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
The whole film is about people being convinced that they can reduce themselves to their archetypes.
People make decisions that may have one intent and yet are somehow perverted into something else. And sometimes it's because of design. Sometimes it's because of happenstance. But very often, it's mysterious to them.
I love when people are resilient and when they form ways of dealing with grief or dealing with some traumatic episode, and sometimes those are the wrong choices.
You are traveling and see these people shooting the entire experience of going through a city, and maybe in the back of their minds they sustain the illusion that they will edit it all, but I don't think that's it.
April 24th was another commemoration of the genocide of Armenia people by Turkey. The perpetrator never admitted the crime. I was raised with that, this question: how do you actually find the truth of such a traumatic event? I'm obsessed with that issue.
We hear about the experiment that is Canada but we are now entering the most interesting phase of that, where people are interacting with their own culture and understanding the degree of tolerance we have created in this place.
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.
It's crazy, it's totally outrageous, it's very upsetting, and I can't understand it,
When you make a film like this, you must have the highest expectations of your audience. Having worked in situations where we have the lowest expectations of our audience.
These sorts of things can happen, identities can be switched, the emotional implications are something that he has not been trained to feel. His whole life has been about separating himself from these sorts of actions.
We couldn't trim any more without destroying the heart of the movie.
You have to be able to deploy the themes that you want to address with a minimum of means, otherwise you aren't going to be able to get it made.
As a parent, I would feel comfortable taking a mature 16- or 17-year-old to this movie. I feel dismayed that they wouldn't now be able to see it in a theater. Yet there is a double standard, because anyone can watch it at their home.
As a parent, I would feel comfortable taking a mature 16, 17-year-old to this movie. I feel dismayed that they wouldn't now be able to see it in a theater. Yet there is a double standard because anyone can watch it at their home.