ATOM EGOYAN TALKS ABOUT HIS NEW FILM, ADORATION
Paul Chaderjian
atom-egoyan-talks-about-his-new-film-adoration
Sat urday May 02, 2009
Auteur’s 12th feature stars wife Arsinee Khanjian and Scott Speedman
Beverly Hills, Calif. – Atom Egoyan’s 12th feature film, Adoration,
opened in Los Angeles and New York on May 1.The film will open in
other cities across the United States in the weeks ahead.
The Canadian-Armenian director-writer-producer was born in Egypt in
1960 and grew up on the western edge of British Columbia, Canada. His
films are familiar to audiences around the globe. He has scored
nearly 50 top prizes for his films, received two Oscar nominations,
and won multiple Canadian Academy Awards. His movies have premiered
and competed at Cannes.
Adoration, in classic Egoyan style, explores how individuals connect
to one another. The film is about an orphaned Toronto teen named
Simon (played by Devon Bostick) who reads an actual news story of
terrorism to his class and pretends that he is a key part of it. The
story – concerning a 1986 incident in which a Jordanian man put a
bomb in the luggage of his pregnant girlfriend – is also posted on
the Internet. The intriguing reactions and dialogue that ensue help
Egoyan explore how humans connect with one another, technology,
and the world. (See Vincent Lima’s review in the Armenian Reporter.)
Armenian Reporter: Why Adoration and why now?
Atom Egoyan: Because I’ve been thinking a lot about when I started
writing plays. Our son, Arshile, is at the age now when I started
writing plays, and it became this really huge revolution for me that I
could actually dramatize things in my life, and I put on these plays
for my friends, and parents, and school, and, of course, if I was
doing that now it wouldn’t be enough. I’d want more people to see it,
and I would presume that I could get more people to see it because
of this strange invention called the Internet, which allows anyone
to post and find a global audience if people are paying attention.
Creating drama around loss
So I started to write about a boy who is orphaned and wanted access
to his parents, and the only way he could find that access is through
creating drama around it. And that wasn’t quite working the way I
wanted to. It wasn’t developing properly, and I reacquainted myself
with this story that I remember happening in 86, where this Jordanian
man put his lover, his pregnant girlfriend, onto an El Al flight. She
was pregnant with his child, and, unbeknownst to her, he had put a
bomb in her handbag. And I remember thinking that was the most evil,
unimaginable act that any person could do to an unborn child.
Then I thought, What if this character, whose father has been
demonized, suddenly imagines that he is that child, and uses that
as a way of exploring his own lineage? And where the mother has been
completely transformed into an angel, and where the father has been
transformed into an absolute demon? And then a teacher, who gives
him the story, seeing the reaction, encourages him. And why would she
encourage him? Then questions begin to arise, and you find yourself
suddenly in the midst of it, and that’s what happens.
You start to explore something, and suddenly it raises other issues
– much like my previous works. Ararat, for instance, started to be
written as a conventional historic drama, and then that raised certain
issues and then you explore that, and you try to always ask yourself,
Why is this fascinating to you? Is that relevant? Is that story worth
being told? You make those decisions and then decisions about at what
scale you tell it. How many people are you expecting to watch it? –
because it is business, you have to be aware of that. You have to be
responsible to that.
So it’s a series of considerations that are both intuitive and also
rational. The intuitive side of you, as an artist, is trying to have
your antenna, feelings, your culture, and compel you to determine
the issues that are most important and pressing. But then there’s
this whole other side, which is quite rational, which is based on
the business of filmmaking.
AR: So what started as the idea of this one character, and his truth,
gave birth to a couple of themes you’re talking about in Adoration,
including how this character embellishes the truth, and how as humans
we present ourselves as something other than our true selves. Talk
about those themes.
Constructing a personality
AE: Those themes are the themes of surrogates, the themes of, actually,
how you get access to places that you’re not supposed to be in. I think
some of that comes from my experience as an immigrant. I remember
being in Victoria, and wanting to fit in. There wasn’t an Armenian
community to speak of, and so I really wanted to assimilate, yet I
was different than most of the other people in that very homogenous,
Anglo-WASP society.
So that process of constructing yourself and taking up certain manners
and learning another character so well that it became your own was
part of my upbringing, and I think it’s part of a lot of immigrants’
upbringing. A lot of them have the assurance of a community to
situate themselves in. But once you have that experience, you become
aware of the possibility that our characters and our personalities
are constructions. It’s a way you begin to see things. Sometimes I
wish I didn’t respond that way, but it’s a natural process for me
to ask that question which Christopher Plummer asks Raffi in Ararat:
"What has brought you to this place?"
There’s a multitude of different narratives that we bring to a moment,
where we interact with someone else.
Some will remain mysterious. Others will become really obvious, and
I’m fascinated by the mystery of a meeting between any two people. It’s
loaded with so many different possibilities and ways it can go. And in
many of these dramas it doesn’t go the way you think it might or it
should. And that can seem really troubling or disturbing. And things
don’t resolve the way they should. They don’t have the desired affect,
and that is true and warped as well.
