EGOYAN RETURNS TO HIS ROOTS
Michael D. Reid, mreid@tc.canwest.com

Times Colonist
May 23 2008
Canada

Victoria-raised director had qualms about debuting new film at Cannes

You couldn’t blame Atom Egoyan if he felt a little apprehensive when
he arrived in Cannes this week.

It was in the Riviera resort, after all, that Where the Truth Lies,
his sexually explicit $30-million showbiz mystery, got its world
premiere in 2005 and a thumbs-up in The Hollywood Reporter, only to
be later vilified by critics and ignored at the box office.

Egoyan, 48, returned to Cannes for yesterday’s world premiere of
Adoration, his 12th feature.

His $6-million drama centres on the turmoil that ensues when a
tech-savvy teenager, Simon, uses the Internet to reinvent himself as
the child of two historical figures.

The film, which stars Scott Speedman and Rachel Blanchard, focuses
on the impact of a translation exercise assigned by Simon’s French
and drama teacher (Arsinee Khanjian).

The text that prompts the student to reimagine it as his own life story
was based on a real news story about a terrorist who put his pregnant
Irish girlfriend on an El Al flight with a bomb in her handbag.

"This is a film that should be at Cannes. It’s the perfect way to show
it," says Egoyan, who was last on the Croisette a year ago. He was
one of 30 filmmakers invited to create a short film for a compilation
honouring its 60th anniversary.

"I’ve never had as much fun as I did last year because I didn’t have
the usual pressures."

Adoration, which he wrote, produced and directed, is a return to
Egoyan’s more intimate, lower-budget films like The Sweet Hereafter
and an opportunity to put a fresh spin on his signature exploration
of the role technology plays in our lives.

He admits he was nervous until he learned his feature was selected
as one of the 20 vying for the Palme d’ Or.

"I didn’t know if the experience of my last feature was going to
colour the path this one would take, but they loved it," says the
Victoria-raised filmmaker, former Cannes juror and frequent guest
since Speaking Parts premiered there in 1989.

Sony Pictures Classics has already snapped up distribution rights
for the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and Latin America.

By comparison, Where the Truth Lies, his slick, erotic meditation on
celebrity culture through the eyes of a writer probing the breakup
of a decadent 1950s-era showbiz duo (Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon)
wasn’t a good fit for Cannes, Egoyan says.

"I never wanted to show the film in Cannes, but they insisted on seeing
it, and I sent them a VHS, which I’d never done," the Oscar-nominated
director said. "I did everything I could to discourage them but they
went nuts over it. It was a miscalculation."

He theorizes the glowing Hollywood Reporter review triggered a backlash
that intrigues him to this day.

"It’s not a work of art and wasn’t meant to be.

"You can’t compare a film like that to The Sweet Hereafter. It was
me having fun with a genre because I’ve always loved noir and murder
mysteries. I thought it was a great exercise in style."

He says the relationship between Simon and his drama teacher in
Adoration was "very clearly drawn" from his experiences as a high
school student and Victoria Drama Festival winner here.

"I had a huge revelation in junior and high school in Victoria about
the power of people who can inspire students to create drama," says
the former Mount Douglas and Glenlyon student.

He still holds dear an award honouring him for The End of Solomon
Grundy, a play he wrote and staged in Grade 12.

Decades later, Egoyan’s passion for drama is intact. He recently
directed Michael Gambon in an acclaimed mixed-media production of Eh
Joe, Samuel Beckett’s contemplative half-hour teleplay that Egoyan
staged first at Dublin’s Gate Theatre and then for London’s West
End. He’s remounting it with Liam Neeson as part of a Lincoln Center
Festival event in New York in July.

Meanwhile, his fascination with how we can use the Internet to redefine
ourselves continues unabated.

"When you’re dealing with YouTube and Facebook and there’s such a
plethora of responses there’s this pressure to be as entertaining
as possible," he says. "There’s pressure to engage people through
shock or in this case creating an alternate personality which is more
exciting than he would consider himself to be."

For an auteur so fixated with technology, it’s surprising to hear
Egoyan insist he’s not a "technophile." It wasn’t until two months ago
he even became aware of The Internet Movie Database’s user-comments
section, he says.

"I literally wasn’t aware there were whole dialogues around my movies
in these communities of people who don’t know each other," says Egoyan,
whose new film is rife with text messaging and the Internet telephone
service Skype as forms of communication.

And he hadn’t heard of text messaging until he used it as the central
motif in his Cannes short, he says.

"I’m beginning to become a little resentful of it," he adds. "I
don’t like the way it can puncture your life at any moment, yet
it’s a wonderful way to embroider your day with ongoing conversation
communicated by rudimentary concepts."