INTERVIEW: ATOM EGOYAN – PUTTING ALL THE PIECES TOGETHER

The Scotsman
26 January 2010 7:00 PM

FANS of art house darling Atom Egoyan are in for a treat when two very
different films by the Canadian-Armenian auteur hit our screens just
over a month apart.

The first to arrive, Adoration, premiered in Cannes back in 2008, and
is arguably Egoyan at his most demanding. On the other hand, Chloe, a
reworking of the French thriller Nathalie, was made with the idea of
finding a wider audience, and could prove to be one of the filmmaker’s
most box-office-friendly movies so far.

The last film Egoyan made with a "commercial agenda" was 2005’s Where
the Truth Lies, about a Rat Pack-like comedy double act. However, the
movie hit a snag in America when a sex scene involving a menage a
trois between Colin Firth, Kevin Bacon and Rachel Blanchard (one of
the stars of Adoration) landed the film with a dreaded NC-17 rating.

Egoyan appealed but had nothing he could offer the MPAA in the way of
cuts. In the end, the film was released unrated.

"That was my own stupidity," the director recalls, sighing. "I shot
that scene as one master. Now I realise if you have a scene like that
you’re supposed to go even further and have coverage so you can go
back and say, ‘I did this. So reconsider’. But we couldn’t do
anything. I still find it a little shocking that it crossed such a
line, because I was very careful not to show penetration. But,
apparently, it has to do with the number of thrusts. You can’t do more
than two. Now I’ve learned."

Chloe’s commercial potential stems not only from its
erotically-charged scenes between Hollywood A-lister Julianne Moore
and Mamma Mia star Anna Seyfried, as a suspicious wife and the escort
she hires to seduce her husband respectively, but as Egoyan has noted
himself, the script by Erin Cressida Wilson is much more linear, and
therefore more immediately accessible, than many of his own films. By
contrast, Adoration, which he regards as one of his three most
personal films to date, along with Family Viewing (1987) and Exotica
(1994), is one of the "riskiest and most extreme films that I have
done".

Indeed, Adoration exemplifies Egoyan’s method of fragmenting a
narrative and withholding information so that pieces of the puzzle,
and connections between characters, fall into place only gradually.

Consequently, there is no instant emotional connection to or
identification with the characters. Depending on your point of view,
and his films are all about different points of view, Egoyan’s work
can often be either intellectually stimulating or infuriating.

He knows that he makes demands on the audience. However, it’s just the
"way the stories come out", he insists. "I think once people commit to
(Adoration] then it’s very satisfying." Explaining, he says: "I do
feel that the strongest emotions you can reach are the ones where the
viewer has to have made an effort to have earned those emotions. Very
often in screen dramas, though, those emotions are given to you … you
become passive and just let the emotions wash over you, and at the end
it doesn’t have any residual effect, because you didn’t earn it."

Adoration ultimately pays off emotionally, he believes, because while
"it’s not immediately apparent where the film is going … you don’t
feel manipulated and actually feel that you are actively involved in
this process of putting it together."

And there are a lot of pieces to assemble in Adoration. Inspired in
part by a Jordanian man’s failed bid to blow up an El Al flight in
1986 by planting a bomb in his pregnant Irish girlfriend’s handbag,
the film attempts to reflect where we are post 9/11, as well as
tapping into such familiar Egoyan themes as the subjective nature of
truth, family dynamics, the legacy of history, the differences between
appearances and reality, and the impact of technology – in this case
the internet – on the construction of identity.

In the film, a high school student (Devon Bostick) orphaned when his
parents were killed in a car crash, reads an assignment to his class
in which he claims that his father was a terrorist. Taking the story
to the internet, he assumes a new identity that allows him to journey
deeper into his past and discover the truth about his grandfather’s
claim that his Muslim father was a monster who caused the fatal
accident intentionally.

"It’s a story about extremism," says Egoyan, and the way extreme
positions beget extreme responses. "Tolerance is ultimately about
understanding how someone else views the world from their perspective.

It’s not about applying your sense. I think the greatest Christian
myth is ‘do unto others as you would have done unto yourself’. But
maybe other people don’t want to be treated the way you want to be
treated. They might have a whole other way of what their sense of
dignity is. So to impose that is very aggressive."

Given its subject matter, it is either ironic or appropriate,
depending on how you look at it, that Adoration is, by Egoyan’s own
admission, extreme in its design. Perhaps explaining his decision to
follow it with something as relatively straightforward as Chloe, he
admits that the audience for such films is dwindling today, while
there are fewer distributors willing to handle them and fewer screens
to show them on.

"I find it very strange that a film like Where the Truth Lies has no
problem getting distribution all over the world and is available, but
when you make something that is maybe a more significant work, it
won’t get the same distribution because it doesn’t have the same stars
or it doesn’t have the same production values. But that’s just the
nature of how the industry is."

Although the internet is now providing many filmmakers with an
alternative means of delivering their films to an audience, Egoyan
sees a problem. Because he structures films like Adoration in a way
that is initially challenging and demands a viewer’s full attention –
not to mention his or her patience – he worries that people may not be
as attached to the work on the net or television as they would be in
the cinema.

"It’s like a piece of theatre," he suggests. "When you go into the
experience, you’re there and you’re committed to it for the hour and a
half, and it’s designed with that level of commitment. Otherwise it
doesn’t really work the same way. Even if you rent the DVD, you’re
more committed than if you’re watching something on the net. It’s the
least sustained way of assuring that there will be viewership, even
though it’s the largest possible audience."

It would be sad to see films like Adoration disappear from our cinema
screens. Yet you feel that in an age when people often demand instant
gratification, Egoyan may well be swimming against the tide. With
luck, he will continue to do so.