The double life of Atom Egoyan

One minute he’s making uneasy arthouse films, the next he’s a
Hollywood gun for hire, shooting the likes of Liam Neeson. Can auteur
Atom Egoyan really cope with a dip in the mainstream?

Cath Clarke
guardian.co.uk
Thursday 21 January 2010 23.50 GMT

Splitting the atom – Canadian director Atom Egoyan.
Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features

A year is a long time in the movies. Fifteen months ago, I met the
Canadian film-maker Atom Egoyan as he brought his low-key indie
Adoration to the London film festival. The venue was an anonymous
hotel cafe. At the festival’s next edition, Egoyan returns with a new
film, Chloe; this one stars Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson and Amanda
Seyfried, and Egoyan is holding forth in a suite at Claridge’s in
central London. Things have clearly gone well for him.

Adoration
Production year: 2008
Country: Rest of the world
Runtime: 100 mins
Directors: Atom Egoyan
Cast: Arsinee Khanjian, Devon Bostock, Rachel Blanchard, Scott Speedman

At our first enconter, in the cafe, Egoyan was nursing a hangover that
made him pleasantly effusive. He wasn’t what I expected. Even his
actors can be confused; before starting work on Adoration, one of its
leads, Scott Speedman, said he thought Egoyan would be "an auteur in a
black suit, not communicating very much". Instead, Egoyan joked about
failing to meet Penelope Cruz at a party the previous night. "I
thought there would be a red carpet, people would part and I would be
able to glide directly to her." He smiled.

"I gather she was there, but I never saw her." A stern auteur he was
not – though he was wearing a black suit and a pair of fiercely
designed glasses.

Egoyan made his first film, Next of Kin, in 1984, when he was 24 – "I
was very driven" – which roughly puts him in the same generation as
Jim Jarmusch, Todd Haynes and the Coens. "At that point independent
film-making wasn’t considered the cool, hip thing to do," he
says. Since then he has directed 12 features – Exotica, from 1994, was
the biggest commercially, and 1997’s The Sweet Hereafter the most
critically acclaimed, winning two Oscar nominations. In 1987, he got a
splashy career launch at a film festival in Montreal when Wim Wenders
publicly handed over a $5,000 prize he had won for Wings of Desire to
the young director. (The gesture backfired somewhat when Egoyan tried
paying the cheque in, only for the cashier in his local bank to ask
him if he was Wim Wenders. "I was totally crushed. It was worthless.")
As well as films, he has directed theatre, opera, television and made
art installations. Penelope Cruz aside, it is serious stuff. "Atom has
no lowbrow side," a friend of his recently told the New York
Times. "He doesn’t even have a middlebrow side.”

Watch one Egoyan film and you’ll soon be able to spot another. They
feel like they’ve been traumatised, back-ended by a car; the
chronology has been knocked out of sequence, characters behave like
they’re in shock. Recurring themes are loss, missing bits of history
and voyeurism. They can leave you deeply uneasy. In one scene in
1991’s The Adjuster, the colleague of a female film censor (played by
Arsinée Khanjian, Egoyan’s wife), sidles up to her pervily in a dark
screening room. She responds by pushing his hand up her skirt and
laughing manically. I vividly remember watching it in a London cinema
years ago. When the lights went up at the end the audience squirmed
out like we’d been caught watching something seedy in a Soho
backstreet.

He says he changed his formula dramatically after The Sweet Hereafter
– "I felt I’d gone as far as I could go" – though Felicia’s
Journey, a Birmingham-set thriller with Bob Hoskins and the
Armenian-inflected Ararat don’t seem all that different. Much more of
a departure was Where the Truth Lies, a critically derided take on LA
noir, with Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon as a pair of sleazy 50s
rat-packers. It cost $25m but recouped just $3.5m. "If you’re going to
do a -neo-noir it has to be an LA Confidential," Egoyan said. He had
clearly thought about it a lot. "It has to be exceptional." Adoration,
which finally goes on limited release next week was a return to his
signature personal storytelling, he told me. He called it "a coming of
age story in the time of the internet".

