Her subject, and maturity, go way beyond her years

"Away From Her," Polley's first feature as a writer-director, comes to the Sundance Film Festival after an opening at Toronto that had local critics calling it "one of the most astonishing feature debuts by a Canadian director in ages." A beautifully done film made with delicacy and classic virtues, it showcases a luminous Julie Christie in a drama revealing what the onset of Alzheimer's does to a marriage. Although an Alzheimer's story is not exactly what you'd expect from a 28-year-old director, Polley has made a habit of making a success out of doing the unexpected.

In film in Canada since she was 6 and perhaps best known for her work in Atom Egoyan's "The Sweet Hereafter," the gifted Polley has made a conscious decision to avoid the classic young Hollywood actress career and instead work with such auteur directors as Egoyan, Wim Wenders, Hal Hartley and Michael Winterbottom. Cast in the role Kate Hudson would ultimately take on in "Almost Famous," she dropped out of the project, a decision she feels led directly to directing, a job she plainly adores.

"I feel so kind of infinitely happy and exhilarated," she says with a grin. "Every nightmarish thing that happens, I enjoy it more, which is the sign of true addiction. It's the intensity of the collaboration that I like. Having an idea by yourself in a room and a few months later, 40 very talented people are helping you do it is so magical. Plus, when I acted as a child, I'd get sent away from the set to do my schoolwork when the really interesting things happened. This time, I finally got to be one of the guys."

"Away From Her" is based on a short story by Alice Munro, one of Canada's most revered writers, and Polley admits "my first instinct was that it should be left as a story. But it had such an emotional impact on me, I went back to it again and again, maybe 25 or 30 times. It was the idea of the kind of love story that doesn't often get told on film. It's not a chemical collision between two young people, but a story of people who've failed each other, who've been battered around by life."

Polley also thought of this as a film because she read the story ("The Bear Comes Over the Mountain") flying back from Iceland after costarring with Christie in "No Such Thing" and "I couldn't stop seeing her face in the role." But even though the two actresses are good friends, getting her in the project was not easy.