185. Should We Stay & Fight, Leave, or Do Nothing? with Sarah Polley

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Today's conversation is with the absolutely incredible Sarah Pauley, who is the Oscar-nominated director and screenwriter of the most powerful film I've ever seen, Women Talking.

In this conversation, which contains a lot of laughter and joy and hope,

we also

talk about sexual assault, including Sarah's experiences and mine.

So, please take care of yourselves.

If you need to skip this one, for those who listen, I think it will be a source of hope and joy for you as it was for me.

Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things.

I am just going to tell you as a disclaimer, I'm feeling a little bit nervy because I feel like the person that we're talking to today,

I just feel like the work she's doing is so freaking important.

So I am going to

just do my best.

Okay.

Sarah Polly is an Oscar-nominated director and award-winning actor whose works include Away From Her, Her, Take This Waltz, and Stories We Tell.

As an actor, Polly starred in a variety of films, including The Sweet Hereafter, Go, Dawn of the Dead, Mr.

Nobody, and My Life Without Me.

In 2022, Polly released an autobiographical collection of essays, Run Towards the Danger, Confrontations with the Body of Memory.

More recently, Polly wrote and directed the film adaptation of Miriam Tave's novel, Women Talking, which has since been nominated nominated for several awards, including the Academy Awards, Critics' Choice Awards, and Golden Globe Awards.

And if it doesn't win the Oscar, we all march.

We march.

We'd be pissed.

Okay.

We all march.

So, Sarah, I

started getting to know you a few months ago.

I read your book.

Run Towards the Danger, loved it so much that I immediately watched your documentary.

Loved that so much that I immediately watched Women women talking.

And then I haven't stopped thinking about all three of them.

Well, ever, for the past few months.

So I go for these walks in the morning.

And you and I

during these walks for the last few months have been having the most amazing conversation.

She comes back and I'm like, so how did you and Sarah do?

Like, what did you guys talk about?

I really appreciate this because I walk every day since recovering from my concussion and what accompanies me on my walks are your voices.

So that's amazing to hear that because truly you live in my head.

So

this is actually a really, really narcissistic dream I'm having at the moment.

That makes me feel better because I feel as if the kind of the Venn diagram of what it seems to be the ideas that sort of fascinate and plague you.

And the ideas that fascinate and plague me are just a solid circle.

Yeah, I think that's right.

So I'm really looking forward to this next hour.

And in my head, we've been talking about memory and imagination and raising kids who are comfortable in their own skin and women and abuse and recovery and just creating more beautiful lives and worlds.

And so since I started with your book,

If It's Okay, Run Towards the Danger, which by the way, I love that freaking title.

Like I wear Joan of Arc little medallion just to remind me of that very idea every day.

But there's one essay in the book that when I read it, I felt like, well, this is the most important essay I've read in a decade.

This

is an essay that could change the way the whole world looks at women and sexual assault and the aftermath of all of it.

I don't think I've ever heard the perspective given publicly.

I've only heard the perspective from friends

in private or from women in book signing lines in these private moments, but I've never heard anybody talk about it publicly.

So to the pod squad, when we talk about this story, it's just very important to me that everyone listens very closely because the truth is that of the pod squad, a small percentage of you all have had no experience with sexual assault.

And a smaller percentage of you have had experience with sexual assault and have come forward to testify against the attacker.

But the widest swath of listeners in the pod squad

has experienced sexual assault and for a million different very valid reasons has not come forward.

And those people are never spoken to.

So in your essay about your sexual assault, you teach us something that every single one of us needs to know.

before ever passing judgment on another victim or upon themselves.

So can you tell us a story about your experience with Gian Gameshi and the way that, let's just start with the way you used to tell it, the party story.

Sure.

The party story that I told for years, which was a funny story about my worst date ever, was that I had gone on a date with him.

I didn't mention my age.

And it was, he was.

So kind of ridiculous and did this stupid thing where he like ran his hands all over my body and said, I'm the devil, I'm the devil, you're in hell, you're in hell.

And it was so off-putting.

And I sort of told this story.

I would do this little crinkle of my nose and this fur of my brow, like I was looking at some specimen of something, which always got a big laugh.

And then that was sort of the end.

And that was the end of my ever having casual sex ever again, because it was so terrible.

And people would laugh.

And

what I didn't tell was that it was a really traumatic, violent encounter.

And I neglected to say that I was 16 and he was close to 30.

I neglected to say that I was terrified and that I was hurt and that I asked for things to stop and they didn't.

And then women came forward.

This is pre-Me Too, about a year before the Me Too movement, which is an important point because when these women came forward and went to court, it was seen and heard in a very different way than it would have been just a couple of years later.

And it was really the beginning of this conversation.

This incredible woman named Lucy Ducoutur came forward and told her story.

