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Atom Egoyan: legacies, blessings, challenging conventions
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Twenty-three years ago, Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan read the story of a pregnant Irish woman blocked from boarding an 
Israel-bound airplane when security found explosives her Muslim boyfriend had slipped into her hand luggage. Egoyan's latest movie, Adoration, spins this headline into a remarkably un-melodramatic triptych about tolerance and legacy: at the behest of a teacher, Simon, the son of mixed-race parents killed in a car crash, convinces classmates his father was the terrorist planning to blow up his wife and unborn child.
Q: Was there ever a scenario in which Simon was really the son of a terrorist?
Atom: That wouldn’t have been possible. That’s a very particular story, and the woman later gave birth to a daughter in Ireland. I don’t know if the daughter knows anything about the father’s legacy, but I suspect she does because he came up for parole and he’s completely unrepentant…he’s currently serving the longest prison term in British history. But it’s not important for Simon to be the son of a terrorist. What’s important is for him to have access to a father that’s been presented as a demon and to go as far as possible into what that might mean. It’s a therapeutic relationship (with his teacher) where he sets up this imaginary figure. All the things he’s saying are ways of trying to tap into his father: the bafflement, the rage, the acceptance. Of course, no one else could understand that.
Q: Everybody’s using everybody.
Atom: That’s a really important point. People using other people as devices for situations they don’t want to confront themselves. When people’s histories have been denied to them they do extreme things.
Q: Your films tend to have unusual structures. How do you determine how to piece the threads together?
Atom: It’s intuitive, it needs to be. It’s about showing different people and gauging where things come into play, but it’s also about gauging certain conventions - audiences want to have as much information as possible. I remember we had a screening for Exotica, and they said “people are confused, they would like the end at the beginning, they would like a voice over.” Of course anyone would like that but it would eviscerate the dramatic shape of the film. You have to know what you’re resisting as well. It’s challenging, and hopefully that excites the viewer’s imagination and makes them more curious and exploratory, but that assumes a degree of trust. It’s a tall order, but I just have the highest expectations of the viewer.
Q: Could or would you have made this film for a bigger budget – say, thirty million dollars?
Atom: No. If you had thirty million you’d have to make a different type of film. You’d have the pressures of having to not use these structures.
Q: How did you set up the scenes with the parents? They fit the tone of the film but seem almost ethereal.
Atom: I needed to create a heightened reality. I wanted it to seem natural, yet also feel like it’s in another world. Those were done in master shots with very long lenses and a very specific type of light. The challenge was to set up the security checkpoint scenes. I didn’t want them to feel surreal but I did want them to feel like they existed on another level of reality.
Q: I was struck by the notion of legacy and ritual, as both a blessing and a curse.
Atom: A lot of these symbols are very potent in they haven’t really been adhered to with any consistency. The residual elements of the crash, the violin that’s been handed down, they’ve become decorative. They’ve lost their meaning. Simon has to imagine it because the transmission of what the value is isn’t there; he goes through the process of throwing all of that up to the ether of the internet, and getting all of these responses. At the end, he’s creating his own ritual.
Q: Is there a legacy you feel you’ve been handed down?
Atom: Culture. The value of art. The value of respecting art, reading art and the sacred nature of that is really important. My parents were both painters, my sister‘s a pianist, so it’s a very important value. We’re Armenians, there are certain things we inherited culturally as well. (But) there’s a danger in looking at things as handed down institutionally, because institutions are always at the mercy of the agenda of the people who lead them. The traditional codes of any of these religions have been reinterpreted so many times. Very often you need to clarify and go back to a source.
Q: Would you consider this a film about reconciliation?
Atom: It is. It’s about how tortured that process can be. And also the incredible leaps characters have to make in order to reconcile, often the result of a negotiation between individuals as opposed to a collective approach. It’s people having time to consider, and one of the things the internet does not allow is consideration. It’s so immediate that it doesn’t lend itself to the consideration necessary.
Adoration is currently playing in New York City.
Read a review: http://www.examiner.com/x-8509-NY-Film-Examiner~y2009m5d6-Adoration-72-virgins-and-one-lie
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