Atom Egoyan’s Journeys

by Kevin Lewis | Published November 12, 1999

Egoyan directing Bob Hoskins in Felicia’s Journey

Nothing about Atom Egoyan is predictable. The now 39-year old director has made a series of films over the last 15 years which are more artworks than traditional movies. A true auteur, the Canadian writes, directs and sometimes acts in his movies. His wife, Arsinée Khanjian, is always a major character in his films, and the plots revolve around issues central to his life.

With The Sweet Hereafter (1997), he became a player in American commercial cinema, and indeed, it was more accessible than his previous films with their somewhat nonlinear storylines and techniques, but Egoyan has not moved to Hollywood. His new movie, Felicia’s Journey, a British film produced by Bruce Davey (Braveheart) for Icon and distributed by Artisan, is a crystallization of his earlier movies about dislocation, sexual dysfunction and delusion, hardly popular American film themes.

Felicia’s Journey, a chilling brief encounter between a Little Red Hiding Hood and a Big Bad Wolf, is deceptively straightforward, and appears to conform to the mystery/horror genres while managing to elude clichés and defy easy classification. Though it uses the plot elements of these genres, it concentrates on symbolism and philosophy to develop its theme of delusion. The movie was favorably received this fall at the Toronto and New York Film Festivals; while in New York Egoyan and stars Bob Hoskins and Elaine Cassidy discussed the production with MovieMaker.

The Egoyan of past years, with his rapid hand motions and nervous energy, has been replaced by a mellow, professorial figure in a conservative black suit, appropriate for someone with five honorary doctorates from Canadian universities. He was knighted with a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French government in 1996, elected a Member of the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts, and inducted into the Order of Canada. A happy marriage to Arsinée Khanjian, who plays the glamorous TV cook in Felicia’s Journey, and the birth of their son, Arshile, have centered his life. “She’s my muse—she inspires me—her presence and her response and her image, I suppose. She’s a really intelligent, compassionate, but also critical partner. She

Ian Holm in The Sweet Hereafter (1987)

is an invaluable contribution, and I’m really, really blessed with having found her, having found each other. It’s extraordinary. I’m able to deconstruct her, and yet, thankfully, the relationship has been able to remain, I think, relatively healthy. But she understands the rules of the game and is there to support me.”

His themes of dislocation and delusion, however, have not changed, and have only deepened. Though he grew up in Canada, Egoyan’s artistic approach is more European than North American, and he underwent profound changes in his early years. His parents emigrated from Armenia to Cairo, Egypt, where Atom was born in 1960. The introduction of nuclear energy in Egypt at that time inspired his parents to name him after the source of atomic energy. Despite the fact that they owned a successful furniture store in Cairo, the unstable political climate motivated their move to Canada with Atom and daughter Eve by 1963.

In British Columbia, the Egoyans were cut off from Armenian culture. Atom surmises that his recurring artistic theme of alienation derives from not only his personal disorientation in a new land but also the profound sense of dislocation felt by Armenians because of the destruction of Armenia as a nation and the 1915 massacre by the Turks. His central idea is “how people deal with loss and the psychology and politics of denial” and “the notion of entitlement,” as he calls it. “At what point is someone entitled to claim an experience theirs?...I came into this [Canadian] culture as a child who didn’t speak English, and came at a point when this other personality wasn’t wholly formed, and suddenly I had to absorb another culture and I remember being aware of that. I remember the things I had to do in order to be like the other kids. That does have an effect on you, and you realize that personality is something that you construct. The moment that you become self-conscious about that construct, that induces a sense of alienation and disenfranchisement. That’s what I’m more interested in—that notion of what is it that people have to do in order to feel at place, and the degrees of self delusion that they suffer through in order to convince themselves that they have found their place amidst the havoc. Those are all really loaded issues for me. This is true for Felicia as well. She comes from a place [Ireland] where her history is being drilled into her. This is where you come from, this is what happened to our people... the links to the maternal great-grandmother who speaks the ancient tongue are so important.”

Music and playwriting were Egoyan’s artistic outlets. While he was at Trinity College in Toronto he earned a degree in international relations and made short films for a film club. He soon discovered that the movie camera was more artistically satisfying than the stage. He inherited, after all, a strong affinity for visual composition from his parents, who were trained painters. “I’m very attuned to the screen as a canvas; the notion of the projected image and the relationship that the viewer has is as exploratory as it might be in a gallery.

