Film-makers on film: Atom Egoyan
The Daily Tepegraph, UK
July 16 2005
Atom Egoyan explains to Mark Monahan why Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining
is a remarkable fusion of opera and cinema
Atom Egoyan is something of a living legend among lovers of
art-house cinema. Born in Egypt to Armenian parents, but raised in
British Columbia, he makes films as exotic as his lineage: cerebral,
mysterious, astonishingly atmospheric studies of people in emotional
extremis.
Atom Egoyan: loves opera The Adjuster (1991) and Exotica (1994) –
both poised to make a welcome appearance on DVD (from July 30) –
are tense, erotically-charged tales of lust and longing; Felicia’s
Journey (1999) a gripping thriller; Ararat (2002) a demanding but
extraordinary film about film, death and history.
Egoyan’s masterpiece remains The Sweet Hereafter (1997), a mesmerising
fairytale-noir about a lawyer (Ian Holm) who descends on a small,
snow-bound town in the wake of a terrible accident, and it’s this,
above all, that has guaranteed him immortality. But the director
has many other strings to his bow. He’s also a helplessly highbrow
maker of filmic installations and television plays, an accomplished
classical guitarist, and, as Toronto-based opera-lovers have recently
learnt to their delight, a fine director of Wagner, too.
The latter offers an insight into Egoyan’s appreciation of Stanley
Kubrick’s magnificent, terrifying The Shining. Made in 1980, it’s one
of the pinnacles of Kubrick’s career (which also famously included
Dr Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon, all of which
have previously been bagged for this page), but not, says Egoyan,
for reasons you might expect.
“I hadn’t seen it for many years,” he explains, “and a few weeks
ago I had this impulse to watch it. I can’t explain why, but it was
inspiring. I’ve been doing a lot of work in opera lately, and it
was one of the most remarkable fusions of opera and cinema I’d ever
encountered. People ask me whether or not I would ever think of doing
an opera for a film, and I think Kubrick achieved that. His use of
composers such as Penderecki and Ligeti, and in particular Bartók,
was just stunning.”
To illustrate his point, Egoyan homes in on a pivotal, punishingly
tense exchange between little Danny Torrance (Danny Lloyd) and his
father, Jack (Jack Nicholson). Clearly unstable from the start, Jack
has taken his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and Danny to Colorado’s
isolated Overlook Hotel, which he is caretaking over the winter. The
building is otherwise deserted – apart, that is, from its many ghosts,
which are by now tipping Jack into full-blown psychosis.
He summons Danny over to sit on the bed with him, says Egoyan, “and
this begins a six-minute sequence that plays out to the third movement
of Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. It’s thrilling
to watch the very terse dialogue later between Jack Nicholson and the
boy on the bed, and the spaces that Kubrick has allowed for the music
within this dialogue. I don’t think there’s any editing of the music
at all – the piece is kept intact – but the play between dialogue and
the actions of Bartók’s music is operatic. There’s no other way of
putting it.”
So, does the music becomes dialogue in itself, or even an integral
part of the narrative?
“Sure,” says Egoyan. “I think that we’re all kind of accustomed
to a more Hollywood use of music, but rarely do we see music that
pushes the boundaries of tonality used within dialogue, and in this
film it’s just done brilliantly, contributing to the sense of dread
that permeates the movie. There’s a theatricality to this film, and
indeed in much of Kubrick, which really pushes our sense of cinematic
naturalism. But I think The Shining especially is so ambitious,
and there are so many subjects he’s dealing with subtextually that
he uses all these devices that are available to him, and boldly.”
The question of subtexts in the film is an interesting one. The
combined talents of Kubrick and Nicholson make it all too easy to
appreciate The Shining simply as an impeccably aimed neutron bomb of
pure horror. But, as Egoyan says, there’s much more to it than that.
“There’s this sense of violent past,” he explains, “not just with the
family who were the previous caretakers. There are also references
made to the Native Americans, in the fact that the hotel itself is
on an ancient Indian burial site, and that it’s called the Overlook
Hotel, as though a historical wrongdoing has been overlooked. And of
course there’s the black caretaker [who meets a grisly end], and the
fact that the final image is on July 4, which is Independence Day. To
speak of it sounds heavy-handed, but these themes are quite latent,
and I find that very exciting.”
Several of Egoyan’s own movies echo The Shining in having solitary,
rather strange characters at their core, people dealing – poorly
– with unresolved pasts. Egoyan not only acknowledges this, but
cheerfully admits to having “ripped off” The Shining’s opening,
floating helicopter shots that follow the Torrances’ vehicle heading
off through the mountains. He employs a similar device in The Sweet
Hereafter, tracking the doomed schoolbus along frozen, winding roads.
Sadly, there’s no space here to linger on his thoughts on Kubrick’s
ominous use of camera movement, establishment of “separate realities”,
heightened approach to characterisation, or just how Nicholson’s
performance generates such power (“It’s as if he and Kubrick are in
on a sort of private joke”). But it would feel a dereliction of duty
not to close with perhaps his most piercing observation.
“The film is largely about triggers,” he says, “at which point
something is abstracted, our own family can become abstract to us.
There’s that scene on the bed, where Danny asks his father – who he
remembers has hurt him before – “You wouldn’t hurt us, would you?”,
and that becomes the trigger that allows Jack to abstract and do
violence against his family members. And that’s what’s so chilling
about the movie, that’s where the true horror is: it’s in the fact
that we’re all quite capable of that.”
To order The Shining on DVD for £19.99, incl p&p, call Telegraph
Music Direct on 0870 164 6465. Prices are subject to availability.
–Boundary_(ID_vB92d1XC9VDTzV22+FmJqw)–