| Cineaste: It would seem accurate to term The Sweet Hereafter your most affirmative film. For example, both Christina in Exotica and Nicole in the current film have been traumatized by incest. But Christina is unable to transcend her childhood trauma, while Nicole succeeds in breaking through and changes. Speaking Parts, on the other hand, could be termed your most pessimistic film.
Atom Egoyan: Absolutely—and The Adjuster as well. Although if you look back at the early films, like Next Of Kin, there’s a bit more optimism. I think that The Adjuster went about as far as you could go in rendering characters almost completely absurd because of their inability to define themselves. There was something quite humorous at some level about the repetitive patterns of behavior that the people were forced to reenact over and over again. Emotionally, the films are obviously quite bleak. There’s not really any invitation to identify with any of the characters. As a matter of fact, you’re always aware of the fact that you’re watching them, and that becomes what those experiences are about. They’re very much about watching, and what happens when a relationship is entirely conducted through a lens, either in a literal or figurative sense. In a way, the censor’s relationship to the images she sees in The Adjuster are characteristic of how all those relationships work. Material is gathered in an archive, and then stored and preserved. Cineaste: Were those sequences focusing on censorship in The Adjuster your critique of the Ontario censorship board? Egoyan: Yes, this also refers to my own experiences of being censored as a journalist. It is not as extreme as it once was. After the film was made, Tokyo Decadence was banned. The censorship board is a fascinating organization, because there’s this casualness about the way the board defended themselves. They had this idea that they existed because there was a need to defend certain social values. Though Toronto was a very liberal city, they’re a provincial board, and they felt they had a wider mandate to defend the interest of a wider cross section, people who wouldn’t go to art cinemas in Toronto. In the early Eighties, when I was a student at the University of Toronto, we were experiencing the most vicious period of censorship. It was around the time that The Tin Drum was banned. I wrote an article about that for a student newspaper and met Mary Brown, who at the time was the head censor. She took me to this room and showed me what she called the shock reel. It was literally a reel that had all the scenes that had been cut and were then pasted together. Of course, this was designed to place the viewer in a state of shock. After the lights came on, she came into the theater, and said rather smugly, “And now you know what we do.” That experience was so important because it was so absurd. At that moment, I wanted nothing more than to agree with her, because those were images that I would never want to see. But those images were completely out of context, and some of them were culled from films that I later saw in their complete versions.
Cineaste: It would be completely absurd, for example, to evaluate In the Realm of the Senses only from the vantage point of the castration scene. Egoyan: Yes—or you could make similar points about Salo. That idea of context, and the way in which you see an image, are issues which are really important to me and they are certainly ideas that become a part of the narrative structure. I like to replay scenes, moments, or ideas from different viewpoints that challenge the viewer to queston the authenticity, not only of where the material or where the images are sourced from, but why those people need to express those views. That takes us back to The Sweet Hereafter, where we have Mitchell Stephens, a character who is similar to the title character of The Adjuster in some ways. While Noah Render was completely numbed by his own lack of self-awareness, and is not particularly a bright man, Mitchell Stephens is a brilliant lawyer who is able to manipulate and to adapt his course, depending on whom he’s confronted with. And yet, he’s not a wise person. Unlike Nicole, Mitchell is just destined to repeat an immediately satisfying occupation—immersing himself in other people’s grief, but without really understanding how to deal with, in the longer term, his profound sense of loss.
Cineaste: The consistency of your work is remarkable. The deliberate blurring of Nicole and Alison is almost a throwback to the beginning of Speaking Parts, a film where the viewer has a great deal of difficulty in distinguishing the two female protaganists for about the first ten minutes. Egoyan: It’s a problem that other filmmakers don’t seem to run into as much as I do. But viewers do feel confused by similarities and parallels in my films. Any viewer is very sensitive to the attitudes that a filmmaker has when making an image. And because I’m so aware of the construct, image, and presentation of characters, and because there’s something delicate about that, people approach my characters with a degree of caution. In a film like Speaking Parts, which is so agressively mystifying, you are quite untethered in making those decisions. You don't necessarily have anyone pointing you in one direction or another. That’s what the film is about, ultimately, the fact that people resemble each other and have the ability to play certain roles based on their ability to remind someone of someone else. It’s always a matter of finding a form or texture which reflects the underlying psychology of what the film is about. In Speaking Parts, it was about substitution, projection, and people living with other people as images and being able to trade and barter those images. The film has to reflect that. So, almost by definition, it couldn’t be an easy film to watch. It couldn’t be a film where identification was made comfortable or simple. There are films that could deal with those issues so that the viewer might be more immediately entertained. But the residual effect on the viewer’s subconscious might not be as strong.