And there was this hashtag that went viral, millions of people saying, hashtag, I believe Lucy, and telling their story of why they didn't go to the cops at the time, because she was criticized for not going to the cops.

The case went to court.

He was acquitted.

And more importantly, in my mind, the women who went through being on the stand in that trial had a horrific traumatizing experience, which is common.

And I, coming from a family of lawyers and legal academics, you know, I had an eight-week eight-week old baby.

I had a toddler.

I literally spent weeks just walking the city and talking to everyone I could about whether or not to come forward when these other women did.

Not so much because I felt that I wanted to see him in jail or go through a court process, but more in a gesture of solidarity because there were these women making themselves very vulnerable.

I had a certain amount of public profile.

And my thought was: could I at least lend credibility by being a witness?

And I was told in no uncertain terms that there were so many gaps in my story, as is common, including the having told it as the funny party story, having not told many people, having maintained, I mean, I wasn't friends with him, but I did interviews on his show.

It was part of what you did when you released a film in Canada as you went on his radio show.

I had had friendly interactions with him.

I was in behavior towards him.

far more deferential and ingratiating than I was with almost anyone else, which was, I think, a sort of fear response or a wanting to normalize or wanting to make things not have happened, which again, I think is really normal behavior post an experience like this.

So there are actually, you know, videos you can look up online.

And believe me, I did when I considered coming forward of me on his radio show.

being really nice to the point where like, I don't know if it seems like I'm flirting with him.

It kind of seems like he's flirting with me and I'm certainly not pushing it away.

It's actually out of character behavior for me, like the way in which I was sort of reverting to this teenage actress

demeanor.

But absolutely the effect that being in a room with him had on me was this terror,

which I was really good at masking even for myself, I think.

So all of this is to say is it turns out this is what a lot of people do.

after they've had a really terrible encounter.

They try to normalize it by engaging in, you know, friendly behavior.

They don't tell the story as the story of a violent encounter.

They tell it as a funny party story.

Of course, I was 16 years old.

You know, I was in my 30s when people came forward.

There were going to be lapses in my memory.

Absolutely.

There were going to be things I got wrong.

So I sort of was given the

information that you will not lend credibility to these women coming forward.

You will, in fact, have just as bad a time as they are going to on the stand.

This is a horrific experience.

And the advice was absolutely don't come forward.

And this is from people who work in the legal system and was very sobering advice to receive.

So years later, and I carried this with me.

I always knew I would end up telling the story.

I knew that.

For my mental health, my kids had to be older so that I didn't kind of crumble and impact them in really destructive ways.

But I carried it with me.

I knew I would always tell this story in solidarity with those women.

But also I thought it was extremely important to offer a window into the thinking process behind what, as you said, most women who experience this do not come forward.

Why?

So to look at what that looks like and at least, you know, try to offer that.

to the conversation.

Yeah.

And to just explain to people what is used in court still or in the court of public opinion, the behavior of women that is used to say, oh, look, they're lying.

They can't remember details of the assault.

The story changes because their memory changes.

If you have fight, flight, fawn, they act in a very fawning way afterwards.

They call the person sometimes who attacked them.

They go back to their house because they are trying to

make a different ending.

They're trying to make themselves not victims by recreating the situation with a different ending.

These are normal, these are not evidence of lying.

These are often evidence that the person has been assaulted.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's interesting.

There's this amazing clinical psychologist named Dr.

Lori Haskell, who I think is just the person who knows the most about this.

And she's now an expert witness in trials in Canada, which actually has resulted in much better outcomes in those trials with sexual assault.

She does a lot of work on what trauma does to the brain and to memory.

And one of the points she makes that I love is she says, you know, after a major car accident, if the person in the car accident doesn't remember the color of the cars that were going by at the time or the person who was standing there or what they were holding in their hand, we know and we assume that's because their brain was so traumatized.

Of course they don't remember those things.

But when it comes to sexual assault, we expect all these details to be remembered in a way that's just not, it doesn't correlate to trauma having happened to the brain.

So there's still part of us that doesn't actually think of this in the same way that we would being in a car crash.

And it absolutely is trauma.

Yeah, do you feel like that is purposeful?

Because I just feel like we know enough to know.

We know that trauma causes absolute disembodiment, which then of course you don't remember.

We know that in a courtroom about a car crash.

Why do we refuse to know that in in terms of sexual assault?

Is it just in order for the system to continue this shit?

Because it's feigned ignorance.

I think it's across a lot of marginalized groups.

If you're telling the story, as you say, Sarah in your book, we judge reality according to our expectations

rather than evaluating our expectations according to the reality.

And in order to evaluate our expectations according to the reality, we would have to know the reality, which would mean we would, at a fundamental level, have to listen to and believe the original stories of women when they say, This is what happened to me and this is how I reacted.

