ATOM EGOYAN’S JOURNEYS
by Kevin Lewis
MovieMaker Magazine, NY
Oct 31 2007
Nothing about Atom Egoyan is predictable. The now 39-year old director
has made a series of films over the last 15 years which are more
artworks than traditional movies. A true auteur, the Canadian writes,
directs and sometimes acts in his movies. His wife, Arsinee Khanjian,
is always a major character in his films, and the plots revolve around
issues central to his life.
With The Sweet Hereafter (1997), he became a player in American
commercial cinema, and indeed, it was more accessible than his previous
films with their somewhat nonlinear storylines and techniques, but
Egoyan has not moved to Hollywood. His new movie, Felicia’s Journey,
a British film produced by Bruce Davey (Braveheart) for Icon and
distributed by Artisan, is a crystallization of his earlier movies
about dislocation, sexual dysfunction and delusion, hardly popular
American film themes.
Felicia’s Journey, a chilling brief encounter between a Little Red
Hiding Hood and a Big Bad Wolf, is deceptively straightforward, and
appears to conform to the mystery/horror genres while managing to
elude cliches and defy easy classification. Though it uses the plot
elements of these genres, it concentrates on symbolism and philosophy
to develop its theme of delusion. The movie was favorably received
this fall at the Toronto and New York Film Festivals; while in New
York Egoyan and stars Bob Hoskins and Elaine Cassidy discussed the
production with MovieMaker.
The Egoyan of past years, with his rapid hand motions and nervous
energy, has been replaced by a mellow, professorial figure in a
conservative black suit, appropriate for someone with five honorary
doctorates from Canadian universities. He was knighted with a Chevalier
des Arts et Lettres by the French government in 1996, elected a Member
of the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts, and inducted into the
Order of Canada. A happy marriage to Arsinee Khanjian, who plays the
glamorous TV cook in Felicia’s Journey, and the birth of their son,
Arshile, have centered his life. "She’s my muse-she inspires me-her
presence and her response and her image, I suppose. She’s a really
intelligent, compassionate, but also critical partner. She
Ian Holm in The Sweet Hereafter (1987)
is an invaluable contribution, and I’m really, really blessed with
having found her, having found each other. It’s extraordinary. I’m
able to deconstruct her, and yet, thankfully, the relationship has
been able to remain, I think, relatively healthy. But she understands
the rules of the game and is there to support me."
His themes of dislocation and delusion, however, have not changed, and
have only deepened. Though he grew up in Canada, Egoyan’s artistic
approach is more European than North American, and he underwent
profound changes in his early years. His parents emigrated from Armenia
to Cairo, Egypt, where Atom was born in 1960. The introduction of
nuclear energy in Egypt at that time inspired his parents to name him
after the source of atomic energy. Despite the fact that they owned
a successful furniture store in Cairo, the unstable political climate
motivated their move to Canada with Atom and daughter Eve by 1963.
In British Columbia, the Egoyans were cut off from Armenian culture.
Atom surmises that his recurring artistic theme of alienation
derives from not only his personal disorientation in a new land but
also the profound sense of dislocation felt by Armenians because
of the destruction of Armenia as a nation and the 1915 massacre by
the Turks. His central idea is "how people deal with loss and the
psychology and politics of denial" and "the notion of entitlement," as
he calls it. "At what point is someone entitled to claim an experience
theirs?…I came into this [Canadian] culture as a child who didn’t
speak English, and came at a point when this other personality wasn’t
wholly formed, and suddenly I had to absorb another culture and I
remember being aware of that. I remember the things I had to do in
order to be like the other kids. That does have an effect on you,
and you realize that personality is something that you construct. The
moment that you become self-conscious about that construct, that
induces a sense of alienation and disenfranchisement.
That’s what I’m more interested in-that notion of what is it that
people have to do in order to feel at place, and the degrees of self
delusion that they suffer through in order to convince themselves that
they have found their place amidst the havoc. Those are all really
loaded issues for me. This is true for Felicia as well. She comes from
a place [Ireland] where her history is being drilled into her. This
is where you come from, this is what happened to our people… the
links to the maternal great-grandmother who speaks the ancient tongue
are so important."
Music and playwriting were Egoyan’s artistic outlets. While he was
at Trinity College in Toronto he earned a degree in international
relations and made short films for a film club. He soon discovered that
the movie camera was more artistically satisfying than the stage. He
inherited, after all, a strong affinity for visual composition from his
parents, who were trained painters. "I’m very attuned to the screen
as a canvas; the notion of the projected image and the relationship
that the viewer has is as exploratory as it might be in a gallery.
