Born in Egypt of Armenian parents, director Atom Egoyan has been resident in Canada since the age of three. He describes his film career as schizophrenic, dividing his activities between his own work, and directing Canadian shot episodes for American television series such as Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone. According to Egoyan, shooting for television means having the lowest expectations of the audience…however with Family Viewing, audience expectations are high…“I want people to be suspicious.”
Ron Burnett: Atom, could you describe how you got to make Family Viewing? Atom Egoyan: I was in a very odd situation with Family Viewing because I had made a first feature, Next Of Kin, totally outside of any system, inasmuch as it was made for $35,000, and it received a moderate amount of attention. When I was planning Family Viewing, the Ontario Film Development Corporation came into existence. I wasn’t originally intending to go to Telefilm or OFDC but it happened that they were using my first feature, Next Of Kin, as an example of the type of work they wanted to support, and I thought I would be a fool not to take advantage of the situation. Because of the formal considerations in Family Viewing, I had no desire to make it into a higher budget picture. I was in a weird position. I had to marginalize myself to make sure I had total control over the project and that meant, for instance, not going to Telefilm and not pursuing investors whom I knew would not support the way I wanted to make the film. I think the OFDC understood that when they said, “Look, we can give you more money than you’re asking for, and the only thing we would suggest is that a lot of the stuff you want to shoot on video, you should shoot on video and film just in case the video doesn’t work.” It was that sort of spirit that I felt could have undermined the whole approach to the production. I think that’s a problem with Toronto to a degree, inasmuch as you have funding organizations which try to mirror the ways in which an American funding organization would work. The whole attitude with a lot of American organizations is that you delay the process of filming until the last possible moment. In the case of a film like Family Viewing it is all about the opposite, about taking certain types of risks and seeing whether or not you can succeed. RB: Why did you choose to work in video? Was it for aesthetic reasons? AE: Oh yes. I think that’s one of the problems with low budget films. People see a different type of language being employed and they often think it is a result of economic circumstances, in other words, the filmmaker didn’t really have a choice. That has been very frustrating for me, because of the way we used video in that film, so it was an aesthetic decision. It was very important that it be done in such a way that it be executed with complete conviction. If I had done it both ways, if I was trying to cover myself in case it didn’t work, then it would have been to no purpose. I mean, if you are directing actors to do one thing and then directing them to do something else entirely because the one thing you wanted them to do may not work, then you are just shattering their confidence in the project. RB: Could you define more precisely where you see yourself in relation to mainstream cinema? I ask this because your home, Toronto, has become the Hollywood of the North. AE: I make my living doing freelance directing for North American television shot in Toronto, series like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Twilight Zone, and so forth. It is not as though the process of production holds any mystery for me, I know exactly what it involves and I know the predominant concern in shooting one of those things is production values—or as they would say, seeing it all up there on screen. That’s a very odd notion because it involves seeing money up there on the screen—if something cost $5 million to make, they want to see that $5 million up there. And of course, the whole thing with independent cinema is that what you want to see up there is a certain spirit, and the whole process of their type of production (and I’m making gross generalizations when I say “their,” I’m referring to that in a very archetypical sort of way) is that you camouflage that whole process of seeing a spirit by seeing a lot of other things in a very superficial sort of way. So, I suppose because I have a familiarity with that sort of production, I know exactly what I’m reacting against when I’m doing my own films. It’s not as though I’m working in some sort of vacuum, I do know exactly what my options are and it is a creative choice to go one way or the other. RB: To elaborate on that, how did you get into commercial filmmaking? AE: That’s a very odd story. When I finished my first feature, Next Of Kin, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had a series called For The Record—which was a series of shows on social issues in the form of one-hour dramas. They were looking for new Canadian talent at that time, so I ended up doing one called In This Quarter, which was quite an interesting script dealing with an IRA terrorist who got involved with an Irish-Canadian boxer. This particular episode involved a lot of action, and action is something that I very rarely choreograph in my own work—in fact in some ways they are anti-action in terms of the way they are presented—but all of a sudden I had the opportunity to choreograph action. Once I finished that show I had created something which caught the eye of a lot of the commercial productions that were being made in Toronto. Right now my career is totally schizophrenic, because when an American production like Hitchcock Presents asks to see my work I would never dream of showing them my independent films. Ironically, I now have another body of work which conforms to their idea of what film is about. So as I said, in my case it’s very schizophrenic. My exposure to mainstream forms of production has taught me what I am up against and actually clarified for me where I’d like to go. |
