Sarah Polley's memoir

[cclark]

A pair of articles with Sarah Polley have appeared on The Guardian. One is an interview and the other is an excerpt from her memoir.

Interview - Sarah Polley on her unflinching memoir: ‘Can you forgive – and should you forgive?’

Sarah Polley: ‘It took me years to see how responsible Terry Gilliam was for my terror’

[bruttenholm]

The quote chosen as a title for the excerpt is a bit more clickbait than the more nuanced excerpt itself to be honest. Now Gilliam is held as the prime example of the male tyrant on twitter.
Funny that the interview (posted 2 weeks earlier and not clickbaity enough I guess) had this part which complexified the whole point of view :

Yet, in an extraordinary example of the “reciprocal dance” between past and present, when we discuss her children being on set for Women Talking, she recalls a moment when she herself almost lost it as a director, slipping into a vivid present tense as she speaks. “The light was fading. There’s this crane shot. My kids are supposed to be sitting on a hay bale with a bunch of other kids playing. It’s the biggest shot I’ve ever done in my life, and we have five minutes to get it, and every time we bring the crane in, my middle kid pulls all these faces right into the camera,” she says. “And there’s this moment where I thought if I hadn’t had the benefit of a childhood trauma, there’s no chance I wouldn’t be losing my mind with my kid right now. I had a moment of extreme empathy for film-makers being horrible to everyone, including children. It doesn’t make it OK or right, but it’s really complex when you have 100 people standing around and millions of dollars being spent.” A day after the interview, she emails to say it hadn’t occurred to her until now that Gilliam never lost his patience with her on set. “I think I should acknowledge that about him.”

[cclark]

Also worth noting is that I can't think of a single post Munchausen film that had as big action set pieces as that film. Even the WWI scene in 12 Monkeys was pretty tightly shot with the war as a backdrop to what was going on with Bruce Willis' character in the moment.

[Donald McKinney]

I feel sorry for what Sarah Polley went through, however Terry Gilliam was the director of Munchausen, not the stunt co-ordinator, pyrotechnics specialist or health and safety officer. How is it all his fault? Is a director entirely responsible for every single thing that goes on during a film shoot? As Gilliam later asked "Is the auteur theory correct?" Munchausen was a traumatic shoot for numerous reasons, the biggest culprit for most of the faults that went on during the film shoot was the producer Thomas Schühly, who lied to Gilliam about how much the film would cost, Schühly and his accountants told Gilliam it would cost $23.5 million to make and it ended up costing nearer to $45 million. If anyone needs to be truly blamed here, it's Schühly not Gilliam, but no actor, young or old should be put in danger.