The Toronto Times
May 14, 2005. 01:00 AM

Censors sharpen scissors for Egoyan
Director vows not to trim a frame of sexy, violent film

Some viewers walked out at U.S. test screenings

PETER HOWELL

There was sex, nudity, drugs, violence, more sex and more nudity on
the Croisette yesterday. And it was coming from Canada.

Toronto filmmaker Atom Egoyan brought his new thriller Where the Truth
Lies to the Cannes Film Festival and the talk following its premiere
was whether or not he’ll be able to get it past strict U.S. censors,
who have a major say in what filmgoers everywhere see.

Where the Truth Lies is the most mainstream movie the 44-year-old
Egoyan has ever made, with big-name stars in Colin Firth and Kevin
Bacon and an accessible plot about a showbiz and mob conspiracy to
cover up a woman’s gruesome murder.

But it’s also Egoyan’s most explicit work, featuring full-frontal
nudity, three-way and lesbian sex, drug-taking and other things sure
to raise the blood pressure of the censors at the Motion Picture
Association of America (MPAA). That’s the industry watchdog that
wields the scissors for movies shown in the U.S. and effectively the
rest of the world, since for business reasons most films are cut to
U.S. standards.

If the MPAA slaps the feared “NC-17” rating (no one 17 or under
admitted) onto Where the Truth Lies, instead of the more marketable
“R” (viewers under 17 require adult accompaniment), many American
multiplexes would refuse to carry the film and its box-office take
would be severely curtailed. (Canadian provinces have their own censor
boards and ratings, Ontario included, but they normally receive films
already approved by the MPAA.)

Egoyan and his producer, Robert Lantos, were standing their ground,
refusing to slash a single frame from the film, which is targeted for
a fall release.

“We’re not going to make any cuts,” Lantos vowed.

“If they’re going to slap an NC-17 on the film it will be to the
MPAA’s everlasting shame. Because if there ever was a film made in
which the sexuality is integral to the story, this is it.”

Egoyan said he wanted his movie to have an “intoxicating” effect on
the senses of the viewer, to really bring home the hedonism,
corruption and moral duplicity of the story, which is set in the 1950s
and 1970s and taken from a prize-winning novel of the same name by
Rupert Holmes. Egoyan directed the film and wrote the screenplay.

Firth and Bacon play a superstar song-and-joke duo of the 1950s, Vince
Collins and Lanny Morris, who suddenly split after a very beautiful,
very naked and very dead young woman is found in the bathtub of their
hotel suite. The death is covered up and all but forgotten until the
1970s, when a journalist (Alison Lohman) starts digging for the inside
story.

“I wanted you to feel the sense of violation,” Egoyan told a news
conference, prior to his stroll up the red carpet outside the Palais
des Festivals, where the film had its official world premiere last
night and where it is competing for the Palme d’Or award to be handed
out next Saturday.

“That sense that you feel as a viewer that it’s going too far is
absolutely essential to the dramatic intention of the piece.”

Egoyan said he shot the film with an “R” rating in mind and in fact he
was contractually obliged to do so but he admits he might have gone
further than that with his final version. “In the midst of all this
death it was important to have a lot of sexuality, and to make that
sex as vivid and as corporeal as possible.”

He expressed surprise at the uproar over the sex and nudity. There
have been walkouts from the film in U.S. test screenings, mostly by
people over age 30.

But Egoyan finds it even more remarkable that no one is complaining
about the violence in the movie, just the sex.

An early scene shows Firth’s character, Collins, beating a man almost
to death backstage at a nightclub show, after the man heckled his
partner with an anti-Semitic remark.

“No one says that it goes too far when (Collins) is bashing (the
man’s) head against the floor. No one ever talks about that. That’s
the most gory scene I’ve ever done, and people don’t have a problem
with that. It’s weird. We’re still kind of obsessed (with sex).”

Egoyan’s actors all backed him up, agreeing that the sex and violence
is strong but not gratuitous. “It really seemed necessary because it
would have looked self-conscious or ridiculous if we’d all had our
bras on,” said Toronto actor Rachel Blanchard, 29, who plays the
doomed woman in the movie.

“It would have taken away from the realness of the scenes.”

Bacon agreed, saying he normally wears some clothing while having sex
a frank admission that brought guffaws from his press audience but
that full nudity was essential to the tone of Where the Truth Lies.

“One of the things about the movie is that when we have sex we’re
naked, and that’s what flips people out,” he said. “It’s unfortunate
that people find that so disturbing. To me, I think the sex in the
movie is incredibly appropriate and the way it’s done is very specific
to the storytelling.”

Lantos has had experience jousting with censors over sexy films,
beginning with his 1978 movie In Praise of Older Women and followed
two decades later with David Cronenberg’s Crash, which caused a
similar commotion at the 1996 Cannes festival. (Cronenberg is back in
competition with his own new work, A History of Violence, which is
expected to live up to its name when it premieres Monday. It’s the
first time in more than two decades that two Canadians are in
contention.)

Lantos said there would be even more uproar over Where the Truth Lies
if Egoyan hadn’t already trimmed some of its stronger scenes. They’ll
be put into an unrated home video version of the film.

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