Interview: Atom Egoyan - Putting all the pieces together

Published on Tuesday 26 January 2010 18:03

FANS of art house darling Atom Egoyan are in for a treat when two very different films by the Canadian-Armenian auteur hit our screens just over a month apart.

• Picture: Getty

The first to arrive, Adoration, premiered in Cannes back in 2008, and is arguably Egoyan at his most demanding. On the other hand, Chloe, a reworking of the French thriller Nathalie, was made with the idea of finding a wider audience, and could prove to be one of the filmmaker's most box-office-friendly movies so far.

The last film Egoyan made with a "commercial agenda" was 2005's Where the Truth Lies, about a Rat Pack-like comedy double act. However, the movie hit a snag in America when a sex scene involving a mnage trois between Colin Firth, Kevin Bacon and Rachel Blanchard (one of the stars of Adoration) landed the film with a dreaded NC-17 rating. Egoyan appealed but had nothing he could offer the MPAA in the way of cuts. In the end, the film was released unrated.

"That was my own stupidity," the director recalls, sighing. "I shot that scene as one master. Now I realise if you have a scene like that you're supposed to go even further and have coverage so you can go back and say, 'I did this. So reconsider'. But we couldn't do anything. I still find it a little shocking that it crossed such a line, because I was very careful not to show penetration. But, apparently, it has to do with the number of thrusts. You can't do more than two. Now I've learned."

Chloe's commercial potential stems not only from its erotically-charged scenes between Hollywood A-lister Julianne Moore and Mamma Mia star Anna Seyfried, as a suspicious wife and the escort she hires to seduce her husband respectively, but as Egoyan has noted himself, the script by Erin Cressida Wilson is much more linear, and therefore more immediately accessible, than many of his own films. By contrast, Adoration, which he regards as one of his three most personal films to date, along with Family Viewing (1987) and Exotica (1994), is one of the "riskiest and most extreme films that I have done".

Indeed, Adoration exemplifies Egoyan's method of fragmenting a narrative and withholding information so that pieces of the puzzle, and connections between characters, fall into place only gradually. Consequently, there is no instant emotional connection to or identification with the characters. Depending on your point of view, and his films are all about different points of view, Egoyan's work can often be either intellectually stimulating or infuriating.

He knows that he makes demands on the audience. However, it's just the "way the stories come out", he insists. "I think once people commit to (Adoration] then it's very satisfying." Explaining, he says: "I do feel that the strongest emotions you can reach are the ones where the viewer has to have made an effort to have earned those emotions. Very often in screen dramas, though, those emotions are given to you … you become passive and just let the emotions wash over you, and at the end it doesn't have any residual effect, because you didn't earn it."

Adoration ultimately pays off emotionally, he believes, because while "it's not immediately apparent where the film is going … you don't feel manipulated and actually feel that you are actively involved in this process of putting it together."

And there are a lot of pieces to assemble in Adoration. Inspired in part by a Jordanian man's failed bid to blow up an El Al flight in 1986 by planting a bomb in his pregnant Irish girlfriend's handbag, the film attempts to reflect where we are post 9/11, as well as tapping into such familiar Egoyan themes as the subjective nature of truth, family dynamics, the legacy of history, the differences between appearances and reality, and the impact of technology – in this case the internet – on the construction of identity.

In the film, a high school student (Devon Bostick) orphaned when his parents were killed in a car crash, reads an assignment to his class in which he claims that his father was a terrorist. Taking the story to the internet, he assumes a new identity that allows him to journey deeper into his past and discover the truth about his grandfather's claim that his Muslim father was a monster who caused the fatal accident intentionally.

"It's a story about extremism," says Egoyan, and the way extreme positions beget extreme responses. "Tolerance is ultimately about understanding how someone else views the world from their perspective. It's not about applying your sense. I think the greatest Christian myth is 'do unto others as you would have done unto yourself'. But maybe other people don't want to be treated the way you want to be treated. They might have a whole other way of what their sense of dignity is. So to impose that is very aggressive."

Given its subject matter, it is either ironic or appropriate, depending on how you look at it, that Adoration is, by Egoyan's own admission, extreme in its design. Perhaps explaining his decision to follow it with something as relatively straightforward as Chloe, he admits that the audience for such films is dwindling today, while there are fewer distributors willing to handle them and fewer screens to show them on.

"I find it very strange that a film like Where the Truth Lies has no problem getting distribution all over the world and is available, but when you make something that is maybe a more significant work, it won't get the same distribution because it doesn't have the same stars or it doesn't have the same production values. But that's just the nature of how the industry is."

Although the internet is now providing many filmmakers with an alternative means of delivering their films to an audience, Egoyan sees a problem. Because he structures films like Adoration in a way that is initially challenging and demands a viewer's full attention – not to mention his or her patience – he worries that people may not be as attached to the work on the net or television as they would be in the cinema.

"It's like a piece of theatre," he suggests. "When you go into the experience, you're there and you're committed to it for the hour and a half, and it's designed with that level of commitment. Otherwise it doesn't really work the same way. Even if you rent the DVD, you're more committed than if you're watching something on the net. It's the least sustained way of assuring that there will be viewership, even though it's the largest possible audience."

It would be sad to see films like Adoration disappear from our cinema screens. Yet you feel that in an age when people often demand instant gratification, Egoyan may well be swimming against the tide. With luck, he will continue to do so.

&149 Adoration is released on Friday; Chloe follows on 5 March