If you believed that, you would be able to extrapolate data from that that shows that that is natural.

But we don't do that.

We just rely on our expectations.

In the legal system, it's been happening to black people for centuries.

We didn't know in the legal system until very recently that white people could not accurately

identify facial recognition at the level that they do for white people in police lineups.

And so all those police lineups, we expect if someone pulls someone out of a police lineup, that's true.

We didn't expect that people would ever under any circumstances

confess falsely to a crime.

Now we know that happens all the time.

It's because we're getting to these places where we're actually understanding we need to

adjust our expectations, but that starts with believing people.

If you don't believe people, you never adjust expectations.

Yeah.

And I think also it's, it's complex, right?

Because in this kind of situation, someone might go to jail, someone might go to prison.

And so I'm of the belief that the burden of proof should be very high if we're going to actually take away someone's freedom.

I really believe that.

I think for me, though, there has to be a way for being on the stand in a sexual assault case to not act as a second rape, which it does for many women describe it as worse, if not as bad, as the experience of the assault.

So it's like, how do we make this less horrific an experience for people to come forward?

And it's really complicated because, yeah, we do demand all these details that are not reasonable.

At the same time, I do think people deserve a robust defense when they're being accused of something that could send them to prison.

If you've ever walked through a prison, which I'm sure you have, like, you know.

I want to know that we're sure before we send someone.

And it's really hard in sexual assault cases because it so often is one version versus another.

It's just, should people

be

interrogated in a cruel, punishing, humiliating way when they come forward in sexual assault?

Or is there another way to do this?

Well, the least we can do is understand trauma when we are investigating trauma, which is what a trial is, right?

Exactly.

The least we can do is to not have a judge say, well, it's black and white.

It's as simple, are you lying or telling the truth?

Your essay, I believe, is going to do that.

Even people listening to this podcast to understand that the way a woman or a victim acts is not

what we would describe as perfect victimhood.

If we, as people who are listening or watching, don't say, oh, well, look, of course.

If we can understand it and explain that behavior, that is helping.

And what do you make of people over and over again advising women to not report, to not go into the court system?

Because to me, it's like, do we need a freaking different

system for ourselves to protect each other?

Because I am sick of telling women,

report, just report, just report, knowing full well that the system is not set up for them to get any justice or to even be protected.

It's sending them to the wolves.

I think it can be.

I'm hopeful it's getting somewhat better.

I do think it's changed a lot since I chose to not come forward.

I wonder if I knew someone like Dr.

Lori Haskell was going to be in the courtroom

explaining my behavior to a jury or to a judge.

I wonder if I would be more inclined to go into that experience.

I think no matter what, it's going to be really, really horrible.

And you need to be in a mental state.

to go through it.

And you have to have your support and your people and have yourself really set up for it.

I'm hoping it's getting better.

But yes, I think it continues to be a really, really difficult experience for most women.

Yeah.

Well, and it sounds like if the system changes,

it might make women feel more believed to begin with.

Then some of this response with the perpetrator or infriending them in some way to change that narrative for yourself.

Maybe that in and of itself could also change if there was a system that could hold these women's stories and actually believe them.

Yeah, I think so.

And I think too, just the conversation that I think has been evolving since the Harvey Weinstein trial and they did call an expert witness in this stuff, which was key to that case.

I do think just, I think just having less rigid expectations around human behavior generally

would be nice.

The idea that you did this one thing, or if there's one inconsistency, or you told this one lie, which means you're a liar, or, you know, I don't trust you because you took this one position on this one issue.

I can no longer work with you on any other issue, you know, that might be really useful for a group of people to help progress forward.

I don't think social media helps much in this regard, but there's this sense of with us or against us or good or bad.

I think these concepts don't help when we have complex conversations about how people actually behave and how they protect themselves and how they try to.

interpret their behavior to others.

And that applies to you say

in Women Talking one of the characters says they made us disbelieve ourselves and that was the worst.

I think this expectation we have of our own self about how we're going to respond is

equally unhelpful as the way the legal system has on us.

In high school, I got hours later, got a ride to my haircut appointment from my attacker.

And

seeing that as utterly crazy made me question,

well, I wouldn't have done that if that was,

you know, and

later at my job attacked by my boss that I worked for for years after ingratiating myself to him.

And I think that understanding even helps us because I don't like this binary that we are put in as victims.

You either go forth as a warrior and bring your case to the court and you protect other women or you have to shut your mouth and never say a word and be ashamed of yourself for not protecting the people who come after you.

That is horseshit.

All we were doing is minding our own goddamn business.

It wasn't our fault, and it's not our obligation to fix whatever someone did to us.

It's their obligation to fix it.

Absolutely.

