Best Of Sarah Polley's "Run Towards The Danger"

Here is a selection of memorable quotes from Run Towards The Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory by Sarah Polley

I was very moved reading Run Towards The Danger by Sarah Polley, especially given my work in entertainment. In reading Polley's book of essays, I learned a lot about working in film and television, live action, theatre, and lots of behind-the-scenes work for screen-based media. I was especially enlightened by her comments about working as a child actor and the impact that can have on a young person as I was working with child actors a couple years ago and had some misgivings about it.

There are certain people from whom you can immediately intuit that their fiercest expression of warmth is brutalizing honesty.

p. 28

The whole concept of "mad genius" that I had absorbed involved a necessary abdication of responsibility, empathy, and conscientiousness in favour of erratic flashes of brilliance that I assumed had to coexist with an obliviousness to other people's pain. On the back cover of the book Losing the Light by Andrew Yule, which chronicles the disasters of the [The Adventures of Baron Munchausen] production, Terry [Gilliam] is quoted as saying: "I think my priorities are right. I will sacrifice myself or anyone else for the movie. It will last. We'll all be dust." For so long, a certain glamour has come along with this single-minded pursuit of a great film at any cost.

p. 169

As the Baron says, when confronted with reality: "Your reality,' sir, is lies and balderdash, and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever." It's a wonderfully seductive line, but one that only a privileged white straight man could live by without devastating consequences.

p. 170

So much of coming to terms with hard things from the past seems to be about believing our own accounts, having our memories confirmed by those who were there and honoured by those who weren't. Why is it so hard for us to believe our own stories or begin to process them without corroborating witnesses appearing from the shadows of the past, or without people stepping forward with open arms when echoes of those stories present themselves again in the present?

p. 173

A few years ago, I travelled back to Rome […] The air in the square had the same smell. Centuries old. Romantic and disgusting. As though something was rotting, beautifully. I wondered if the tourists could smell it too.

p.173

It has always given me a jolt to realize that most parents of child actors really don't want to hear the truth from someone who has lived it. Only twice has this not been the case, out of dozens of conversations with parents. The exchange usually goes something like this: "But he loves it so much! He wants to do it." To which I reply something like: "Yes— and lots of kids want to be firefighters or doctors too. But they must wait until they are no longer children to assume the pressures and obligations of adult work." It's something our society made up its mind about a long time ago: children shouldn't work. Why this principle doesn't apply to an industry known for its exploitation and self-serving nature bewilders me.

p.187

When I was a teenager I became more politically active, I think in part because of what I had witnessed of the hierarchical, insidious structure of the set I worked on, which I realized was a microcosm of the world beyond. I became something of a problem for the show. I went to a television awards show in Washington during the Gulf War, and several US senators were in attendance. I wore a large peace sign necklace that had belonged to my mother. I was asked, by a representative of the Disney Channel, to take it off. I didn't. Shortly after this I was told, over the phone, by an executive at the Disney Channel that when promoting a show for Disney, I was not to make political statements. They weren't "a political company," he said. Afterwards, at every opportunity, I told journalists this story about being "censored" by Disney. By the time I was fifteen, the producers could no longer pretend I wanted to be part of the show and they began to write me out.

p.197

I started to see injustice everywhere. The technical crew, who generally showed me more compassion and kindness than anyone else on set, and who clearly had far more experience and expertise than the people they worked under, had no meaningful say in the show's creation and were treated with noticeable disrespect by producers and some of the show's directors. Many of the crew worked such long hours that they would talk about falling asleep and swerving off the road, or not seeing their children at all during the week because they left for work so early their kids were still sleeping and returned home long after they had gone to bed. I saw elderly background performers moved unceremoniously out of lunch lineups to make way for the show's "stars," including myself, after they had spent twice the time outside as everyone else, in thin period costumes, in sub-zero temperatures. Sometimes even the food they ate was different from ours, cheaper and less healthy

p.196

An interesting piece of Canadian history!

After years of clearing the land and cultivating it, the settlers in PEI were still paying rents to absentee landlords in Britain. The Tenant League was formed to support farmers who began to refuse to pay their rents. When the sheriffs came to arrest those farmers, neighbours would blow tin trumpets to alert supporters across the countryside. Sometimes dozens of people would answer the trumpet calls and arrive to surround the farmer in question, preventing his arrest. Finally, British troops were called in, but most of them were Irish, and when they arrived many found themselves siding with the tenant farmers. Though the rebellion was ultimately crushed, and the history of the Tenant League remains largely unknown in Canada, it had a profound influence on the Island. To this day in PEI, the acquisition of land by non-residents is highly regulated.

p. 202-203

He said, "If this film is everything we want it to be, maybe, if we are very lucky, it will affect two or three people for a little while. The only thing that is certain is that the experience of making it will be with all of us, it will become a part of us, forever. So we must try our best to make it a good experience. It's the most important thing."

- Sarah Polley, quoting a conversation she had on set with Jaco Van Dormael 

I feel a rush of breathlessness, my heart beating fast. The world looks large from here, and I have a thousand thoughts at once: where I would like to go, who I miss, what delights, who I might be, what words I might use to describe this moment one day. It's the kind of trance I used to go into often, before life went on tilt during those child-actor days. It's the feeling Lucy Maud Montgomery described as "the Flash," which she experienced herself and endowed so many of her young female characters with versions of. In Emily of New Moon, Montgomery writes: "It had always seemed... ever since she could remember, that she was very, very near to a world of wonderful beauty. Between it and herself hung only a thin curtain; she could never draw the curtain aside-but sometimes, just for a moment, a wind fluttered it and then it was as if she caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond— only a glimpse and heard a note of unearthly music. This moment came rarely-went swiftly, leaving her breathless with the inexpressible delight of it. She could never recall it— never summon it— never pretend it; but the wonder of it stayed with her for days... And always when the flash came to her Emily felt that life was a wonderful, mysterious thing of persistent beauty."

p. 205