In May, Canadian director Atom Egoyan's latest film "The Captive" bowed as part of the prestigious Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival. Charitably it can be said reception of the film was mixed, with some stinging vitriol levelled at Egoyan.
"The Captive" is a challenging, dark film that echoes many themes prominent in Egoyan's other works. The loss of a child, the bleak snowy landscapes and emotionally charged performances from the likes of Rosario Dawson and Ryan Reynolds make for a unique kind of thriller that may well find more receptive audiences outside of the festival bubble.
Moviefone Canada spoke to Atom Egoyan in Toronto at the end of August, as he was preparing to host a sneak preview of his film to a local audience.
Moviefone Canada: You've lived with the film a little bit [since Cannes]. How's your reaction to your baby changed now that you have a bit of distance?
Atom Egyan: Well, it was interesting because I shot another movie in the meantime, and then I watched it again this past weekend to talk about it. It was great because I feel totally proud of it. I felt proud of it that night in Cannes, seeing it publicly, but there's been a lot to absorb in terms of the response and I don't understand most of it.
I really think that the film is a mélange, it functions at the level of a fairy tale and is still rooted in reality. I think at a certain point, when people's lives are as extreme as they are in this film, their sense of reality begins to transform into something else. It's something I've explored in a lot of my movies, from "Exotica" to "The Sweet Hereafter" and "Felicia's Journey," that point at which someone begins to see their own life in terms of a fairy tale. As a way of coping with trauma, they go to this other space, or the way of coping with something extreme, so it's no longer attached to a completely realistic place, even though the events happening are real.
It's a very ambitious film, and creatively I'm proud of it, so I don't have any regrets about showing it at Cannes because they were so excited about programming it, they saw it early on in February, they immediately invited it in and gave it a primo slot. I wasn't there at the press screening that morning, so I don't quite know what happened.
There was some booing, as there often is at Cannes, but also quite a bit of applause.
At a certain point, you just have to go OK, that's what happened then, now let's deal with where and what the film actually is.
I don't understand that it's exploitative because it's so delicate about not showing exploitative material and putting up a whole other system where you get the feeling of exploitation, the vibes are really exploitative, but not actually showing what child porn is. It's a horrifying concept, but you're actually involved in a parallel ring, if you will, where you're seeing adults being exploited and I think that's a pretty interesting way of showing the phenomenon without actually delving into exploitation.
Was the criticism particularly pointed?
It's a different world than when I first started showing things at Cannes. There's a whole social media aspect and there's a gang mentality and it's also the alchemy of where it's presented in the festival.
It's an exceptional year historically, because there were three Canadian films in competition out of 18 films, so maybe a lot of people were wondering, are all three so amazing that they had to have three films from one country? So there was an undue pressure on it maybe as well.
Are you normally somebody who reads your film criticism?
I've had to this time because I wanted to understand it and I don't get a lot of what the criticism is. They're talking about the subject matter, how it should be, and that was never my intention. I don't think that's the role of a critic, to tell how it should be, it's to criticize what the intentions of the film are and what it's trying to do.
In going back over it, since you're reading these criticisms, is there anything that actually did sort of ring true?
Yes, and I've changed that. I think that in the Cannes version there were too many threads that were being tied up at the end, so it's been simplified. I do think that does help things and that was something I felt during the screening as well. That there was just one too many, it was all too convenient at the end, and so that was changed.
It must have been refreshing to dive right into a new project. What's it about?
Well, it's also dealing with a dark history and people negotiating through dark history. It's a Holocaust survivor who suffers from early-stage dementia who believes he's discovered the person responsible for wiping out his family in Auschwitz, and he goes on a mission to hunt him down and kill him but keeps forgetting why. It's just a really interesting, original script and I'm using a very different approach. It's much more direct, it's almost a hand-held documentary but I wanted to ... it's a linear story and it moves in a certain way and I wanted to enhance that.
There's the aspect of a Scandinavian-style thriller with "The Captive," and with this new film it again sounds like you're working towards an even more European sensibility. Is that a fair assessment?
The psychological thrillers I've been attracted to have been so resolutely American."Vertigo," "The Conversation," and all those '70s films left such a huge impression on me.
You have these characters go through some sort of trauma to work things out. Do you see your own films working out your own demons?
Oh yeah, definitely. 100 percent. You're affected by these things that happen in your childhood and things that you've seen and things that you didn't really completely process at that point. It's not just what you're doing creatively, it's also the conversations you're having with actors, and it's also seeing what they're bringing to the table. You're very aware that there are certain scenes that you write and then you see someone live it out and come up with a creative choice that just reveals something.
Specifically in ["The Captive"], Maria knows the moment when she gets the news that her daughter might still be alive ... and looking at these horrifying images on the internet of someone who may or may not be her daughter, identifying that, and calling her estranged husband with this kind of joyous news and then the way she flips into this anger, this rage. The scene was written in a certain way where she's ambivalent and then enraged. The fact that Maria was so happy at the beginning of it and so delighted that the daughter was alive of course, I was just stunned by that decision. And that was such a human choice. That's so real, so that's therapeutic. That's amazing that you see that detail painted and factored in.
"The Captive" opens in Canadian theatres on September 5, and is screening at the Toronto Film Festival.
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