And I have definitely had a lot of people at book signings and stuff come and sob in my arms about having not come forward and the guilt they've felt about that.

And I mean, I just feel like it's so awful that people would carry that on top of the experience.

None of it belongs to them.

I couldn't understand it more.

I obviously didn't come forward in that case for so long.

And also, it's not the only thing I've experienced like that in my life.

Like you, like most people have multiple experiences.

This is the one I wrote about because, you know, there was a purpose in terms of supporting these women that I felt had been hung out to dry.

But certainly it's not the only experience I've had.

And in all of them, you know, you do carry all of these questions about, you know, what does it mean that I didn't come forward?

And again, it's such a complex process to make that decision.

And most people decide not to.

So I feel like for anybody who is carrying that guilt, you're in very good company.

And there's a lot of legitimate reasons to not be ready to tell your story.

Absolutely.

And also just.

praise and kudos to those who find it in themselves too.

Yeah.

Because I think the chilling deterrent effect of knowing that it is a real and present danger that you will be prosecuted or sued is very helpful to us to keep us safer.

And so all the respect to those people who do come forward and all the respect to those who don't.

Yeah, or who come forward in different ways.

The court system is not the only way to come forward.

Yeah.

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I want to talk about women talking.

For any pod squatter who has not seen the movie yet, you will need to see the movie.

This is just like the closest we get to a book club.

Just go see the movie.

Women Talking was based on a novel written by Mirion Taves.

which was inspired by real events that occurred in a Mennonite colony in rural Bolivia.

It was a 2,500 person, very conservative colony in which boys and men systematically raped approximately 150 girls and women aged three to 65.

The attackers used a cow anesthetic to spray it into homes to sedate the entire household before climbing through the windows.

The victims woke up bloodied and bruised with rope marks on their arms, but with little memory of the attacks.

And so they were told,

these victims were told over and over again, that the events were the result of, quote, wild female imagination or demons.

In the real life events, eight men were eventually convicted and the girls and women stayed in the colony.

But your film, Sarah, imagines a fictional reckoning.

The women in this tight-knit fundamentalist, pacifist community

gather in a barn and they discuss with each other how best to respond to the abuse.

They narrow in the beginning their choices to do nothing, stay and fight or leave.

I,

I, when I, I told him, I said, did you have to go see it, sister?

Just go see it.

I get a text and she gets back and it just says, that was the most powerful thing I've ever seen.

If the whole world saw it, the world would change overnight.

Yeah.

Oh,

thank you.

Amazing.

Just what do you want to say about it just to start off and then we'll tell you everything we want to say about it

sure

sure i mean i feel like the most important thing to know about the film because i think if you see

you know images from or the title or or hear what the premise is i think it can sound like a lot of hard work and i think the most important thing i have to say about it is that when i read this book I was really looking for an off-ramp for grief and rage.

And I kind of found it through this book.

And that's kind of what I wanted for this film was that it would give some offering of a way forward and a way in which we could work together to imagine a better, different world.

And so ultimately, it was a project of hope.

And I think we were doing such important work around identifying harms and we have to continue to do that work.

But I think equally, if not more important, is imagining what it is we want to build, what we want to see, not just what we don't want to see.

So that so excited me about making this film.

And that's what I wanted the tone and the spirit of the film to really capture.

Yeah, it sure as hell does.

I know it's based on a book, and the book is based on actual events.

To me, it felt like an allegory.

I have been in this conversation over and over again.

I've been in actual conversations, like what happened in that barn with women.

And I know you have, you've been an activist forever.

I know each of those women

in that circle.

Like, I know them, some of them inside of myself.

I was thinking of people that I know, the one that's just fucking murderous about everybody, the one that is breaking down all the time.

And we're mad at her because why does she get to break down?

Because we all have to stay strong.

Like they're archetypes, really, of all of us, not

in that culture necessarily, but now.

Yeah.

I kept using the word fable as we were making the film.

This is about all of us.

This isn't about pointing the finger at some misunderstood community where this terrible atrocity did happen.

It's about looking at all of us and all the conversations we're having.

I mean, I feel like you guys do a version of women talking.

Every time I listen to this podcast,

I'm in some version of women talking, but it is that sense of how do we get underneath,

you know, what this harm has done to us, how it's made us treat each other, start moving through it, have some accountability amongst us and some forgiveness.

of ourselves and each other.

And now what?

Like, now, what do we get to do?

What do we get to build?

And I also was so interested in the aspect of they're actually not doing this to abandon their faith.

They're actually doing it to move towards it.

Like they're not

taking down.

Yeah, and make it real.

And like, let's take down these insidious power structures that have been thrown up around our faith.

crumble them so we can get to the what we actually believe and then how do we manifest that and that really excited me too is i think we can be so obnoxious and elitist about faith communities in film and books.