I remember, when I was making Ararat, I just assumed that this would
provoke an incredible exchange with younger Turkish kids who would
relate. Now I wonder, What was I thinking? I mean, of course, the
film is a provocation, but I didn’t make it as a provocation. Then
I had to understand the waters I was swimming in, and realized that
the people who were reacting were people who would never even see the
film necessarily. They were people who were just provoked by the title.
So how something can be taken out of context is also fascinating to
me. And that’s what Adoration is about, maybe: these objects that are
taken out of context or interpreted in ways they weren’t designed to
be interpreted.
Religious systems have lost their value. Or indicators or markers or
sacred objects have lost their meaning. And this kid has to reorganize
them, has to go back to the original scrolls, if you will, has to
go back to his grandmother’s place, has to go back to his father’s
ancient scroll of the violin and understand what it was intended to
be and reformat that in the real world, and stop just receiving this
wisdom from other people.
Because some of that wisdom is false. The grandfather’s intentions
are so malicious, ultimately, so all that is very stirring and it’s
the stuff of drama for me.
AR: You were always fascinated with the dynamics between any two
individuals. Now, with Adoration, you’re exploring individual
identities in the new information age, within the context of the
Internet. Has this new medium, and the information age as a whole,
changed the psychological forces that drive how we identify ourselves
to others?
AE: It’s accelerated it. That’s what’s happened. I think that
there’s a velocity to this interchange, and – especially when it
becomes communal – there’s this sense that people are clamoring for
attention. So they’re embellishing and creating ways of presenting
themselves, which are misrepresentative, yet that’s something that
we absorb as a new natural, if you will.
Igniting memories
I think it comes to a peak in Adoration. When this boy resorts to
saying his father was responsible for this terrorist attack that never
happens, he suddenly ignites the memories of the people who were on
that plane, who suddenly form this very emotionally rooted group of
people mourning over this tragedy. And we forget that the group is
somehow fundamentally absurd. It would not exit in real space. These
people would not go into a car to go to a clubhouse to meet. Because
the moment they got in the car, they would realize this is absurd.
But because the Internet provokes immediate response, there’s an
emotional tenor which is, which feels, very real, but it’s the result
of washing into something without the normal physical boundaries that
would tame or perhaps even withhold behavioral responses, which are
now completely present and urgent.
When that man, for example, is saying, "I represent the dead,"
what’s he saying? But it seems very real. The most touching scene is
the one with the Holocaust denier, and there’s this girl who takes
her great grandmother and brings her to a medium that she doesn’t
even understand. But she uses the tattoo as this transformation
of a physical world, physical proof, into a place where it becomes
somehow trivialized.
AR: Why do you think humans need these objects: the tattoo with the
number, the tail of the violin? Why do they need those things to
identify themselves and their role in other people’s lives?
AE: It’s because we’re engineered to need physical totems. We live
in a material world. And these material objects and our fascination
with them, and our devotion to them, hold the key. We are concerned
and quite upset about the instability of any reference that we can’t
control ourselves. It’s about the ability to communicate a history.
Look at the example of Raffi and Ararat: he’s watching this Genocide
epic being made and something about this feels fake to him. That it’s
hard to communicate what he has understood that experience to be,
and this crazy journey he goes on to somehow record it digitally
or find plates for digital effects. This anxiety of it being
misunderstood. This anxiety of something not representing who we
are. Then he’s concentrated on certain objects which are understood
to be codes. And things we can pass down, and things that can be read
in the way they’re intended. And that, of course, presupposes that
there are people who still know how to read those codes.
That’s why, I think, Simon, in Adoration, empowers himself that he
can still read that code of his grandmother’s design or the father’s
design of the violin. He can read that and he can now interpret
it in terms of who he is at that moment, and that is a liberating
thing. Even the fact that the grandfather’s recorded statement,
which he now decides is false, he doesn’t delete it. He has to burn
it. There has to be something ceremonial about it, because that’s who
we are as well. This is like human beings burying their dead. This
is what makes us different.
AR: What stood out for me watching the film was how surprised I was
at the various turns of the story. What do you hope audiences will
be thinking and examining when they find themselves reflecting on
these story turns and twists?
Pushing the envelope
AE: The audience will have to trust the film, that it will come
together. The most challenging character is that of Sabine [played
by Arsinee Khanjian], because the complexity of what she’s doing,
and why she is doing it, will not be revealed for a long time [during
the movie], and the risk is that it may not be revealed until you’re
long past any hope of it making actual sense. And that’s always the
risk with these films, because I’m pushing them as far as they can
go. I think for the people who understand the language of what I’m
doing and trust it, the film has real rewards, but it’s probably one
of the riskiest and most extreme films I’ve done, because there are
things which you think are supposed to be signifying something quite
clearly, and characters say this is what they signify, but it’s not
so. And you really don’t have any understanding as to it being other
than that, except for a certain energy in the scene which doesn’t
quite feel right.
