Egoyan Rips into Pop Culture Icons in “Where the Truth Lies”
October 15, 2005
In the 1950s, there was no greater entertainment team than manic
comedian Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon) and suave singer Vince Collins
(Colin Firth). There was also no team with bigger secrets to hide,
including the truth behind how a female corpse managed to turn up in
their hotel room one inconvenient evening. In bringing his adaptation
of Rupert Holmes’ novel, “Where the Truth Lies,” to the screen, Atom
Egoyan follows an ambitious writer’s (Alison Lohman) investigation
into the mystery of a decades-old crime, and in the process once again
explores the many ways humans revise their pasts to salvage their
presents. IFC News’ Dan Persons had an opportunity to speak with the
director: Just a wild guess: The title’s what first attracted you to
the project.
It’s a title that could kind of serve as a guide to a lot of the work
that I’ve done. But I think it was an enormously entertaining and
vivid window into American pop culture that Rupert Holmes provided. I
was delighted by the book and the possibilities, but the latent theme
that the title suggests was compelling as well.
There are several levels to the romanticism in “Where the Truth Lies:”
There’s the otherworldliness of the sequences in the TV studio, but
even when you move out of that environment, you’re dwelling in a
stylized world.
But only because one of the characters, Lanny Morris, is trying to
present that stylized world. He has an agenda with the way he’s trying
to present what his life meant at that time, what his life was geared
towards at the height of his fame. The Kevin Bacon character, in his
voice-over — purportedly writing his autobiography — is trying to
present a version where everything, and anyone, was available to
him. He was this voracious, lascivious, erotic being moving through
countless women, so it behooves his legacy to sustain that.
He does that very meticulously, but we find out that that’s not the
case.
There are obvious parallels between Vince and Lanny and the real-life
team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. What was the line you had to walk
to make the characters stand on their own?
Well, in the book, they’re actually modeled after [Martin and Lewis],
and I found that very distracting. I wanted to create an act that
didn’t exist, but which people felt could have existed. There’s a
whole kind of history of duos that we’ve lost a sense of, because we
don’t have teams anymore in our popular culture. There’s a Freudian
make-up to them, which is based on a sort of ego/id principle: One is
unleashed, very impulsive, and the other is always trying to civilize
and tame him. It’s a recurring sort of construction, and I just
thought, Why don’t we look at this idea of the Englishman, the
ultimate civilizing influence, and how that intersects with American
culture at that time? You did have these people like Noel Coward and
David Niven and Rex Harrison, even Peter Lawford — kind of suave and
the picture of etiquette — trying to tame someone else, trying to
keep a lid on it. That just seemed an interesting way to construct a
team. We worked on that and scrupulously avoided direct references to
Martin and Lewis.
Am I off-base in thinking you don’t have any romantic regard for the
past? I’m certainly fascinated by the role of sentiment in the way we
construct our sense of what the past is about, the ability to
manipulate and present histories that may not have been what they seem
to be, but which have a powerful hold over our subconscious
otherwise. Those can sometimes be romantic constructions, and often I
will create a view of something which seems to be loaded with a
romanticism, only to have that deconstructed, ultimately, just because
the characters are trying to arrive at some sort of clarity. But I’m
also trying to create an atmosphere which is seductive and which draws
us in, so I will use any one of a number of stylistic devices to do
that. So sometimes the music can be very romantic, and there’s a type
of imagery which seems to suggest another world, but my goal is to
arrive at something with as much clarity as possible.
“Where the Truth Lies” opens in New York and Los Angeles on October 14,
rolling out to other cities in subsequent weeks. For more on the film, see the
_official site._ ()
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