You shouldn't be too put off by the fact that Sarah Polley's debut feature film as a director, Away From Her, is essentially a love story set amidst the painful realities of Alzheimer's disease. In fact, it's a beautiful and moving film that might force even the youngest of lovers to question the mortality of their relationship with its poignancy. Based on Alice Munro's short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain," Polley's movie stars Julie Christie (Doctor Zhivago) and Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent as elderly couple Fiona and Grant, who after 45 years of marriage are separated when Grant is forced to put Fiona in a retirement home after she starts showing early signs of Alzheimer's. What happens next is both shocking and heartbreaking, but also very real, and it's an amazing achievement for a young woman who hasn't even turned 30 to be able to convey such complex emotions in her first feature. ComingSoon.net had been wanting to chat with Polley about for a while, but we finally had our chance when she stopped through New York City before the theatrical release of her movie after successful runs at the three major film festivals in Toronto, Sundance and Berlin ComingSoon.net: What interested you in the subject matter of this short story? Sarah Polley: I read the short story by Alice Munro in the New Yorker when it first came out, and I was just unbelievably moved by it. I guess I was just drawn to this really profound and complex examination of love. CS: How long was the short story? Polley: Probably around 40 or 50, it's quite a long short story, and she's a very dense and complex writer, so a lot really did have to be subtracted from the short story to make it into a two-hour feature. CS: It's surprising that you'd have to remove things, since that's not usually the case with short story adaptations. Are all of the characters from the movie in the short story? Polley: There are some that have been added and taken away, but basically, yeah, it's very true to the story actually. There's things that definitely had to be adapted, but I think at its core, it's incredibly true to the story. CS: Why did this subject matter interest you, especially since most of the characters are significantly older than yourself? Did you have any relatives who suffered from Alzheimer's? Polley: No, but I did a lot of research into Alzheimer's disease, and I spent a lot of time in a retirement home for three and a half years with my grandmother, so I knew that environment quite well, but I didn't have any first-hand experience with Alzheimer's disease. CS: Did it ever seem odd that a woman in her late 20s might be interested in telling this story? Polley: What's weird is that it didn't even really occur to me as weird at all when I first read the story, I was just so drawn to it. I never considered this is odd that I'm drawn to something about people in their 70s that I just wanted to make. It's only since the film's been made that it seemed like such a strange choice. CS: Maybe it seems strange to us since so many filmmakers your age are making movies about how difficult it is to be in your late 20s. Can you talk about the casting for the movie? I thought it was interesting to have Julie Christie play Fiona. She's obviously had a long career and is very well known, while Gordon has done a lot of stuff in Canada but not so well known here

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