Sarah Polley: Interview with the Undead

Canadian actress Sarah Polley won critical praise for her work in small art house films like Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter and Isabelle Coixet's My Life Without Me, so to see her in a big budget horror movie with a solid ensemble cast of actors is almost as shocking as the exploding heads and dismemberment that this Dawn of the Dead remake serves.

Gamestar: How did you choose this project?

Sarah Polley: I met with [director] Zack [Snyder] and [producer] Eric [Newman] one night at a restaurant, and they convinced me they were going to make a really sort of daring, sick, twisted movie that was going to be true to the allegory of consumerism that was in the original. I loved them and I believed they were going to make a great movie, and if it was a big disaster, at least I'd be with people I'd be willing to go down with. As we were shooting, I often wondered what was I doing, but when I saw the movie for the first time, I was shocked to see that the movie was exactly what they described to me that first time. Completely sick and twisted, and made by incredibly perverse people.

GS: What was it like watching this movie for the first time?

SP: When I first watched the film, I was gleefully clapping and laughing as zombies were being mutilated in horrific ways, but you grow as a person and I’m comfortable with that.

GS: What are the challenges of working on a horror movie?

SP: I love movies like Peeping Tom and those sort of classic movies, and I actually thought of that movie a lot while we were shooting this, about what is the most frightening thing is the look of fear. You realize as an actor you can just sort of wander through a movie like this, but actually you have to work harder in a movie like this than in any small character-driven piece, because your fear sells the audience on being afraid.

GS: What do you think of today’s horror movies in the wake of Scream, Scary Movie and Freddy vs Jason?

SP: I think it takes a lot more nerve to not be in on the joke. I saw it with an audience last night, and people were kind of like shocked, because we're so used to that kind of ironic, tongue-in-cheek, like we're all way too sophisticated to actually be scared. I think that era has had its day, and I think people actually want to experience real things in theatres again. I think that it's really brave to make a movie that isn't just making fun of itself the whole time. And it's funnier, actually.

GS: What was the most frightening thing on the set of Dawn of the Dead?

SP: The most frightening moment for me was the second day when I realized I was going to have to run every day?he poker through the [zombie’s] eye, I couldn’t do it as many times as [director] Zack [Snyder] wanted me to. I was going to puke if I had to do it again.