INTERVIEW: IN "ADORATION" OF ATOM EGOYAN

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May 12 2009

The New York Times’ Stephen Holden certainly adored Adoration:
"A profound and provocative exploration of cultural inheritance,
communications technology and the roots and morality of terrorism,
the Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan nimbly wades into an ideological
minefield without detonating an explosion." Here’s a synopsis from
the official site:

High school French teacher Sabine (Egoyan’s wife and frequent
collaborator Arsinée Khanjian) gives her class a translation exercise
based on a real news story about a terrorist who plants a bomb in
the airline luggage of his pregnant girlfriend. The assignment has
a profound effect on one student, Simon (Devon Bostwick), who lives
with his uncle. In the course of translating, Simon re-imagines that
the news item is his own family’s story, with the terrorist standing
in for his father. Years ago, Simon’s father crashed the family car,
killing both himself and his wife, making Simon an orphan. Simon
has always feared that the accident was intentional. Simon reads his
version to the class and then takes it to the Internet. In essence,
he has created a false identity which allows him to probe his family
secret. As Simon uses his new persona to journey deeper into his past,
the public reaction is swift and strong. Then an exotic woman reveals
her true identity. The truth about Simon’s family emerges. The mystery
is solved and a new family is formed.

John Esther chatted with Egoyan on April 24, to some known as
"Recognize the Armenian Genocide Day," an annual event protesting
the continued denial of the 1915-1916 massacre of an estimated 1.5
million Armenians at the hands of the Turkish government, a theme
explored in Egoyan’s 2002 film Ararat.

Why did you want to make this film? Is your son telling stories about
his parents in school?

[laughs.] Actually, it started because I wanted to tell stories when
I was in school. I started writing plays when I was pretty young,
and I’ve been thinking a lot about that impulse–how, at that time,
it was about telling stories to friends, parents, and now [there’s]
the opportunity for a kid to create any sort of persona he wants. If
he finds the audience, it’s global. In a lot of my earlier films,
I was dealing with ideas of there being something oppressive and
malevolent about the way media and technology can suppress and filter
emotion, but the reality now is that it’s completely unfiltered and
open. There is a freedom and exchange, which is very exciting. Yet
there’s a velocity and acceleration, which is troubling because people
don’t have time to consider. It becomes really easy to abstract
identities. It almost lends itself to degrees of confabulation. I
wanted to have a character emerge from the world, diverted by the
excitement of a response, but realizing that’s not going to lead to
any sort of personal revelation. In some ways, the technology isn’t
designed to be cathartic. It sets up a number of possibilities but
it’s open-ended, by its nature. You still need a journey in the
physical world. So those were some of the ambitions of the story.

You do allow Simon’s mythical narrative to go on for a considerable
time without verification. It takes some time before someone comes out
and says, "Hey, this isn’t the kid of those terrorists/ parents." We
knew the banal backstories of "Octo-Mom" and "Joe the Plumber" within
hours of their notoriety. Why did you hold off on verifying an act
of terrorism?

The kids are so excited by the possibilities. In the workshops I
did at various high schools, I said, "Suppose one of your friends
did this?" For them, it wasn’t really about ascertaining whether
it was true or not. All the stuff the kids were saying in the
film was actually what those kids were saying. None of it was
scripted. They’re smart kids and some of the ideas in the film came
up in the workshops. They were probably more consumed with the way
they were appropriating, to express their own story.

Then the narrative trickles into the adult world.

The adults know, but Tom doesn’t know Simon was doing this. Sabine
knows right off, and she probably knows why he’s so attracted to
that narrative. Then Principal Robert says, "Well, the other kids
have to know that it’s not true." Tom is not really in touch with
what’s going on until it gets out of hand.

What does Arsinée think of her role in this film?

It’s a problematic role for any actor because she or he doesn’t get
the satisfaction, at any point, that someone’s going to identify with
the character. It’s a risky role. The more distance I’ve had from
it, the more the perverse it is. She’s a traumatized victim, but she
doesn’t invite any empathy. She’s irresponsible, very obsessive. She
was probably stalking her former husband, but seeing Tom reawakens
all these feelings. When she dresses up in the chador, she’s not
teaching the kid about tolerance.

Her character plays into a lot of Occidental fears. She is a smart,
Muslim woman. And she teaches French, another threat to many Americans.

[laughs.] That’s really interesting. So it’s not a gratifying role
for Arsinée. It’s true to what that character would be, but it’s
not conventionally structured.

You typically do not have Arsinée play empathetic characters.

Why is that? We’ve been talking about that. One exception is Calendar,
maybe?

Except her Translator leaves Photographer, played by you.

Generally, it’s a big question in the relationship. I trust her to
play those roles that are more challenging. Yeah, you’re absolutely
right. I can’t really explain it, other than that I cherish the
relationship and it’s a course we took from very early on.