And I just thought the idea of what if we actually look at what these women's faith feels like to them in its best iteration, its purest iteration, and then let them have the agency to decide what that's going to look like out in the world.

And people do it in every realm.

Abby and I, in the first 10 minutes, when we saw the leave, stay and fight, or do nothing.

Abby and I looked at each other like, what the fuck?

Like, that is literally what I wrote down when I was trying to figure out what to do with the church.

Wow.

Because before I even knew I was queer, going to these fundamentalist churches and hearing this shit about, well, all the stuff you hear.

And this is what we say to people who come to us, who are sitting in church in pews where, you know, homophobia is being taught or racism isn't being addressed.

You don't pretend.

You only have three choices.

You stay and that means you agree.

Or you stay and raise hell.

Or you get out.

But there's no other option.

So it's just people are doing this in their families, breaking those structures.

They're doing it in churches.

They're doing it in nations.

It's a fable for our times.

And how do we start over?

I mean,

the part that gets me so much, so much of it gets me, but when they're all sitting around, they're trying to create a new world.

You know, my sister was saying it's like you got your first draft.

We keep trying to edit it.

But the draft is patriarchy and racism.

Like we have to crumple it up and throw it away and start over.

But you can't because the women are saying, what about about our boys?

At what age are they the old draft?

It's the connection between the two that you can't start over because there's always part of the old and the new.

Yeah.

And we've also absorbed it within ourselves.

They also owe each other apologies because they have acted out this oppression and violence towards each other in various ways, or at least been complicit.

in some way in terms of one relationship where there's this domestic abuse situation.

And a mother has actively encouraged her daughter to forgive this over and over and over again.

And those apologies have to happen before this community can move on together.

There was this amazing experience I had when we first showed the film where these two young women came up to us who were, I think they were 20, and they had come from a really, really religious community out west in Canada.

they had kind of fled and there was quite a lot of abuse there and they had had to like sever their relationships relationships with their families basically and give up their entire life.

And they were in a deep state of grief because they felt they had turned their back on God and their families to live this other life.

And they came out of the film and they told me this whole story.

And they said, and we realized that we've just become roommates.

We came here alone, one after the other, now we're roommates.

And we realized we don't have to think of it that way.

We can just create our own colony.

We don't have to turn our back on what we believe.

And I just was like, that was just the most amazing thing to get to hear after this film is it doesn't have to be this rigid thing.

You can create your own version.

And your own version, you can make it real.

Like, I want to talk about forgiveness for a minute because in this community, these women's faith is real and deep, and they want to forgive.

But the choice they're given is stay and forgive.

That's it.

Forgive.

You should forgive.

Just forgive.

And so listening to their conversation about,

yes, they believe in a forgiveness that's deeper than the one that's demanded of them.

They don't want fake, compulsive forgiveness.

And so they discuss together, okay, what are the conditions that we need to create so that forgiveness might one day come?

And I just want every

person listening, like, please listen to that.

Forgiveness is real.

It's true, but not compulsory.

It's something that you have to create conditions where maybe it comes one day.

And it's not easy.

And I think thinking about those conditions that you create or what you you would need in order to forgive is the most self-loving project you can possibly embark upon.

Because one of those main conditions is getting yourself out of harm's way.

Yes.

You cannot forgive when it can be mistaken for permission to continue violence.

So

that's what one of the characters does when they're unpacking that word forgiveness, which I'm so fascinated by because it used to sound to me altogether pat, like I was just always interpreted as one thing.

And then to unpack it and realize, no, it can be this deeper, richer, most beautiful of things if it's interpreted well and and one of the characters says perhaps in some cases forgiveness can be confused with permission and that came directly from one of our collaborators on the film who had been living um with an abusive partner for years and she said every time after he would hurt me he would beg for my forgiveness and i always granted it and it took me years to realize that every time i was granting him forgiveness i was actually giving him permission to do it again and so she started to think of forgiveness as this very naughty, tricky thing.

And in fact, I think it's that bird's eye view and pulling back to deeply and truly forgive, not because you're compelled to, but because it's there.

What would your life have to look like?

What would have to happen?

How would we need to take care of each other and ourselves?

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The first time I felt real forgiveness for my ex-husband was as soon as we signed the divorce papers and we were on the elevator on the way down.

And that is because there was a boundary restored that made me feel safe again.

It's literally called forgiveness, and we demand it of people.

Like it cannot be given

until we have made ourselves safer than we were when it happened to us

before.

I completely agree with you on this being a film that is primarily about power and hope.

I think it's just one of the most hopeful things I've seen when you start the film with what follows is an act of the female imagination.

And

that is the third way that we never consider.

We think our choice is to try to like sit here and just make a very violent situation slightly less violent, as opposed to starting over and being like, what would be the world that we could create that would not

have that?

