Speaking to Vera Farmiga is a lot like watching her film Higher Ground. It’s a passionate conversation, full of breathy pauses, flighty asides, and winding treatises on what the acclaimed actor—probably best known for her role opposite George Clooney in Up in the Air—was trying to achieve with her debut as a director. The small but powerfully evocative feature, opening Friday (September 23) in Vancouver, happens to be one of the best American films of the year. And if they were giving out awards for phone calls, Farmiga’s conversation with the Straight from her home in upstate New York would be an inside favourite too.

“It feels like it was divinely ordained,” Farmiga answers, half-ironically, when asked how difficult it was to get the movie made. “It should have been a lot harder,” she says. “I’d say, ‘It’s about a woman enmeshed in this very particular spiritual community who’s trying to conceptualize and define God for herself.’ And you use the word God and people quake with fear. That’s when I started to realize what a touchy, bizarre, sensitive, combative subject matter it is.”

Based on Carolyn S. Briggs’s memoir This Dark World: A Memoir of Salvation Found and Lost, Higher Ground follows Farmiga’s character, Corinne, through 20 years of waxing and waning faith inside a closed evangelical community. The director notes that we inhabit a “disturbing time, and many of us desperately crave to understand our soul’s nature”, which might partly explain the film’s sympathetic approach to the rigid and fairly alien culture it depicts.

“Automatically, there’s a certain amount of introspection that occurs,” Farmiga says. “Can you have compassion for her journey? Can you sympathize? Can you appreciate it? Can you have respect for it?”

She wanted “to state a case for every character”, she explains, even the patriarchal ministers and their gently interfering wives. “I was really vigilant for that. I didn’t want to laugh at the characters,” she states. Her obstinacy nearly brought matters to a premature end.

“I basically called Carolyn Briggs,” she recalls with a laugh. “I said, ‘I’m not doing this. I don’t know why, but people are accusing their characters and I’m getting caricatures.’ ”

Things eventually began to fall into place when Norbert Leo Butz came through the door and “I knew that was my Pastor Bill.” (Sesame Street stalwart Bill Irwin as Corinne’s childhood minister, Pastor Bud, hits another of the film’s small but perfect notes).

Once the cast was in place, all Farmiga had to do was make the damn thing. And we all know how easy that is. “The crew and the cast were working under a really stringent atmosphere,” she sighs. “But no one had the right to complain because they saw me in the second trimester of pregnancy…”

Come again?

“I had it worse than anybody,” she says. “But they were champions. The way to get everyone on board is by loving them, ’cause certainly they weren’t doing it for the paycheque.”

Watch the trailer for Higher Ground.