WHERE EGOYAN’S TRUTH LIES TODAY
jstone@canwest.com

Montreal Gazette
Canwest News Service
May 23 2008
Canada

CANNES, France – Atom Egoyan was watching his movie Adoration the
other day and wondering why one of the film’s closing images – of a
cell phone being thrown into a fire – seemed so powerful.

"And when I was watching I went, ‘Well, duh,’" the Toronto-based Egoyan
said: the cell phone has a key role in the movie. It’s an instrument
that is used as a weapon to kill some of the film’s characters: it
has an association as a weapon of destruction. "I never thought of
that when I was shooting it," he added. "You look at it and it seems
so intentional, but that’s the beauty of making a film in a smaller
way, is that you do have the freedom to just let yourself go with
certain impulses."

Egoyan expected he would have more such epiphanies when Adoration had
its gala screening at the Cannes Film Festival this week, where it is
in competition for the Palme d’Or. He wrote, produced and directed
the movie, but the fact that it still has the ability to surprise
him is one of the signature characteristics of his cinema.

I just respond to these things in an intuitive way and at a certain
point it feels right, but I don’t analyze it too much while I’m making
it," he said in an interview.

Adoration tells the story of a teenager (newcomer Devon Bostick) who
is given an assignment by his teacher (Arsinee Khanjian, Egoyan’s
wife and frequent collaborator) to translate a news story about a
terrorist attack. The boy re-imagines the story as something that
actually happened to him and takes it to the Internet, where he
assumes the persona of a boy orphaned by an airplane bomb.

The movie allows Egoyan to examine such issues as reality versus
truth, one of his frequent themes, and in a low-budget way that is
more comfortable for him. It’s his first movie since his 2005 Cannes
release Where The Truth Lies, a more conventional mystery story –
and a larger-budget project, with Hollywood stars Kevin Bacon and
Colin Firth.

"When you’re writing, at a certain point the stew feels it’s ready
to cook. And then you just have to start cooking. And that cooking
starts with the shooting and the casting and through the editing and
when you’re adding music, and just trying to find a shape. I love
that. I love that about filmmaking."

Beyond a certain budget, though, the script becomes "a very clear
industrial blueprint for this prototype you have to create. And all
the people who are invested in it expect you produce that thing you
read." Where The Truth Lies couldn’t change because it was locked in:
at a press conference later in the day, Egoyan said he now thinks
the music was much too loud in that film, perhaps because he was
directing a production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the same time.

A movie like Adoration is more fluid, and Egoyan said he hoped people
were still awake enough – Adoration was showing on the ninth night of
Cannes – to read its various connections and themes. Told that some
of the festival audience had been up past midnight the night before
watching the four-and-a-half hour epic Che, Egoyan groaned.

Adoration had its genesis when Egoyan went to a Toronto high
school with a film program and became interested in the adolescent
immersion in the Internet and how easily users can assume identities
online. "They have to assume other personalities to hold attention,
and it’s very fluid and natural," he said. "You can find yourself
emotionally connected to something that in the real world might not
have much purchase."

It creates something that, while it doesn’t have the artistry of
movie-making, finds immediate distribution and creates the phenomenon
of YouTube celebrities. Egoyan himself made his breakthrough in 1984
with Next of Kin, a debut feature that found theatrical distribution
around the world. That’s not such a big deal today.

"People have millions of hits . . . that to me is what’s shocking. At
one point the idea of international distribution was something that
was so inconceivable for independently produced programs, and now
it’s banal. Everyone gets that."