We've been talking about faith a lot in this conversation so far.

And I think it's so easy to look at these characters, this kind of ultra conservative, oppressive.

culture as foreign and to kind of pity them and even despise them for staying in a culture that puts their children and themselves in such a course of constant violence.

But that is exactly what we do every day.

We are in the barn with them.

Among

us, we have six daughters.

One out of six girls will be violated through rape or attempted rape.

Five out of six of them will be sexually harassed.

In the course of our talk today, 40 Americans will be sexually assaulted.

And of the child victims of that, 95% will know their attacker.

So we are raising our kids and living ourselves in a culture where families, neighbors, and community members are violating our children and ourselves.

What

did you want to say

about what we outside the barn

can imagine for our cultures

today, for everyone listening to this.

The first thing that I was excited about was the idea of this radical act of democracy in which people who really don't agree on some fundamental issues have to sit together and come to some consensus and work it out, and that they have to actually acknowledge and listen to each of their lived experience and make amends where necessary in order to move forward together.

I do think that this requires us

allowing each other to not be perfect when we come to the table and talk about gender-based violence and to come from every side of the political spectrum and to move together.

I do think, like, we have to let go of this idea of, I don't agree with you on every single issue.

I hated your position on that one issue, so I'm not going to sit with you in a room and talk about this.

I do feel like there is this huge reimagining that has to be done around what all genders imagine for themselves to be their role.

And I think we have assumed these roles

so intensely and in such a concentrated form in so many ways that we can't even track.

And so just the idea of being able to be creative with ourselves and with each other, I do think that the work that you guys do, these conversations are transformative because I think you are getting underneath things in a public way and you're forcing other people to as well.

So in my mind, what I most hope for

are these really rich, difficult conversations.

And what's been super interesting is, you know, I've had very positive experiences with Mennonite communities in Canada and I have a lot of Mennonite friends.

We have Mennonite input all the way through this.

And again, it's about all of us.

It's not about Mennonite communities.

But what's been amazing is hearing that all of these conservative Mennonite, some old colony Mennonite women are breaking the rules and going to see this movie.

They've never been in a theater in their lives.

There's buggies in parking lots of movie theaters.

And they are singing in four-part harmony along with the hymns.

No.

And then cheering at the end, and then all staying and talking.

And then more are coming back the next day.

And that is something I could have never predicted for this film.

Like this film I knew would never be seen by those women.

And obviously, it broke my heart.

I wanted everybody to be able to access it, especially them.

But the idea that they themselves are seeing it is thrilling to me.

And I'm hearing stories of people staying in the theater and having debates with strangers and having conversations with strangers.

To me, that's the great hope: we can actually talk to each other because I think that is getting harder and harder to do.

And talk to ourselves.

I mean, I've had so many conversations with myself after, because you kind of figure out when you watch, oh, I'm doing that.

Like

there's this one character named Arike who is in the most abusive marriage of the group, and she is there.

And the vibe of the group is judgmental to her

because she keeps kind of being what would appear to be less strong about the take, right?

She's just like more afraid and more

cynical.

And maybe she just wants to stay.

And I'm annoyed with her.

And you can tell the other women are annoyed with her.

And there is this moment where she

looks at the group and she says, How dare any of you pretend that I had a choice?

Okay.

Sarah,

a week ago we interviewed Gloria Steinem and I was asking her, why the hell white women still vote, you know, voted for Trump, vote for whatever.

And I said it in a very judgmental way.

And she said, well, what we have to do is widen their choice.

So many of them, and by the way, I still feel judgmental of them.

But what she was trying to get to me to was,

it's not always, it's because their very survival is tied to this thing.

And let's not always pretend that they have a choice but to stay

aligned.

And

the idea of

a movement, because I think of these women leaving also, it's literally a movement.

They are moving away from an old thing towards a new idea that they've imagined.

Because as Sonia Renee Taylor says, we're already living in somebody's imagination.

What we're living in right now was a bunch of dudes' imagination come to life.

One of our jobs as movement makers is to make another choice for people that is real and sustainable and possible and irresistible.

And this watching those women gather up their things to try something new.

felt like that.

Yeah.

And what they couldn't do in order to move forward and what didn't work and the obstacles they faced before they could move forward was when they looked at someone else's point of view as stupid or didn't try to understand the reasons they got there

and i think that is key is that by the end the person who's the biggest adversary in that group they have taken on her story and how she got there.

Like, why is she defending the status quo?

How are we part of this problem?

What can we do to help heal that?

That is completely pivotal to the fact that they can move on as a group and she has to be able to go with them.

The part that was so powerful to me about what you're describing is the way that

we take in

this violence.

And because it's so

unmetabolizable that we have to find someone to put it on.

We have to.

