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
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.
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.
When we first shot it, something very, very weird happened, and it's a good example of how things work intuitively or are improvised.
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.
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.
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.
I started in theater and I wanted to write plays, but I never really found an original voice as a playwright.
My parents taught me to believe that through the creative act, we're able to transcend and give a response to desecration.
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.
One of the huge advantages of shooting in the winter is that locations that wouldn't have been available to us suddenly were, like Yorkville. ... It's just specific streets and specific angles. I think that's what's always kind of shocking about some cities: they are really about intersections.
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.
As a producer, I think one of the most important decisions you make is not necessarily the material you are working on but the production apparatus that you choose to develop the project with, and that determines what funding you go to, it determines many factors.
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.
I wanted to make sure that the environment of the shooting itself was not that controlled, and the way to go about that course was to work with as small a crew as possible.