Atom Egoyan
Atom Egoyan
Atom Egoyan, CCis a Canadian director, writer, producer and former actor. Egoyan made his career breakthrough with Exotica, a film set primarily in and around the fictional Exotica strip club. Egoyan's most critically acclaimed film is the drama The Sweet Hereafter, and his biggest commercial success is the erotic thriller Chloe. Egoyan has been nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, both for The Sweet Hereafter. He also won several awards at Cannes Film Festival, Toronto...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth19 July 1960
CityCairo, Egypt
CountryCanada
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.
My parents taught me to believe that through the creative act, we're able to transcend and give a response to desecration.
I started in theater and I wanted to write plays, but I never really found an original voice as a playwright.
Don’t get depressed about not being where you want to be. This nagging feeling of anxiety is actually called ambition. Ambition is your friend.
Though I am still very vulnerable to audiences - and it happens all the time - where for some reason the energy doesn't connect and, since the film is very personal, obviously I am made to feel very vulnerable by that.
You can talk about Holocaust denial, but it's really marginal for the most part. What is compelling about the Armenian genocide, is how it has been forgotten.
When we first shot it, something very, very weird happened, and it's a good example of how things work intuitively or are improvised.
unwarranted response given the story it's telling and the way it needed to be told.
That is where the irony of the film comes off, in terms of the language it employs - where he tries desperately to be a 'TV Dad,' to give advice and it's so pat it becomes ridiculous.
Once we were in the studio, we realized we were getting certain effects through the shooting of the dramatic scenes on video, shooting off a screen and then getting wave patterns and stuff like that.
The programme has ended, something has finished, and he has a sense of something having finished its course, and then all of a sudden he turns away and this other thing has just finished its course, this other person.
I've just been very, very lucky with the film having been introduced in the right way.
These are very subtle things, of course, and I don't expect everyone to pick them up consciously, but I think that there is something there that you must be able to feel, there is an energy at work that I must trust my audience will be able to pick up at some level.
I suppose I had these concerns but I really felt that I had to keep my scope very, very concentrated.