I also recognize that for a great number of viewers films don’t work that way, but I can’t afford to acknowledge that.” A painterly style, which does not get in the way of narrative, is a key to the beauty of his movies. Felicia’s

Exotica (1994)

Journey, in particular, is awash in various styles—French Impressionism, Renaissance art, Expressionism, and Arts and Crafts. There is one astonishing moment when Felicia steals the money from her great-grandmother and leaves the room. The camera stays on the great-grandmother, but through the window on the side of the room, Felicia can be seen retreating across the land. The shot is a reference to Renaissance portraiture in which people were painted with their valuables. Granny has lost two of her valuables. Egoyan uses windows throughout to show the alienation between characters.

The sale of his student film Open House (1982) to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) was his entry into feature filmmaking and his stint as freelance director of such television shows as the resurrected “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “The Twilight Zone.” His debut feature, Next of Kin (1984) was funded through Canadian arts councils, as was Family Viewing (1987). That film, about an Armenian man erasing his videotaped past with his family, brought him European recognition and a champion in Werner Herzog. Speaking Parts (1989), The Adjuster (1991), Calendar (1993), were all shown on the international film festival circuit. Exotica (1994) won the Cannes International Critics Prize and three Genie Awards.

The Sweet Hereafter (1997) was his breakthrough into more commercial moviemaking. It won the Cannes Film Festival’s Grand Prix du Jury, and a Best Picture Genie Award. Egoyan received two Academy Award nominations, the first for direction and the second for his adaptation of the Russell Banks novel.

Felicia’s Journey has many connections to the films of Alfred Hitchcock. The central situation of a naive, pregnant Irish girl (Elaine Cassidy) stealing money from her great-grandmother to pursue her errant lover (Peter McDonald) in England and taking shelter with an innocuous, mother-fixated man who plans to kill her is reminiscent of Psycho. The drugged milk scene is like the one in

Exotica (1994)

Suspicion. Is he comfortable with those analogies? “I’m comfortable with acknowledging Hitchcock as a really strong influence. Philosophically, I think, he was able to introduce and normalize in mainstream cinema a stronger sensitivity to psychological analysis. In a way, he enjoyed that, and took pleasure in that level of investigation, and he was able give the audience pleasure in that. He was nearly able to normalize obsessive states which would have otherwise been quite transgressant and unacceptable. So he broke ground with that, and I think more than anything else, I’d say that is where I feel his influence.

“Characters like Francis Brown in Exotica come [from] a line of characters like James Stewart in Vertigo, where we see quite “normal, everyday” people suddenly thrust into the middle of something heightened and mythic. So that similarity, I readily acknowledge. I think where I’m less comfortable in describing the film as Hitchcockian is because of the almost scientific approach that he had to suspense, which I have not adhered to; this idea that the viewer is in a privied situation, where they understand something that’s inevitable that the characters don’t... In a way, I kind of work antithetically to that because I try to create a language which puts the viewer into the state of mind of my characters. But that being said, it’s perhaps also a fear that if you call it Hitchcockian, people go in expecting some sort of payoff which the film isn’t really prepared to deliver. Possibly if I were watching the film for the first time, I would call it Hitchcockian without really knowing why. There’s a mood, a sense of dread, and a pervasive creepiness which bears some relationship to what he does.”

Hilditch (Bob Hoskins), kills emotionally lost young women because he is obsessed with his late mother, who rejected his love, and videotapes their confessions. He stores them away as an archive. A food caterer for a factory, Hilditch believes food should be prepared with love and healing hands, and at home he prepares lavish feasts for himself while watching his videotapes of his mother preparing food on her 1950s television show. To those who know Egoyan’s work, this is a fascinating reversal of the way videotape was used in Family Viewing. In Family Vi

Felicia’s Journey

ewing, the man is recording over his past and erasing it, and in Felicia’s Journey he is archiving his past. Egoyan laughs and says, “I’d love to see a double bill of the two movies. It’s very interesting with my work because there’s a whole public who really began to see my films with Exotica, and for them, the use of video in this film probably won’t have any resonance in terms of my early work because they haven’t really seen those movies. Family Viewing is still probably my favorite movie in a lot of ways. I find that this idea of someone who has an uncertain relationship to their personal history seizing on an artifact which records that history as being the next best thing—and by somehow physically manipulating that artifact they can reconcile areas of tension and nonclosure—that’s fascinating to me. And it’s very symptomatic of our time. I remember reading an article in The New York Times about a man who was trying to explain to his child what his upbringing was like and his parents were now divorced so he actually asked his parents to attend an event together so he could videotape them and show them to his son. It seemed so perverse but we are in a time where these technologies become extensions of our psychosexual apparatus...We don’t acknowledge that these are unusual or potentially disruptive. It all falls into the guise of entertainment and distraction.”