And so she becomes the person that receives the anger from everybody else because she is seen as the one that is the excuser of the anger.

And that, that intergenerational moment where her mother comes to her and accepts the responsibility for telling her over and over to forgive and to stay.

And then as the woman's own daughter is watching her be attacked by the other woman and she's standing in to defend.

And then you see this moment where she realizes, oh, I understand

why my mother could not do that and comes to her feet.

That moment of coming to her feet is the most

powerful moment I have ever seen in a film.

And they cry together because their grief is together.

Their grief is not against each other.

And that is, I think, what we need to do.

We have been doing, as I say in the film, we've been passing the sack of stones.

The stones were given to us and we're just passing it around to each other because we need someone to hold it because it's too heavy.

And that moment of crying with each other and just like setting down the sack of stones so that they can move together lighter

was fundamentally transformative.

And everyone needs to see it for the systemic things we're talking about and for the ways that you can put down the sack of stones that you're holding in your own families.

I mean,

just absolutely breathtaking.

Oh, I'm so happy to hear that.

And also that sequence for me is my favorite sequence in the film also because of how it came to pass, which is, you know, Kate Hallett, the actress who plays Ocha, who comes over to her mother in that moment, that was not scripted.

That was something she had to do in rehearsal.

She had to do that.

And then Jesse had to kind of whisper, I'm sorry to her, and they had to hold each other.

That was not scripted.

The other thing that wasn't scripted the way it is in the film is, so the apology wasn't in the book that Greta gives to Marika about how she's forced her to forgive her husband over and over again.

And so I wrote it and we shot Jesse's side of it.

And one of my closest crew members

had a very emotional response to Jesse's reaction to this apology, which is just basically everything,

all the structures inside her crumble and she sees things differently in that one moment of someone apologizing.

And he had an incredibly profound response to it.

He had grown up in a very religious community.

There had been ongoing abuse.

He had never received an apology.

He had been forced to forgive.

And he needed a minute after seeing Jesse's performance.

And it was really, really profound for him.

And then we turned around on Sheila and she gave this beautiful performance, but there was something that felt missing.

And I turned to him and I said, would that be good enough for you?

Like if your parents said that, would it be good enough for you?

And she said, no,

because she never actually said, I'm sorry.

And I was like, oh my God, I'm so sorry.

We can figure this out.

So I went to Sheila and said, okay, say the rest of the thing.

She had been crying.

I said, don't cry.

Let it be about her and center her here.

And then if you have to fall apart, like if you can't hold it anymore, see if you can find the words.

I'm sorry.

And then we shot it

and she said it three times.

So that was Sheila.

And it was.

my crew member and Jesse.

And it was this everyone bringing their lived experience to the table to create this thing that, you know, I could turn to him and say, would that be good enough?

And he could look at me and said, yes, absolutely.

I could move through something with my parents after that.

And then the daughter, I cannot believe she did that spontaneously.

And then she is the one that gets to cast the final vote.

She is the one that says,

we must go because we cannot stay, because it isn't just about protecting herself anymore.

She sees her mom.

She sees her grandma.

She suddenly it clicks about we cannot.

We must go.

And by the way, that line too came from someone's lived experience on the film.

It was actually someone who's very close with Sheila who talked about getting out of a really bad relationship.

and she said, I'm leaving because I cannot stay.

That's the reason I'm leaving.

So, we just had so many moments of crew and cast coming up with these moments and insights that made its way into the film.

It just felt like this kind of extension of the haloft where people were bringing everything they had.

And I think it was a very profound experience for a lot of us.

I bet.

Well, it definitely comes across in the film.

I actually haven't been able to stop thinking about it because I keep finding myself in everybody, in every character, and I keep having to forgive myself for having certain reactions in certain moments of my life, for not saying something, for being status quo, for being the one who's like, we got to get the fuck out of here.

I could see all of this, but I didn't have a place to go with it.

And so it was just living inside of me.

And it was like, I don't know, your film has given me a pathway, not just in terms of creating a future that I don't have yet or a path, but it gave me an opportunity to forgive myself for being every single one of those women in that barn.

Amen.

And to show us how to love each other.

I relate to two mostly, well, three, but one was the one that just wanted to kill everybody.

I understand that deeply.

I have that in me.

Just like,

fuck it.

Like they are killing us.

I have that in me.

And burn it down.

Burn it all down.

Yeah.

So

to have the other women i could start crying talking about this but to have their reaction be

okay y'all what do we have to do so that glennon doesn't kill anybody yes

not like

you shouldn't want to kill anybody you shouldn't you change that what do we as a group have to do so she doesn't do this thing because actually there's a part of that that's right and true but that's right and not to protect them, to protect them.

To protect me.

Yeah.

Because she cannot be the recipient of or the perpetrator of violence because that's not good for her soul.