AR: This whole story is more than just entertainment in itself,
because it makes demands of its viewer. Is it your hope that someone
comes to this film and walks away trying to think as to where they
belong in this film? What are your expectations?
AE: My expectations of the viewer are to be exploratory, curious,
trusting, and self-aware. So they’re trying to situate themselves,
but that’s not to deny that there is a pleasure in that. That can
be very entertaining, but you just have to understand that there is
responsibility on your part, and you can at one level just let it
glide, wash over you, and interpret it later on. But if you’re trying
to come to terms with it on a moment-to-moment basis, it’s going to
be very challenging.
AR: As the filmmaker, are you expressing a certain point of view
about media, and our relationship to media technologies?
AE: I think, and I hope, the predominant thing it’s expressing is
that these media are with us, and they are an incredible means of
getting information and access to other people’s stories, but we
also have to understand what their limitations are. This is really
important. The Internet is an incredible tool, but it is not the
place to find catharsis. It’s not designed to be cathartic. It cannot
resolve itself. It, by nature, is open, and that’s the beauty of it,
and that’s the wonder of the Internet. And if you’re expecting that
you’re going to end your journey through the Internet, that’s just
wrong-headed. But you can certainly initiate and use it as a resource,
and also, like any technology, be aware of its limitations. The more
we understand the limitations of what we’re dealing with, the more
we are able to use it to our best advantage.
In Family Viewing, for instance, Van finds these tapes of his family,
with his grandmother and his mother, and his whole identity is awakened
to him by the tapes. The tapes are in the process of being erased
by the father. Nevertheless, even though the feeling in that film is
that the video is a device that oppresses people, [there’s also the
realization that] it’s through it that Van liberates himself and is
able to join his own history.
It’s actually interesting to think about that, because when we compare
Van in that film and Simon in Adoration, they’re both young men who
are using the technology that’s available to them today to come to
terms with who they are.
AR: One is using the tapes as memory to identify himself, and the
other one is using the Internet to identify himself in the present.
AE: And what’s very interesting too is that, at that time, the whole
idea of generational loss was something I was involved in, using it
as a metaphor in that film, but that’s irrelevant now. With digital
technology, there’s no generational loss. But at that point, all
the different video textures of the film were very much a product
of that time, and the idea of the physical aspect of the time –
the fact that Van would need to retrieve those objects – goes back
to your issue of these things as being sacred, as things you hold in
your hand. Tape is held in your hand – digital information is not. So
there’s a move away. You know, this is very interesting, even with
videotape. We were still in the biblical zone of an engraved image,
where there was a physical displacement of properties to communicate
information. So there was something, magnetic oxide, that was being
displaced, and we were still dealing with the engraved image up until
the end of dialogue. And suddenly we have shed that biblical code
and its terms of reference, and something major has evolved within
us, in terms of how we deal with the trading of images. It’s been
unleashed. There’s no limit to it.
AR: And there is no control.
AE: And there’s absolutely no control. And so the old rules don’t
apply at all.
AR: So is the digital-information age even a more difficult time and
place for humans to maneuver than the 80s?
AE: It’s less ominous in a weird sort of way, because it’s less
hierarchical with respect to control. Control is easier to wrest in
the physical world. You can control tapes. You can control scrolls,
but once something is on the Internet, it’s absolutely available to
anyone, so the real danger is not about who has control but rather
how we limit our own ability to be diverted by this endless amount
of information to process, and how we ascertain our own physicality.
AR: In our last minute, let’s talk about the actors in this
film. Obviously Arsinee is a very important part of your body of work.
AE: She’s a hugely important part. I wouldn’t have done any of this
work if we hadn’t met in our early 20s and had this dream of doing this
together. And we’ve had this incredible, very rare, path we’ve gone
on, where we had this common dream, and it took us to some remarkable
places. It started with a trip to Paris, where we saw these amazing
films being shown in funky cinemas on the Left Bank and dreaming
that one day we’d make something like the films we’ve made. We met
on the set of Next of Kin, and we fell in love, and that took us
all over the world, took us back to Armenia in the early 90s, and I
think Adoration is one of the most remarkable and genuinely daring
performances she’s given, because it’s uncharted territory. There’s
no other character ever created that’s remotely like her.
AR: She’s trying to set the world right.
AE: And she’s kind of misguided about it, but she does it at the
end. And Scott Speedman [who plays Simon’s uncle] does something
incredibly generous at the end too. After understanding that this woman
is potentially unstable, and certainly traumatized, but ultimately
the only person who can provide a direct history or an eyewitness
account of who Sammy was, he realizes that it’s imperative that he
bring Simon back to her apartment and see this shrine that she’s
created, and have him understand as best possible who this man was.