undercurrents of parenting and children, and that’s where it gets incredibly interesting for me – it pushes so many boundaries in that area,” she says. “I mean, the sci-fi, action and horror elements are surprising, but what’s actually shocking, and borders on the offensive, is the human stuff.”
Once the Splice promotional push is over, Polley can turn her full attention to her next project as writer-director, Take This Waltz, which shoots in town this summer with Michelle Williams and Seth Rogen in the leads.
“It’s a movie about relationships,” she explains, “about the way whenever we feel there’s something missing, we feel that means there’s something wrong, so we tend to look elsewhere. And what that means for us, and what do we do after the honeymoon phase is over, and what do we do with that emptiness that’s in all of us. I’m calling it a romantic drama, but it’s pretty funny in parts, I’m hoping.”
Interview Clips
Sarah Polley on working with Vincenzo Natali:
Polley on the evolution of visual effects throughout her career:
Polley on going digital for her new movie:
normw@nowtoronto.com