That's right.

So how what circumstances do we surround her with so that she doesn't have to become a murderer?

Because she will have to be.

It's like a better version of goodbye Earl.

It's like a better version.

Like if

we could get a step further from goodbye Earl, it would be women talking.

Okay.

That's our new tagline.

That's our new tagline.

All the posters just changed.

But that's why every woman's perspective and experience is so important.

You need the rager.

Yeah.

You need that because sometimes the rager is the one that gets you like up and on your feet and like, oh, fuck, we got to get out of here.

But then you also need the other folks.

in the group, in the barn, in your homes to be like, hey, listen, we need to find a new path so you actually don't commit violence because that wouldn't be good for you.

Yeah, but you don't have to change.

This thing has to change.

Yeah.

All of their perspectives are essential like they can't they wouldn't get to where they get if they didn't have all of those responses yeah

i also love they have the three choices clearly and then one i think it's one of the little girls um

who says we could ask the men to leave as a fourth option and everyone just bursts out laughing because it's this almost like shocking, fully humorous idea that that would be on the table.

And it really stuck with me because it's like:

we continue to ask ourselves what we can do to avoid rape.

How can we decrease this violence, this epidemic through policy, judicial, you know, educational system change, as if asking men to stop raping is shocking and laughable.

It truly was a moment because it's like, wait, they could leave.

Wait, we could do all of these things over the next 60 years, or men could just stop raping people.

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Sarah.

Yes.

We like your work.

I like your work, all of you, so much.

So thank you.

I mean, so much to me.

I was like getting people when you at some point were saying on Twitter or Instagram, you were like, who should we have on?

I literally had like 20 friends go on your social media feed and recommend me.

So I feel like, is this a stalker's dream come true?

Women tweeting, women tweeting.

No, let me tell you, Allison, who is our person, who is our, we have Allison Dina, and then the people you see here.

And Lauren, she said, I just think you're, I really think you need to know this Sarah Polly person.

And then I just dove in and she's, she's always right.

Thank you to her.

So

I

will be watching the Oscars.

I don't always, but I will this time.

Thank you.

How are you feeling?

Is that so weird?

Like what?

It's thrilling.

It's totally thrilling.

I'm a little bit out of it and I don't follow these things closely.

I didn't realize that when you get nominated for best picture, way more people see your movie and talk about your movie.

Yes, of course, that's a bit.

I just don't know because I never do that.

I'm too lazy to watch all those movies.

So that's been really exciting.

And I've gotten to meet some amazing other filmmakers and get to be part of conversations.

And so the whole thing has been kind of incredible.

I'm so happy for you because I know through reading you that you used to have this idea that activism and art are like two different things and that art isn't like real activism, which is I'm constantly struggling with all the time.

But this movie is freaking,

it is activism.

It is, it is, it's, it's going to change everybody who watches it.

And then one day, will you come back and talk to me about your documentary?

Because

I would love to.

So fucking good.

I feel like.

Just like, slot me in here.

I'll stay in this little box forever.

Oh, my God.

I got nothing else.

My sister said it's too much.

You can't also talk about her documentary, but I already have our interview written up.

I just feel like we are both trying to be the mystery and the detective of our lives and just chasing our tail over and over again.

And so, I'd love to come back and talk about narrative.

Pod, squad, go see women talking.

Also, pick up front towards the danger.

I could have talked about every essay in that book.

I just loved it so much.

We're in your corner.

We will continue to be women talking.

I just want to thank you because I feel like that film that you made, it's a gorgeous story.

It's a powerful story.

It's also,

it has all of the elements of revolution, of a, of a female

new revolutionary way in it.

And it is like a text for how we can have a different world that isn't just editing this shitty draft of a world that we have now.

And so I truly...

desperately want you to win an Oscar because I desperately need the world to watch this film every single person.

It would be a different world.

And if you're wondering, Pod Squad, if guys should watch it too, for them, it should be mandatory.

Yeah.

Okay.

It's not, they need to watch it twice.

Yes.

I also think, Sarah, I think that it's important

just to say this: keep going, because whatever you come up with in terms of a plan,

I'll follow your shit.

Let's go.

Just write it up, put it in a movie.

Wherever you go, like you are a person that is

just incredible.

You're a genius.

And call us, call us next time.

I'm collaborating with you by myself on my walk, on my freaking day.

We could get so much more done if you were real.

I can't believe I made it through this without sobbing.

I'm so proud of myself.

I just felt it.

Just don't cry.

Don't cry that you're on that.

beautiful pee with those beautiful women.

I didn't cry, but I came close at the end.

Abby almost got me.

She usually does.

She always gets me.

I scare you.

Thank you, Sarah.

As Abby says, keep going.

Thank you.

Bye, Pod Squad.

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