Planning a wish list of things to do before you die never occured to Sarah Polley, even when it was the plot of her film. She talks to Steve Pratt.

A mother-of-two decides not to tell her family that she has only a few months to live. Instead, she makes a list of all the things she'd like to do before she dies - and sets out to make those wishes come true.

They include recording messages for her young children for every year until they're 18, finding them a new mother and her husband a new wife, and sleeping with another man to see what it's like.

The obvious question to ask Sarah Polley, the star of My Life Without Me, is what she'd do in similar circumstances. What would she set out to do in her dying days? Getting an answer isn't easy because the actress, who's in her early 20s, never sat down and made her death wish list. "And I still haven't, which seems to be a problem with doing interviews," she admits.

"I'm terrified of being the type of actor who knows more about the subject than anyone because I've made a film about it. Anne, my character, is better than me in every way. More noble, more generous. If I made a list, I'd come into conflict with the character. The things she put on her list are so noble and beautiful."

Her award-winning Spanish director Isobel Croixet has her own thoughts on things to do before you die. "It's different for me - I'm not 23," she says. "I don't want more lovers because I've had enough. I want very, very simple things like going with my daughter to Hawaii because she's obsessed with Lilo and Stitch."

She wrote the screenplay for My Life Without Me after reading a short story by an American writer five years ago, but made one major change. "In that story, she told everybody she was dying. I thought it was a new point of view if she keeps the secret," says Croixet.

Despite the dark subject matter, filming in Vancouver wasn't all gloom and doom, but a lot of fun. "It really didn't have the intensity you might think it would because the character has a lot of joy and fun in the last few months of her life. If she'd been a different person, it might have been emotionally draining to do, " explains Polley.

"I knew immediately I read the script that I wanted to do it. It never fell into any of the traps it could have done and become like Terms of Endearment. I was amazed you could take this premise and make it surprising and interesting."

She was glad being spared having to die on camera. "There are a few things that are really hard to do on screen - to be in love convincingly, vomit convincingly and die convincingly," she says.

The most difficult aspect was playing the mother of two young children and interacting with them in front of the camera. "It was the thing I was most scared of because it can ring false if someone who doesn't have kids is pretending to be a mother," says Polley.

"I was concerned, but it was also one of the most exciting things about the part. Isabel gave us tons of time with the kids before shooting, and I really loved that part of making the film. We played with each other a lot and had food fights. They were great to hang around with."

The role is the latest in an ever-growing list of roles in independent movies for Polley who starred in The Sweet Hereafter and Go. So she gets a bit embarrassed talking about the mainstream Hollywood movie she's in, a remake of George Romero's zombie movie Dawn Of The Dead.

She took the part because she's a huge zombie fan. She thought twice about accepting because she knew she'd have to justify the choice in the future, and adds: "I don't think I'm going to make a career out of doing big Hollywood horror movies."

She maintains the same criteria for accepting roles - what she calls "things with the right intentions" and to work with "film-makers who want to say something or having original, interesting ways of making films".

She doesn't yearn to be more famous than she is now, saying: "My life now is exactly as I want it to be".

Some actors take big budget movies to subsidise less well-paid work in independent films. Not Polley. "I can't imagine spending three or four months of my life on something I didn't want to do," she says.

"As an actor, even if you only do a couple of independent films a year, you're still making a good living. I don't have an out-of-control lifestyle to support."

* My Life Without Me (15) opens at Newcastle Tyneside Cinema on November 21.

Published: 13/11/2003