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
There is a certain moment in the film when the son is in the nursing home and he goes to the television and turns it off because he sees himself in the image.
The biggest problem with the independent film sector in Toronto is that they find themselves having to make that budget show on screen.
I make my living doing freelance directing for North American television shot in Toronto, series like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Twilight Zone, and so forth.
I think ultimately if you have a very high expectation of your audience and you know exactly what it is you're trying to express through the medium of film, there will always be an audience for you.
I just think I love the process of making films. It's not tortuous for me at all. I love being with my crew. I love actors. There's a joy to the process.
Working on the themes I was interested in, through the context of a particular family, was a very economical way of dealing with a lot of the issues I was concerned with.
When you're working with a smaller budget I suppose one of the things that has to be in your mind when you are writing is that you have to keep the characters down to a minimum.
The fathers greatest folly is that he believes he can be a much more simple person than he is; he is not really able to deal with his own complexity as a human being.
Try to produce your own films, avoid directing for hire.
It is about this very abstract sense of displacement that he feels the moment he turns off the television.
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.
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.
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.
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.