Hilditch cannot see the connection between his crimes and his personality, which is typical of many psychopathic personalities. Egoyan says, “We expect our psychokillers to be brilliant and there to be something almost admirable about their clearheadedness, their wit and their charisma. We want to assign to somebody who does something so heightened and extreme some cult personality. That becomes an important way for us to understand how those acts might have been rendered. But it’s jus

Felicia’s Journey

t not the case. Hilditch is not a particularly brilliant man, and he’s not somebody who’s consumed by violence. He doesn’t see those acts. He doesn’t see himself as being violent at all. He doesn’t remember those moments. To have glorified or to have included those acts would have been denial of what his experience of it was,” he explains.

Ironically, religious fanatics who burst into his garden defeat him. But slyly, Egoyan doesn’t let religion get the credit. Stealing money as a child was his original sin, and he has just found the purloined wallet he hid in the garden as he is digging Felicia’s grave. The religious fanatics flee when he admits he stole Felicia’s money, to keep her near him, but he doesn’t admit his past murders. When the religious woman (Claire Benedict) tells him that the pain will wash away and the healing will commence, those words resonate with Hilditch, Egoyan says, because “those are the words he repeats to Felicia as he lets her go and has made the decision to kill himself.” He decides to release the girl because the reason he murders is to release his victims from suffering; now he decides to release himself.

“Perhaps, the most unusual thing about the films I make is that there are scenes that people expect to be rendered in a way that would allow us to understand what that action actually means. [For example] the incest in The Sweet Hereafter. We expect it to be shown from the perspective of the victim’s anger, but to see it from the point of view of what that person’s actually imagining is happening as it’s going on is a very unusual perspective. In a way, it addresses issues of denial of what that character is experiencing and also puts the viewer in a state of denial. So many people watched The Sweet Hereafter and didn’t actually even understand the incestuous relationship because it was shown in a language which addressed the cold denial of it. In [Felicia’s Journey] especially, Hilditch lives in denial of what he does and the

Felicia’s Journey

film reflects that. For the longest period of time we can’t believe or want to believe that he is capable of what we come to understand is true because he doesn’t see that.”

An actor himself (in the movie, Egoyan is the unseen “Hilditch” in the car videotaping the women), he allows flexibility in interpretation by his actors. In this film he worked with an accomplished actor and a teenager just starting out. Hoskins, who describes his character as a cross between Jack the Ripper and Winnie the Pooh, has played similar characters in the past, notably the murdering salesman in the television miniseries “Pennies From Heaven” and Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa. The 19-year-old Irish actress, Elaine Cassidy, admits that the biggest challenge in playing Felicia was identifying with such a naive, deluded girl.

Egoyan estimates that he averages about five to six takes per scene. “I do believe it’s an actual truism that my signal of maturity as a filmmaker is when I’ll actually acknowledge the fact that the first take is usually the best. The first one or two always are, but you end up not believing that. When you get into this strange thing where you’re around take five and you’ve forgotten that the first takes are actually pretty good, but that take five is actually not good, you end doing takes to respond to take five...I’m always in awe of filmmakers who actually can just go in and realize they have a take and they don’t need a safety because if there’s a real problem, the lab will pay for it anyway.”

Egoyan has been criticized for changing the original ending of the William Trevor novel. Felicia in the novel escapes from Hilditch, but she is destitute, still pregnant and clueless about her next move. In the movie, Felicia, who has undergone an abortion at Hilditch’s urging, has been spared because of her own initiative in leaving the house. She realizes her vulnerability and has shed some illusions. Trevor approved the change, calling the movie “a brilliant interpretation of the novel.” MM

Egoyan with Peter McDonald and Elaine Cassedy on the set of Felicia’s Journey

The Making of Felicia's Journey

Few directors have the training in art and music that Atom Egoyan has, so it’s natural that he is attuned to the various components that go into the making of his motion pictures.