I also recognize that for a great number of viewers films don’t work
that way, but I can’t afford to acknowledge that." A painterly style,
which does not get in the way of narrative, is a key to the beauty
of his movies. Felicia’s
Exotica (1994)
Journey, in particular, is awash in various styles-French
Impressionism, Renaissance art, Expressionism, and Arts and Crafts.
There is one astonishing moment when Felicia steals the money from
her great-grandmother and leaves the room. The camera stays on the
great-grandmother, but through the window on the side of the room,
Felicia can be seen retreating across the land. The shot is a reference
to Renaissance portraiture in which people were painted with their
valuables. Granny has lost two of her valuables. Egoyan uses windows
throughout to show the alienation between characters.
The sale of his student film Open House (1982) to the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) was his entry into feature filmmaking
and his stint as freelance director of such television shows as the
resurrected "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and "The Twilight Zone." His
debut feature, Next of Kin (1984) was funded through Canadian arts
councils, as was Family Viewing (1987). That film, about an Armenian
man erasing his videotaped past with his family, brought him European
recognition and a champion in Werner Herzog. Speaking Parts (1989), The
Adjuster (1991), Calendar (1993), were all shown on the international
film festival circuit. Exotica (1994) won the Cannes International
Critics Prize and three Genie Awards.
The Sweet Hereafter (1997) was his breakthrough into more commercial
moviemaking. It won the Cannes Film Festival’s Grand Prix du Jury,
and a Best Picture Genie Award. Egoyan received two Academy Award
nominations, the first for direction and the second for his adaptation
of the Russell Banks novel.
Felicia’s Journey has many connections to the films of Alfred
Hitchcock. The central situation of a naive, pregnant Irish girl
(Elaine Cassidy) stealing money from her great-grandmother to pursue
her errant lover (Peter McDonald) in England and taking shelter with
an innocuous, mother-fixated man who plans to kill her is reminiscent
of Psycho. The drugged milk scene is like the one in
Exotica (1994)
Suspicion. Is he comfortable with those analogies? "I’m comfortable
with acknowledging Hitchcock as a really strong influence.
Philosophically, I think, he was able to introduce and normalize in
mainstream cinema a stronger sensitivity to psychological analysis.
In a way, he enjoyed that, and took pleasure in that level
of investigation, and he was able give the audience pleasure in
that. He was nearly able to normalize obsessive states which would
have otherwise been quite transgressant and unacceptable. So he broke
ground with that, and I think more than anything else, I’d say that
is where I feel his influence.
"Characters like Francis Brown in Exotica come [from] a line
of characters like James Stewart in Vertigo, where we see quite
"normal, everyday" people suddenly thrust into the middle of something
heightened and mythic. So that similarity, I readily acknowledge. I
think where I’m less comfortable in describing the film as Hitchcockian
is because of the almost scientific approach that he had to suspense,
which I have not adhered to; this idea that the viewer is in a privied
situation, where they understand something that’s inevitable that
the characters don’t… In a way, I kind of work antithetically
to that because I try to create a language which puts the viewer
into the state of mind of my characters. But that being said, it’s
perhaps also a fear that if you call it Hitchcockian, people go in
expecting some sort of payoff which the film isn’t really prepared
to deliver. Possibly if I were watching the film for the first time,
I would call it Hitchcockian without really knowing why. There’s a
mood, a sense of dread, and a pervasive creepiness which bears some
relationship to what he does."
Hilditch (Bob Hoskins), kills emotionally lost young women because he
is obsessed with his late mother, who rejected his love, and videotapes
their confessions. He stores them away as an archive. A food caterer
for a factory, Hilditch believes food should be prepared with love
and healing hands, and at home he prepares lavish feasts for himself
while watching his videotapes of his mother preparing food on her 1950s
television show. To those who know Egoyan’s work, this is a fascinating
reversal of the way videotape was used in Family Viewing. In Family Vi
Felicia’s Journey
ewing, the man is recording over his past and erasing it, and in
Felicia’s Journey he is archiving his past. Egoyan laughs and says,
"I’d love to see a double bill of the two movies. It’s very interesting
with my work because there’s a whole public who really began to see
my films with Exotica, and for them, the use of video in this film
probably won’t have any resonance in terms of my early work because
they haven’t really seen those movies. Family Viewing is still probably
my favorite movie in a lot of ways. I find that this idea of someone
who has an uncertain relationship to their personal history seizing on
an artifact which records that history as being the next best thing-and
by somehow physically manipulating that artifact they can reconcile
areas of tension and nonclosure-that’s fascinating to me. And it’s
very symptomatic of our time. I remember reading an article in The
New York Times about a man who was trying to explain to his child
what his upbringing was like and his parents were now divorced so he
actually asked his parents to attend an event together so he could
videotape them and show them to his son. It seemed so perverse but
we are in a time where these technologies become extensions of our
psychosexual apparatus…We don’t acknowledge that these are unusual
or potentially disruptive. It all falls into the guise of entertainment
and distraction."