Cineaste: There’s a sense in which reality has caught up with what seemed to be the sci-fi premise of Speaking Parts—a world of constant suveillance and instantaneously accessible image banks. I recently heard about a college student who voluntarily subjects herself to twenty-four hour video surveillance through the Internet. Egoyan: One article I remember reading around that period involved a man whose parents had divorced. He wanted to show his son how happy his parents had been before they became divorced, so he brought his divorced parents together and recreated videotapes of their family life so he could show his son. It probably had an enduring effect on my sensibility. Cineaste: Surveillance is usually thought of as Orwellian, but in your early films the characters are quite complicit with their own surveillance. Egoyan: This is a way that the characters find out things. In Family Viewing, there’s a real ambiguity about the role of technology. It’s the means by which the father controls the family, but it’s also ultimately the way in which the boy recovers his past. It’s very easy to take a moralistic position and condemn these technologies, but the fact is they are with us. It’s a question of educating people how to use the technology, instead of demonizing technology or allowing it to become casual. It’s important to understand how unusual those things are. I’ve been editing this Yo-Yo Ma film, and I’m shocked that all this technology really does, despite the fact that it allows us to do something much faster than it was ever possible to do with a Steenbeck, is make us more anxious. It’s not as though we’re using the extra time we’re given to allow ourselves to rest or to reduce our stress. It’s as though there’s this lag between what the technology can provide and our own ability to absorb and understand it.
Cineaste: At the risk of sounding simplistic, the ambivalence towards technology in theorists like McLuhan or filmmakers like David Cronenberg might lead one to think that this position is typically Canadian. Egoyan: As a culture, we are so completely overwhelmed by our access to American identity through technology. All our major cities are no more than 200 miles from the border. From a very young age, we’ve all been bombarded with images of a culture that’s not ours but seems to mirror certain aspects of our upbringing. But we’re fundamentally different in many ways; in order to understand ourselves, we’ve had to understand our relationship to these images which have completely crept into our cultural and social makeup. Cineaste: And, of course, your early films, particualrly Next Of Kin and Family Viewing, are about both national identity and ethnic identity. Egoyan: Right. I'm aware that I’m a person who came to this country from another culture and had to form an identity in order to think of myself as an assimilated Canadian. Even though I am very much a part of the mainstream fabric of English Canada, I’m aware of what I had to go through to become that way. That predisposes one to think of identity in a general sense as a construct. My suspicion about what it means to be natural has been an ongoing concern. Cineaste: In his recent memoir, Black Dog of Fate, the Armenian-American poet Peter Balakian observes that he was encouraged to become “more American than the Americans.” As an Armenian who was encouraged to become totally assimilated, do you see any similarities to your own experience? Egoyan: That speaks very strongly to me. My strongest experience in childhood probably comes from being settled in a town where we were the only Armenian family there and then having to reconstruct myself as an English boy. And learning all those traits and absorbing them so completely that I was more English than the English or thought I was. Cineaste: Calendar quite deliberately circled around Armenian history; the viewer has to fill in the blanks. You don't mention the Armenain genocide, for example. Egoyan: Yes, that was quite deliberate. It’s a fundamental issue which I’m very nervous about treating casually. It’s very interesting the response that some Armenians have towards The Sweet Hereafter, because they almost see it as being a clear metaphor for the genocide. That never even occurred to me when I considered my own attraction to the story. When I hear that, it seems almost obvious. But I was so thankful that this didn’t occur to me while I was making the film or I would have analyzed it excessively. The Armenian genocide hasn’t just been repressed. It’s this very curious type of denial where, in the face of so much openness about the nature of holocaust, the Armenians are in a curious position where the perpetrators have never really admitted it. There’s a vagueness about the whole event. And, as it recedes more and more into our history, as the century has found other events to deal with, the necessity of finding out what happened in Armenia at the turn of the century seems to be diminished. Yet, as an Armenian, its emotional consequences are still overwhelming.
Cineaste: Your TV film, Gross Misconduct, has never been released here. The subject, a family’s relationship with hockey, would appear to be quintessentially Canadian. Egoyan: That is one of the best Gothic stories to emerge from this country. It’s an incredible, true story about this young boy from a small town in northern Canada whose father always dreamed that he would be a hockey player and trained him with an incredible degree of violence—the father was quit psychotic. He hammered this obsession with hockey into the boy until he was finally invited to join the NHL. On the night he was playing his first big league game that was supposedly being broadcast across the country, the father in the small town turned on his TV only to find out that it wasn’t being broadcast in the western part of the country. He flipped out, took a gun, drove to the local TV station and held it hostage and demanded that they broadcast the game. At the very moment that his son was being interviewed between periods on each network, the RCMP ambushed the station and shot the father dead. It could never really make it to network TV in the U.S. because it’s a fractured narrative. Cineaste: Although your films often deal with eroticism, you’ve avoided explicit sexuality. Exotica is, after all, about striptease. The desire to stimulate the viewers’ imagination relates to what has been called the ‘interactive’ nature of your films. Egoyan: It always surprises me that you can conceive of an erotic scene, but the moment you actually shoot it and construct it, it immediately reduces its ability to excite. And yet, what’s interesting about Exotica is that it’s interactive in that you know the film is going to unfold in a certain way and you have to determine what you’re feeling in response to what you know is inevitable. The film will continue to give out information and give out scenes and give out glimpses of these characters. That is much more attractive, in a way, than a situation where you are genuinely interactive, when you control the narrative. That’s what a lot of filmmakers had to contend with about ten years ago with the advent of the CD-ROM. It was thought that maybe this whole aspect of storytelling would become redundant now that we just need to think of drama as an interactive video game. It’s not anywhere near as compelling as having to determine what your relationship to a predetermined story is. One of the results of having a child is that you realize that little human beings want stories. They want to imagine those stories in relationship to images they have as opposed to some controlling set of images.
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