Canadian Paul Sarossy, the Director of Photography, has worked with Egoyan since the late 80s. He received two Genie Awards for his cinematography of Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter. He and Egoyan like to collaborate on the look of their films, and Felicia’s Journey, which is precise in its look and texture, reflects Egoyan’s painterly concerns.

“More than anything, Paul has a tremendous sensitivity to light in a way that I don’t. I know what I like to see theoretically but I have no idea what the techniques are by which you get that effect. I can trust him completely with that. He’s very sensitive with camera movements and there’s a wonderful kind of shorthand that we have developed by this point. I can trust him in sort of a classical way. I will design the shot, design the composition, and tell him the type of movement I want; and then the actual way that it is painted in the frame is entirely his doing. It’s a really important collaboration.”

“As with The Sweet Hereafter, we were using anamorphic Panavision with anamorphic lenses. This time we were using a set of Primos, which was availab

Egoyan directing Bob Hoskins

le to us before. Those lenses generally are more accessible in Europe than in North America. We had a full set, trying to avoid using the zooms, trying to stick with prime lenses almost all the time. In The Sweet Hereafter, we made sure that the key shots were used with a flat focus lens. It was a pretty straightforward set, except for the fact that it was anamorphic.”

Though it achieves an intimate look, the film was actually shot in 2:35 ratio, a ratio which often works against a film when it is shown on television and transferred to video. “I don’t mind the way it looks on the pan-and-scan version. The widescreen was really important to me for a couple of shots, some key scenes. With The Sweet Hereafter, it was a lot more crucial with the landscapes and the bus traveling through the mountains. There was an epic scale to that movie which demanded that format. Here, it’s a more subtle use of the widescreen.” The texture was crucial. Egoyan felt the Irish setting [Glansworth, near novelist William Trevor’s birthplace, Mitchelstown, County Cork] was overused and the Midlands setting [Birmingham] banal. Egoyan wanted to show how these settings look through the characters’ eyes to reveal the “threatening nature of these landscapes, or the oppressive nature, and how these landscapes press in on these people,” he says. “One of my favorite shots in the film is where the father (Gerard McSorley) is cursing [Felicia], and exiling her from the town. It’s done in a very long shot, where the whole village is compressed against her. Lens choices are something that I will do on my own and confer with Paul, but it’s sort of unspoken because we’ve been doing it so long.” The greens and grays were emphasized in an Expressionistic style. “In Ireland, when we were timing the film, we went as far as we could with those tones without becoming unnatural. The greens in England are more burnished and dried out than in Ireland. We have a good relationship with the timer, Peter Hinton, who works at Color by DeLuxe in Toronto. We insist on working with him.”

Egoyan with William Trevor on the set

Egoyan wanted to work again with Costume Designer Sandy Powell, who won the Oscar for her Elizabethan costumes in Shakespeare in Love, because he loved her costumes for the opera he directed, Dr. Ox’s Experiment, which was produced by the English National Opera. Though the costumes in Felicia’s Journey are modest, Egoyan was impressed by the detail with which they were invested by Powell. The blues of Felicia’s outfit are “almost a Catholic, sort of Virgin Mary reference.”

The set design by Jim Clay amplified the themes developed by Egoyan, especially the magnificent country home and gardens, with a fully realized Arts and Crafts interior and furnishings. Egoyan chose that style over Victorian because in the 1950s when the room was decorated by the mother he thought that would be what she wanted; the style also possesses the contradictory intimacy and austerity “which suited the tone of the piece,” he says. “It was the first time I’ve been able to build a set on that scale, and it was such a privilege. That’s where the Expressionism comes in, where everything’s been overscaled and heightened to really emphasize his loneliness in this house, to have the house way bigger than it would ordinarily be. That’s most extreme when we see that shot of the kitchen. It’s almost absurdly large.”

Composer Mychael Danna has worked with Egoyan since his first feature film. Danna uses lush Mantovani-type orchestrations on the 1950s songs and juxtaposes those with Celtic melodies. “Then we corrupt them,”says Egoyan, “and bring in other influences. As the characters go through these fundamental shifts [in behavior], the music would begin to corrupt and distort and bend out of shape.” For Mantovani, it turns into Bartok, replete with military snares. For the Celtic tunes, the woman’s voice would become more distant and dissonant. MM

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Comment by tadalafil on 3/20/08 at 11:24 pm

sexual dysfunction as a movie theme, yes i can see how popular it can be :)

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