Filmmakers shine northern lights on American society

“From the English-speaking Canadian perspective, this is an incredible
year at Cannes.”

Los Angeles Times
5/22/2005

BY KENNETH TURAN

CANNES, FRANCE – CANADA. The United States looks different from there.
Ask Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg, Toronto residents and good friends
who have films in competition here – films that turn out to share a
potent point of view vis-a-vis the United States.

It’s not just that Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence” and Egoyan’s
“Where the Truth Lies,” both based on novels and both changes of pace
for their directors, are set in the United States. It’s that their
north-of-the-border attitude has given them a different take on two
pervasive American problems: our culture of violence and our fealty to
celebrity.

Both directors refer to media guru and fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan
when discussing their own work in relation to the United States. “Does a
fish know about water?” Cronenberg asks metaphorically. “Living in a
tributary, not the ocean, McLuhan had a different perspective. The
insights he had into America would not be possible to anyone living in
America. Stepping away has a lot to do with it.”

“A History of Violence,” written by Josh Olsen from John Wagner and
Vince Locke’s graphic novel, is, at $32 million, easily Cronenberg’s
most expensive film. More to the point, for a director whose previous
work, from “Scanners” to “Naked Lunch” to 1996’s “Crash,” has usually
played out on reality’s farthest shores, this one deals with a
convincingly happy family (parents Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello and
their two children) in Millbrook, Ind., “a Middle-American vision of Eden.”

“I enjoyed that aspect of the film, it was kind of a free gift,” the
director says, looking calm and collected despite very little sleep.
“When you’re inventing weird stuff, you have to start from scratch so
the audience gets it. The dynamics of family are so understood you can
start from a higher level and go further. You get the gift of emotional
intensity, people relate and are drawn in in a way a bizarre fantasy
never could accomplish.”

“Violence” is a forceful, riveting film about the pernicious effects of
violence that easily combines an absorbing and disconcerting plot with
underlying social concerns.

“It has a simplicity, such a transparency, that you can see through it
into something else that is underneath,” the director says. “And that
something else is quite disturbing.”

“You can’t pick up a newspaper or go online without seeing violence
close to home,” Cronenberg says. “In a way, every act of violence in the
movie is justifiable, it’s set up deliberately so that anyone would have
done it or wanted to. But killing is killing. As a kid I remember
watching something on TV that brought home the horror of state-sponsored
execution. If you’re an American, you have a current administration that
says killing under certain circumstances is very desirable, and the more
wonderful at it you are – “shock and awe’ – the more you can
congratulate yourself.”

Like Cronenberg’s film, Egoyan’s project also began with a book, but
this was a mainstream best seller by Rupert Holmes that dealt with a
young reporter circa 1972 (Alison Lohman) who investigates the
mysterious murder of a woman 15 years earlier that led to the breakup of
the great comedy team of the age, Vince Collins (Colin Firth) and Lanny
Morris (Kevin Bacon).

It was a book so unlike the projects Egoyan (“The Sweet Hereafter”)
usually takes on that the filmmaker admits even his own agent was
surprised. But the energetic and articulate director says that
“sometimes I get taken into a world so completely outside my own I get
excited by the possibilities, by something latent in the material that
provokes and engages me.” One of those things was what the film depicts
as the potentially corrosive and destructive effects of Hollywood-style
show business celebrity.

“As a filmmaker who works in Canada, I’m both inside and outside that
world, and I love the distance I have from it,” Egoyan says. “The
entertainment industry is clearly America’s major export, it’s something
that we as Canadians have a profound respect for as well as an awareness
of its mechanics. It was exhilarating dealing with the rhythms of
American culture; one of the film’s most exciting aspects was being in
the belly of the beast.”

When he’s taken meetings with major stars about roles, Egoyan says, he’s
come to “understand the pressure they’re under to make the right
decision, how vulnerable they are in that position.”

“If they commit, they have to be able to defend that decision, because
ultimately a whole battery of people have to follow them through the
process of making that film,” he says.

Egoyan might be speaking for both directors when he says that he’s
trying to create in the viewer what he calls “the transgressive feeling
of not being sure you’re supposed to be watching, of being in a place
where you shouldn’t be but you can’t get out of it. Something dangerous
might happen, things might go too far. You don’t fear for the
characters, you have a very distinct sense you yourself might be affected.”

Then there’s the matter of this film festival, and the place of films
like his and Cronenberg’s within it.

“From the English-speaking Canadian perspective,” Egoyan says, “this is
an incredible year at Cannes.”

PHOTO CAPTION courtesy of the Associated Press:
Atom Egoyan, far right, says “it was exhilarating dealing with the
rhythms of American culture” in making “Where the Truth Lies,” which
stars Colin Firth, far left, and Kevin Bacon.