Hilditch cannot see the connection between his crimes and his
personality, which is typical of many psychopathic personalities.
Egoyan says, "We expect our psychokillers to be brilliant and there to
be something almost admirable about their clearheadedness, their wit
and their charisma. We want to assign to somebody who does something
so heightened and extreme some cult personality. That becomes an
important way for us to understand how those acts might have been
rendered. But it’s jus
Felicia’s Journey
t not the case. Hilditch is not a particularly brilliant man, and he’s
not somebody who’s consumed by violence. He doesn’t see those acts. He
doesn’t see himself as being violent at all. He doesn’t remember those
moments. To have glorified or to have included those acts would have
been denial of what his experience of it was," he explains.
Ironically, religious fanatics who burst into his garden defeat him.
But slyly, Egoyan doesn’t let religion get the credit. Stealing money
as a child was his original sin, and he has just found the purloined
wallet he hid in the garden as he is digging Felicia’s grave. The
religious fanatics flee when he admits he stole Felicia’s money,
to keep her near him, but he doesn’t admit his past murders. When
the religious woman (Claire Benedict) tells him that the pain will
wash away and the healing will commence, those words resonate with
Hilditch, Egoyan says, because "those are the words he repeats to
Felicia as he lets her go and has made the decision to kill himself."
He decides to release the girl because the reason he murders is to
release his victims from suffering; now he decides to release himself.
"Perhaps, the most unusual thing about the films I make is that there
are scenes that people expect to be rendered in a way that would
allow us to understand what that action actually means. [For example]
the incest in The Sweet Hereafter. We expect it to be shown from the
perspective of the victim’s anger, but to see it from the point of view
of what that person’s actually imagining is happening as it’s going
on is a very unusual perspective. In a way, it addresses issues of
denial of what that character is experiencing and also puts the viewer
in a state of denial. So many people watched The Sweet Hereafter and
didn’t actually even understand the incestuous relationship because
it was shown in a language which addressed the cold denial of it. In
[Felicia’s Journey] especially, Hilditch lives in denial of what he
does and the
Felicia’s Journey
film reflects that. For the longest period of time we can’t believe
or want to believe that he is capable of what we come to understand
is true because he doesn’t see that."
An actor himself (in the movie, Egoyan is the unseen "Hilditch" in the
car videotaping the women), he allows flexibility in interpretation
by his actors. In this film he worked with an accomplished actor and
a teenager just starting out. Hoskins, who describes his character
as a cross between Jack the Ripper and Winnie the Pooh, has played
similar characters in the past, notably the murdering salesman in the
television miniseries "Pennies From Heaven" and Neil Jordan’s Mona
Lisa. The 19-year-old Irish actress, Elaine Cassidy, admits that the
biggest challenge in playing Felicia was identifying with such a naive,
deluded girl.
Egoyan estimates that he averages about five to six takes per scene.
"I do believe it’s an actual truism that my signal of maturity as a
filmmaker is when I’ll actually acknowledge the fact that the first
take is usually the best. The first one or two always are, but you
end up not believing that. When you get into this strange thing where
you’re around take five and you’ve forgotten that the first takes
are actually pretty good, but that take five is actually not good,
you end doing takes to respond to take five…I’m always in awe of
filmmakers who actually can just go in and realize they have a take
and they don’t need a safety because if there’s a real problem,
the lab will pay for it anyway."
Egoyan has been criticized for changing the original ending of the
William Trevor novel. Felicia in the novel escapes from Hilditch, but
she is destitute, still pregnant and clueless about her next move. In
the movie, Felicia, who has undergone an abortion at Hilditch’s urging,
has been spared because of her own initiative in leaving the house. She
realizes her vulnerability and has shed some illusions.
Trevor approved the change, calling the movie "a brilliant
interpretation of the novel." MM
Egoyan with Peter McDonald and Elaine Cassedy on the set of Felicia’s
Journey
The Making of Felicia’s Journey
Few directors have the training in art and music that Atom Egoyan has,
so it’s natural that he is attuned to the various components that go
into the making of his motion pictures.
