The courtyard of the Kitchener Freeport Health Care Centre is covered in a flat blanket of poly­ester batting. It’s a March morning; the sky is clear and the sun unchecked. Two set dressers, in steel-toed boots and plaid jackets, their eyes shielded by those dorky aerodynamic sunglasses that hockey players wear off-ice, hose down the batting with a sheen of water, then re-tuck the edges along a serpentine walkway. It should sparkle like snow—and from the second-storey windows, where the camera waits to shoot the scene, it does. Everything is about the snow. The past two weeks have been a mad chase after it. The movie they’re shooting, Away From Her, is based on an Alice Munro story about a man bereft after his wife succumbs to Alzheimer’s. It’s set in winter, and the snow, perhaps, is a metaphor for memory, buried and fuzzy. What the crew wasn’t expecting was that it’d be this warm, and they’d have to relocate farther and farther north, from Hamilton to Paris to Lake of Bays. Today, shoot day 16 of 29, batting will have to do. The scene they’re getting ready for has the husband, Grant, played by Gordon Pinsent, watching from a window in the nursing home as his wife, Fiona, played by the needs-no-introduction Julie Christie, pushes her wheelchair-bound boyfriend (played by career supporting actor, Michael Murphy) down the path. You could call this a love triangle, except that Fiona, deep in her Alzheimer’s fog, doesn’t seem to remember she was ever married to Grant. More accurately, you could call it a love square because Grant, seeing an opportunity, contemplates hooking up with Marian, the perky wife of Fiona’s new boyfriend. Marian is played by Olympia Dukakis, who would slap you if you thought she needed an introduction—but she isn’t here today because she doesn’t have any scenes.

Old people and wheelchairs and forgetfulness and snow—what more could you want in a Canadian movie?

They start to shoot and immediately there’s a problem: Julie Christie is missing her mark, turning the wheelchair too fast and not making nearly enough eye contact with Gordon Pinsent. The camera operator and one of the assistant directors both look to the director of photography, Luc Montpellier, who, in turn, plops down bearishly on a chair and defers with a glance to the tiny woman in the other director’s chair beside him, who doesn’t seem to notice because she’s staring with a chess champ’s concentration into a video monitor.

The tiny woman is Sarah Polley. She’s directing her first feature. The crew freeze and wait for her to decide what to do next.

Though Polley will later try to portray it to me otherwise, this is no small group of friends making a home movie. This is a $4-million production—big-budget by Canadian industry standards—and on this day of the shoot, Polley is in charge of 65 crew and seven actors. She’s ultimately answering to Atom Egoyan, her executive producer, plus a group of three producers that includes Daniel Iron, the watery-eyed man who is standing a few feet behind her and thumbing his BlackBerry with a tight, anxious smile, tallying up in his head how much time they have left to get this wheelchair scene shot before it starts to push the schedule and the budget begins to vanish. (The unit publicist, a black-booted goth, whispers to me that Iron and the other producers are thrilled at how much attention the production has been getting from the media. So many requests. Simply everyone. All because it’s Sarah Polley. Sarah Polley directing.)

Polley stares deeper into the monitor, taps her chin. A few more seconds pass. The batting is drying out. The set dressers run in with their hoses as Christie hauls the wheelchair back to her starting point, then holds her hands up in a “what now?” to the group watching from above. The morning light is shifting; time is short.

Maybe it’s true that you have to be tiny to be a big actor. (And what about all those stars Polley has acted with—Jessica Lange, Ian Holm, Scott Speedman, Sam Shepard—are they this tiny, too?) Polley is in a girl’s outfit of jeans and a stretchy pink sweater with striped arms and a daisy on the chest. Her hair is cut in a bob; she wears little pearls on her earlobes. All her features are delicate, especially a set of teeth that appear no bigger than a baby’s and are almost completely hidden by gums that are surprisingly fleshy and almost alien looking. But she’s all grown up: 27 years old, married, the child star years long gone. Directing, she hopes, is her true calling.

She’s still staring at the monitor, her nose about a foot away from the screen, her right hand supporting her chin and her fingers drumming, now, along her bottom lip. Polley takes a jelly bean out of her pocket and pops it between her teeny-tiny teeth. She switches on her headset, stands at the window and looks down at the crew and Julie Christie in the courtyard. “Hi, guys,” she says. “Bill, are you there? Who am I talking to? OK, um, we’re going to try a slightly different version. Ask Julie to come closer to her mark with the wheelchair. Then she should look up, then turn around. I need a longer look.” Straightforward enough.

They start the shot again. Polley shouts “Action!” then leans into the monitor. Christie proceeds down the path, in between the batting, and pushes the wheelchair to her mark. She looks up at Pinsent and holds his gaze for a half-beat more.

Montpellier smiles. Daniel Iron looks relieved. The unit publicist takes another call. The fake snow glistens. Polley leans back in her chair, pleased, and switches her headset on again. “There, that’s great. Once more, then lunch. Woo-hoo!”