Sarah Polley talks to Terry Gross about how she got to know her her mother — who died when Polley was 11 — while makingStories We Tell:
Having the opportunity to sit with for many hours with most of the people that your mother was close to in her life and get to hear them talk about her ends up forming a much more full picture than the one I had before. At the same time, even though I wasn’t an adult and didn’t get to know the complexity of who she was, I had somebody say to me once, years ago, they were asking me, ‘What was your mother like?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. She died when I was 11.’ And she said, ‘Well, what did she feel like?’