Katie Holmes, who worked with Sarah Polley more than a decade ago when they co-starred in Doug Liman’s Go (1999), recently spoke with the 34-year-old actress, filmmaker, and new mother (Polley and her husband, David Sandomierski, had their own daughter last year), who was at home in Toronto.

KATIE HOLMES: There’s a quote from Margaret Atwood: “Reality simply consists of different points of view.” When you first sat down and began envisioning this piece, was it important to you to tell the story from different perspectives in order to achieve a sense of reality? Or did this idea evolve throughout the process?

SARAH POLLEY: The original impetus for making the film was the multiple points of view. I think that’s what really excited me about the idea of making it. When the story itself happened to me and my family, we certainly had a lot of people saying, “Oh, this would make a great film.” But it’s a film that I thought that I had seen or read before, you know? Finding out that somebody had a different biological father than they thought . . . And while it’s really impactful to the people who are directly living that experience, I think that, in terms of subject matter for a story, it can be a little bit tired somehow. But what made me originally think, “Wow, this actually would make an interesting subject for a film,” was watching how we were all telling the story to the people in our lives. I started to notice embellishments on some peoples’ parts—or things that got omitted that were crucial [laughs]—as we all do in families when we’re hearing people talking about the past. It’s often not the past that we remember. So it was really interesting to see how the story was kind of mutating and how everybody was very committed to their version of what had happened. Another thing that was really fascinating to me was that as my dad started writing the story, and then my biological father started writing his version of the story, and then I was thinking about making a film about it—the telling of the story changed the story itself. The relationships among all of us changed as a result of us telling the stories of those relationships. I thought that that was such an interesting comment on the power of storytelling and how transformative it can be—for better or for worse.

HOLMES: It sounds like you could have many movies in this. I also really loved your mother’s friends and their versions of things and how much they were willing to share—and then also keep quiet.

POLLEY: For me, that was the great privilege of making the film that I didn’t anticipate—getting to talk to your parents’ contemporaries in such detail and hear their perspective on your parents. If you’re lucky, then you might get snippets of that if you have connections with our parents’ friends, but you rarely get many hours to ask every question you’ve ever wanted to ask. I learned more about life and relationships from talking to them than I had learned from anything in my life.

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