Her Zoe in Exotica was empathetic, yet I remember reading how you
said the shoot was hard for her because she was pregnant at the time
and surrounded by beautiful professional strippers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I see her in other people’s films and I see this
whole other possibility. There’s a lightness, something really charming
and winning about her. When we met, we had this idea we would make
these films, like the cool little films we saw on the Left Bank. We
wanted to do stuff that would challenge. That’s just been part of
the pact. I can’t really explain it. It’s interesting you bring it up.

This film also explores another central theme in your work: family
grief. Why are you always going back to these elements? When I
look into your own history it seems like you had a pretty good
childhood. You rebelled a bit.

Yeah, well, I had a really complex relationship with my grandmother
and that was something I was exploring in Family Viewing. Like any
Armenian, it only goes back so far.

Yeah, why are you not at the rallies today?

Maybe I should have been. My grandparents on my father’s side were
survivors. It’s funny, whenever I read books where people can trace
generations of their family, I am reminded I can’t. It just stops
at a certain point. You don’t really know… [gasps] …who they
were. For me, it’s your worldview.

But your grief is more immediate, often about the loss of a child–Next
of Kin, Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter. Of course, it was Simon’s
parents who died, but they were young.

It’s imagining what those people were dealing with a lot of time. It’s
just something you absorb, and the idea of loss is something you’re
grappling with. In Los Angeles, it’s understood: people know what
[the Armenian Genocide of 1915] is about. But often people say, "What
are you?" You say, "Armenian." And they say, "What’s that?" Then you
wind up talking about this story over and over again. It’s always
there. The family history is not as simple as it may seem. Every
family has a certain mythology, and they live and die by those
mythologies. There are orthodoxies we are supposed to believe. Once
you begin to question them, all sorts of things emerge, and you have
to reformat who you think people are.

Speaking of mythologies, another theme in this film, and generally
rare in your work, is religion. And it’s a rather scathing perspective.

In religion and orthodoxy, there are people who sustain positions
of power. The grandmother, who is an absent figure in Adoration,
obviously believed in this very much. She signed this very beautiful
scroll. God knows why she left or why she left the grandfather,
this malicious character who now claims his heritage. He now becomes
the figurehead and owner of this mythology, and he’s using it in a
very cynical and violent way. Most of our major religions are based
on reinterpretations of original texts by people who had reason to
distort and reinterpret, based on needs they had to sustain their
own power. That’s a given. We all know that.

It is not so much an attack on people who interpret religion but
religion itself. You use XTC’s "Dear God" in the film.

Belief systems are only viable if they work for individuals. Simon
takes these objects that are supposed to be venerated, like his
mother’s violin. What is valuable about them? He reformats them. You
can see how quickly generated intolerance and hatreds are. There’s
the rage of this guy, ["Third Passenger," played by Maury Chaykin],
who could have been a victim on a plane that would have been shot
down because he’s Jewish. Suddenly, he takes it upon himself to absorb
this whole history and becomes demonic. Every religion is culpable for
having inflicted horrors in the name of God. It’s all the same God, yet
it’s based on these various interpretations and it gets down to these
fights about the children’s crusade. There is such a litany of things
that can be brought up against them and for, but ultimately the only
thing that has any relevance is whether or not these things lead to a
sense of personal dignity and value. I’m suspicious of any collective
use of religion because it seems to systematically, at some level,
oppress people. [laughs.] It’s not because of the way the individual
has treated it, but rather, the people who control the orthodoxy.

Retreating to what you touched upon earlier, a lot of your characters
go through these storytelling rituals–the videotapes in Family
Viewing, the reworking of a brother’s death to fit commercially
cinematic needs in Speaking Parts, the personal history and
professional partnership between a stripper and the club DJ in Exotica;
a serial killer playing videotapes of his mother’s cooking show in
Felicia’s Journey, the retelling of the Armenian Genocide in Ararat,
or the journalistic search in Where the Truth Lies–in order to get
to the truth.

In those situations, the characters have been denied the truth, yet
the pursuit is so important. There’s a sense of using art, or some
process they can create, as a way of claiming justice, vindicating
or playing out a game where a concept of truth is explored, so there
is some taste of resolution.

Do you feel you have been denied the truth?

I don’t mean to use the national identity as a convenience, but it’s
a huge issue. It’s a huge issue when something on that scale has been
denied, and you spend most of your life talking about that. That’s
certainly the easy explanation.

You have certainly talked about it more since making Ararat. There are
allusions in Next of Kin, but your "Armenian identity" did not really
come about until Ararat. You made it your international identity as
a filmmaker.

Yeah. That’s something I was not expecting to do, but I realized on
the scale of that film and the response to it, it warranted I take
a clear position. Interestingly enough, Arsinée had to take a more
ambiguous position than what she’s normally used to as well.

Why?

She was raised in a more nationalist context where those issues were
very black and white. I was raised in a place where I wasn’t really
taught it. I came to it later on in life. So there was a lot of hope I
sustained about it, and the possibilities of things evolving and there
being communication where there isn’t. In the course of making Ararat,
I had to become a bit more strident, maybe, and Arsinée less so.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress