Sarah Polley and Ruben Östlund on Juggling Acting Ensembles and Pushing Their Audiences

Women Talking writer-director Sarah Polley finds it pretty surprising that Triangle of Sadness writer-director Ruben Östlund openly talks to anyone who will listen about his next project. “Filmmakers can get so protective of their ideas,” says Polley. “I think it’s so interesting to watch a filmmaker go around talking about their idea in such a nascent stage.”

Sure enough, at the start of their chat for Vanity Fair’s latest series, What Is Cinema?—which puts directors in conversation with each other about their craft—Östlund brings up The Entertainment System Is Down, his upcoming film about plane passengers who suddenly lose access to in-flight entertainment. Polley says his open style has inspired her to do the same with her new project—though she won’t say here what it’s about. 

Polley and Östlund actually have a lot in common, beyond the fact that they both earned best-picture and screenplay nominations for their films this year. Both Women Talking and Triangle of Sadness feature large ensembles, requiring the  writer-directors to find a way to balance multiple characters and story lines. Polley tells Östlund she did so by writing versions of the script from each of the nine main character’s points of view. “I found that really complex in terms of not dropping the thread on any particular character,” she says. 

Östlund agrees that juggling so many characters was one of his biggest challenges—as was getting the right actors to play them. For his film that is set aboard a luxury yacht, he required a group of actors that would be okay filming large group scenes in which sometimes they wouldn’t have any lines, but would still need to be present. Because of that, some actors passed. “They would say, ‘I know how long you are shooting and I am too old to sit there and not do anything,’” he says. Polley also had to find actors who would be comfortable perhaps sitting off camera for days without any lines. “Like with Ben Whishaw, he was often staying off camera for three or four days, just writing notes,” says Polley. “I needed an egoless person to do that and not get frustrated.”

Both directors also agreed that they think about their audiences’ experience when working on their films, though Polley says she has to keep it pretty small. “I imagine it’s just me. I feel like once I start to think too broadly about an audience, then I’m weirdly watering down something,” she says.

For Östlund, he hopes that audiences might know what to expect from him by now. “I would like it to be that when the audience goes to a Ruben Östlund movie, they should know there’s a risk involved,” he says. “There will be a point in the movie where I’m going a little bit further than they expect me to do.” Bringing it back to his next project, he revealed a scene he’s planning for The Entertainment System Is Down that will be a major challenge for audiences. He says with a mischievous smirk, “The goal is to create a scene that will be the biggest walk-out in the history of Cannes.”