That might be a little pithy for this puzzle about memory, extremism
and technology. It’s very loosely based on an incident involving a
Jordanian, Nezar Hindawi, who in 1986 hid a bomb in his pregnant Irish
girlfriend’s handbag on a flight from Heathrow to Israel. The bomb was
intercepted and he is still in prison in the UK. In the film, a
newspaper article with a similar story is read out to a class of
Canadian teenagers to translate into French. One boy, Simon (Devon
Bostick) writes it up in the first person, imagining himself as the
terrorist’s child. Encouraged by his teacher (Khanjian again) he
carries on the pretence to his classmates. Rather sweetly, Egoyan said
one of his reasons for making the film was to get to grips with his
teenage son. When he was that age he was reading Beckett and Pinter,
throwing himself into local theatre. "But what if I was that child
now? Putting on plays for friends, parents and teachers wouldn’t be
enough, right? You would want to find the largest audience possible."

Egoyan was born in Cairo to Armenian-Egyptian parents, who moved to
Canada when he was two. Growing up in Victoria, British Columbia, all
he wanted was to fit in. "It was the quest for assimilation, always
aware of being outside. The usual." He wouldn’t speak Armenian at
home, and it was only at university that he became interested in his
heritage, relearning the language and culture, and researching the
1915 genocide – in which up to 1.5 million of Turkey’s Armenian
population were killed. His family had never openly discussed it at
home: "I suppose it’s why it became so powerful, and why my films seem
to contain a history which is suppressed and held."

One sensed a bit of frustration in Egoyan. He admitted there was a
limited audience for the arthouse films he makes. "The reality is the
world for that film is becoming more and more marginal." Directors
such as Gus van Sant and Steven Soderbergh dart between commercial and
personal film-making; Jarmusch has maintained his beat-cool and found
a younger generation of filmgoers. Egoyan would like to be seen by a
wider audience and over the years has been caught up in negotiations
with the studios as a gun-a-for-hire. "I’ve come close a couple of
times," he said. Both projects snagged on his casting choices. He
can’t talk about the second project, but the first was a thriller with
Susan Sarandon. This was before Dead Man Walking and the suits decided
she couldn’t open a picture. "As lucrative as it is, I’m not sure how
satisfying it could be to do one of these films, because it’s not
really my vision," he concluded.

Fast forward to a year later, and Egoyan is at the London film
festival with his new film. In the fancy suite at Claridges a makeup
artist is on her mobile tracking down the correct shade of lipstick
for Julianne Moore. Egoyan’s film, Chloe, is an erotic thriller, that
second gun-for-hire project, the one he couldn’t talk about the
previous year. It’s a remarkably quick turnabout, by anyone’s
standards. "It’s the nature of financing now," Egoyan says. He seems
to be on good form. "It’s so difficult, that if something comes
together it either takes a very long time or it happens very quickly."

Moore plays a Toronto gynaecologist who becomes convinced her lecturer
husband (Liam Neeson) is sleeping around, and hires a classy escort
(Amanda Seyfried) to seduce him. It was during shooting in March last
year that Neeson’s wife, the actress Natasha Richardson, died after a
skiing accident in Canada. So, for all the PR bustle you expect with a
junket like this, the air is a little heavy. Egoyan, who has worked
with Neeson before, on a Beckett play in 2008, describes Neeson’s
enforced departure as the most traumatic professional experience of
his career. They were close to wrapping when Neeson had to leave. "We
didn’t know when he would be back." In fact Neeson returned within
days, "heroically" and in a state of shock, says Egoyan, to complete
two days of filming. "It was really harrowing. Also because of the
subject matter of the film was dealing with – " He pauses for the
first time in either interview, to formulate his words. "It’s so clear
how precious marriage is, relationships are. How you have to seize
every moment."

Chloe might put him in the big league, but you wonder if Egoyan will
want to stay there. Talking about auditioning Seyfried ("She was
clearly astonishing"), he mentions that she was picked before the
success of Mamma Mia! made her a big name. Any other director would be
blessing the heavens, but this one says dolefully: "I don’t know if I
would have had quite the same response after seeing the film." Which
leaves you wondering: how on earth will the director who doesn’t do
lowbrow cope with Hollywood?

Adoration is released on 29 January, and Chloe on 5 March