Canadian Paul Sarossy, the Director of Photography, has worked with
Egoyan since the late 80s. He received two Genie Awards for his
cinematography of Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter. He and Egoyan like
to collaborate on the look of their films, and Felicia’s Journey,
which is precise in its look and texture, reflects Egoyan’s painterly
concerns.
"More than anything, Paul has a tremendous sensitivity to light in
a way that I don’t. I know what I like to see theoretically but I
have no idea what the techniques are by which you get that effect. I
can trust him completely with that. He’s very sensitive with camera
movements and there’s a wonderful kind of shorthand that we have
developed by this point. I can trust him in sort of a classical way.
I will design the shot, design the composition, and tell him the type
of movement I want; and then the actual way that it is painted in the
frame is entirely his doing. It’s a really important collaboration."
"As with The Sweet Hereafter, we were using anamorphic Panavision
with anamorphic lenses. This time we were using a set of Primos,
which was availab
Egoyan directing Bob Hoskins
le to us before. Those lenses generally are more accessible in Europe
than in North America. We had a full set, trying to avoid using the
zooms, trying to stick with prime lenses almost all the time. In
The Sweet Hereafter, we made sure that the key shots were used with
a flat focus lens. It was a pretty straightforward set, except for
the fact that it was anamorphic."
Though it achieves an intimate look, the film was actually shot in 2:35
ratio, a ratio which often works against a film when it is shown on
television and transferred to video. "I don’t mind the way it looks on
the pan-and-scan version. The widescreen was really important to me for
a couple of shots, some key scenes. With The Sweet Hereafter, it was a
lot more crucial with the landscapes and the bus traveling through the
mountains. There was an epic scale to that movie which demanded that
format. Here, it’s a more subtle use of the widescreen." The texture
was crucial. Egoyan felt the Irish setting [Glansworth, near novelist
William Trevor’s birthplace, Mitchelstown, County Cork] was overused
and the Midlands setting [Birmingham] banal. Egoyan wanted to show
how these settings look through the characters’ eyes to reveal the
"threatening nature of these landscapes, or the oppressive nature,
and how these landscapes press in on these people," he says. "One of
my favorite shots in the film is where the father (Gerard McSorley)
is cursing [Felicia], and exiling her from the town. It’s done in
a very long shot, where the whole village is compressed against
her. Lens choices are something that I will do on my own and confer
with Paul, but it’s sort of unspoken because we’ve been doing it so
long." The greens and grays were emphasized in an Expressionistic
style. "In Ireland, when we were timing the film, we went as far as
we could with those tones without becoming unnatural. The greens in
England are more burnished and dried out than in Ireland. We have a
good relationship with the timer, Peter Hinton, who works at Color
by DeLuxe in Toronto. We insist on working with him."
Egoyan with William Trevor on the set
Egoyan wanted to work again with Costume Designer Sandy Powell, who won
the Oscar for her Elizabethan costumes in Shakespeare in Love, because
he loved her costumes for the opera he directed, Dr. Ox’s Experiment,
which was produced by the English National Opera. Though the costumes
in Felicia’s Journey are modest, Egoyan was impressed by the detail
with which they were invested by Powell. The blues of Felicia’s outfit
are "almost a Catholic, sort of Virgin Mary reference."
The set design by Jim Clay amplified the themes developed by Egoyan,
especially the magnificent country home and gardens, with a fully
realized Arts and Crafts interior and furnishings. Egoyan chose that
style over Victorian because in the 1950s when the room was decorated
by the mother he thought that would be what she wanted; the style also
possesses the contradictory intimacy and austerity "which suited the
tone of the piece," he says. "It was the first time I’ve been able
to build a set on that scale, and it was such a privilege.
That’s where the Expressionism comes in, where everything’s been
overscaled and heightened to really emphasize his loneliness in this
house, to have the house way bigger than it would ordinarily be.
That’s most extreme when we see that shot of the kitchen. It’s almost
absurdly large."
Composer Mychael Danna has worked with Egoyan since his first feature
film. Danna uses lush Mantovani-type orchestrations on the 1950s
songs and juxtaposes those with Celtic melodies. "Then we corrupt
them,"says Egoyan, "and bring in other influences. As the characters
go through these fundamental shifts [in behavior], the music would
begin to corrupt and distort and bend out of shape." For Mantovani,
it turns into Bartok, replete with military snares. For the Celtic
tunes, the woman’s voice would become more distant and dissonant. MM
Photos:
m/the_journeys_of_atom_egoyan_3340/
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
