Film Voices: Interviews from Post Script

12. Atom Egoyan

When talking about the differences between the classic English Canadian and Québécois cinemas in the 1960s, I often talk in technical terms. The English Canadian cinema prefers the telephoto lens, isolating individuals from their environments and allowing anglophone filmmakers to keep their distance from their subjects. The Québecois cinema, on the other hand, prefers the wide-angle lens, relating individuals to their environment and implicating as well the francophone filmmakers in the action. The most consistent examples can be found respectively in documentaries like Don Owen’s Runner (1962) and Michel Brault and Gilles Groulx’s Les Raquetteurs (1958), but these technical preferences also inform the two features that so securely announced our cinema in 1964, Nobody Waved Goodbye and Le Chat dans le sac.* What I have always found amazing in Next of Kin (1984), Atom Egoyan’s first feature, is that when refusing the Angloceltic values of his posh West Coast suburban home to adopt the values of the Armenian world in downtown Toronto, the protagonist moves from a telephoto world to a wide-angle one. Furthermore, like the disgruntled central character in Owen’s Nobody Waved Goodbye, Egoyan’s character is named Peter; and like the equally disgruntled character in Groulx’s Le Chat dans le sac, he introduces himself to us. C H A P T E R T W E L V E 쵧 Atom Egoyan PETER HARCOURT 215 *See Peter Harcourt, “1964: The Beginning of a Beginning,” in Self-Portrait, ed. Piers Handling (Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute,1980): 64–76. 216 FIGURE 12. Atom Egoyan in a pensive mood on the set of his film Exotica (1994). Courtesy: Jerry Ohlinger Archives. While working on an article on his films for Film Quarterly* last year, I visited Atom Egoyan in his offices on Niagara Street off Queen Street in downtown Toronto. The visit took place in March 1994, just as Exotica was being invited to Cannes. I asked him if he was consciously referring to the technical strategies and situations of these two seminal films from the 1960s. 쵧 ATOM EGOYAN: Nobody Waved Goodbye was one of the first feature films I saw. There was an NFB† office in Victoria, B.C.; and I remember when I first got involved in film, I just loved this idea of being able to project films in my own basement . I used to be able to go there and rent a 16mm projector, and most of the films were, like, McLaren‡ shorts or documentaries, but they had one feature film there and that was Nobody Waved Goodbye. So I saw that when I was really young. The reference is subconscious. But it was a very important experience for me, watching that in my basement. It was one of the first feature films I saw which I could imagine how it was made, as opposed to most Hollywood films, which at that point in my life were completely mystifying. Perhaps to give himself more control, perhaps to mark his own work off from the Canadian documentary tradition, Egoyan has always built most of the sets for his films. In fact, quite comically, he tells the story that at Cannes he got as many inquiries about the actualities of the strip club in Exotica as he did inquiries concerning the rights for the film. It was, of course, a set; but even for Family Viewing [1987] the old people’s home was constructed. PETER HARCOURT: Where was the set constructed? AE: That was built, here, in Toronto. We built that at the Factory Theatre Lab,§ in the back space there. We just took over that space and transformed it into this home. And the women’s hostel at the end was the same location. We just, as you have to do, changed the angle. PH: Are the photographs on the tombstones at the opening of Speaking Parts [1989] an invention of yours? AE: Yes. But I had seen that. If you go to any Italian cemetery you will see photographs, and certainly in an Armenian cemetery as well: you do find these ATOM EGOYAN 217 *“Imaginary Images: The Films of Atom Egoyan.” Film Quarterly 48.3 (spring 1995): 2–14. †ED: National Film Board. ‡ED: Norman McLaren, animator, early member of the National Film Board, and recipient of an Oscar for Neighbors (1952).§A well-known theater site in Toronto. photographs in glass. When we were in...