ATOM EGOYAN: ‘INTERESTED IN HOW FAR YOU CAN GO’
Mara Math
The San Francisco Examiner
tom-Egoyan-Interested-in-how-far-you-can-go-450504 32.html
May 15 2009
When 15-year-old Simon’s class is assigned to write a story based on
a real event — a Palestinian planting a bomb in his pregnant Irish
girlfriend’s airline luggage — the orphaned Simon casts himself as
the child born of that pregnancy, sparking intense controversy via
the Internet. The Examiner spoke with Canadian-Armenian director
Atom Egoyan:
A friend of a friend said that "Adoration" was a "very Armenian way
of telling a story." What do you think she meant?
It either means that it’s very embroidered or that there’s a tremendous
amount of obfuscation [laughs], maybe both at the same time. We are,
after all, a culture that weaves rugs, so it’s part of our fabric
to play with our materials. In Armenian literature and art there’s
often something that’s kind of withheld, something mysterious.
The first appearance of the mysterious woman in a chador rings false,
and it’s only later that we see it was meant to. Do you have any fear
of losing your audience when playing false notes on purpose?
Oh, completely. It’s a fear and it’s the biggest risk. There’s a way
in which the awkwardness could be interpreted as [bad presentation
by the director], but it’s a deliberate awkwardness.
Has Simon subliminally stumbled on a psychological truth: that in
a much lesser way, even though Simon didn’t know about it, his late
father did metaphorically blow something up, an earlier part of the
father’s life?
That is a fascinating interpretation which I hadn’t really thought
of exactly, but I do think traumas are transmitted somehow.
The fury that [someone in that earlier life] must have felt, how much
is that is transferred on to Simon?
I’m always interested in how far you can go. If people honestly think
the film was trying to make a statement about tolerance, that’s a
bad presentation.
Would you say that as a director, you are drawn to tragedy and loss?
One of the conditions of being Armenian is that you can’t help but
be drawn to that, because it’s so unresolved [the 1915-17 genocide
of Armenians, denied by the Turkish government].
New technology, such as videoconferencing, is prominent in
"Adoration." Does technology isolate us as much as it connects us?
No, it connects us. It connects us to a degree that we can’t absorb,
we’re actually saturated with intimacy that we’re not really designed
to accept.