SOURCE: “Family Romances: An Interview with Atom Egoyan,” in Cineaste, Vol. 23, No. 2, Spring, 1997, pp. 8–16.

[In the following interview, Egoyan discusses the nature of the film industry, his approach to filmmaking, and the influence of Canadian identity.]

Widely regarded as Canada's leading independent filmmaker, Atom Egoyan is frequently hailed as brilliantly innovative and occasionally damned as a purveyor of arid cinematic parables. Egoyan's wry self-deprecation, however, allows him to view both acclaim and derision with a jaundiced eye. In fact, the critical response to Egoyan's films often seems several steps behind the director's unsparing assessments of his own work. Egoyan's personal modesty has never interfered with his professional assurance, enabling him to explore a cluster of interrelated themes—the erosion of ethnic identity in the face of modernity, the relationship between technology and alienated sexuality, and the black humor that can be derived from the travails of irrevocably dysfunctional families.

Egoyan's debut feature, Next of Kin (1984), typifies the absurdist tenor which suffuses his work. A lighthearted film which provides a glimpse of darker ironies, Next of Kin focuses on an elaborate wish-fulfillment fantasy concocted by Peter, a nondescript young WASP who flees his affluent middle-class family to effortlessly become part of a warm but fractious Armenian clan. Never one to offer glib panaceas, Egoyan mercilessly skewers both the puritanical Anglo-Canadians and the feuding Armenians; the Candide-like protagonist's search for ethnic bonhomie proves futile.

A few ludicrous videotaped family therapy sessions in Next of Kin foreshadow the all-encompassing preoccupation with video surveillance and voyeurism that comes to the fore in Egoyan's subsequent films. Even if the narcissistic protagonists of Family Viewing (1987) and Speaking Parts (1989) seem inextricable from the media-saturated landscape—a world which fetishizes the ability to instantaneously record and play back images—Egoyan is not committed to a crude technophobia. He is merely bemused by how new technologies become harbingers of perceptual and cultural upheavals.

The Canadian critic Geoff Pevere remarks that these early works create a world where “identity becomes as erasable as videotape and as ephemeral as battery power.” Family Viewing deals explicitly with the permeability of one young man's identity, a Toronto WASP named Van. Van's discovery that his authoritarian father has erased an entire archive of video images proves pivotal; amateur pornography featuring the smug dad's sexual romps with his mistress obliterate the son's cherished images of a childhood spent with a now-absent mother and grandmother. Van's unlikely alliance with a phone-sex operator culminates in a strangely upbeat triumph over the enemies of historical memory.

Speaking Parts, a less optimistic cinematic fever dream, can be savored as a savage parody of the culture industry's tendency to reduce serious discourse to a series of banalities. Set in an antiseptic Toronto hotel, the narrative plunges us into a vertiginous and often hilarious tale of bumbling solipsists. Clara, a naive young woman, writes a heartfelt but plodding script in an attempt to commemorate her brother's death. But the script is eventually bowdlerized by a wily producer who replaces its earnest platitudes with a talk-show format. Both Clara and Lisa, a pouty chambermaid, are dazzled by the film's leading man, Lance. Nevertheless, they usually cannot enjoy his sexual allure in person, but must resign themselves to gaping at his image on a video monitor. Even grief has become subservient to electronic razzmatazz; in Speaking Parts' dystopian universe, video mausoleums convert mourning into a private spectacle. While Family Viewing concluded with a qualified optimism, Speaking Parts refuses to comfort the audience with even a glimmer of hope.

Equally pessimistic, The Adjuster (1991), Egoyan's first wide-screen film, bestows an epic dimension on its protagonists' concerted disengagement from reality. Noah Render, the eponymous insurance adjuster, is an unsavory mixture of therapist and con artist. Superficially empathetic towards his clients, his compassion for the bereaved emanates from a need to control their lives. And Render's arrogance is bizarrely congruent with his wife Hera's job as a film censor—a task that fuses anal-retentive zeal with furtive prurience. By the film's end, the semicatatonic Renders are eventually victimized by the schemes of more diabolical narcissists—a wealthy couple who spend their time staging increasingly violent private fantasies. The Adjuster unveils the authoritarian implications of a world where the genuine pursuit of pleasure has been replaced by loss of affect and asocial hedonism.

Casting a wider esthetic and thematic net, Calendar (1993) and Exotica (1994)—a low-budget experimental film and a lush, relatively high-budget psychodrama—were incrementally less claustrophobic and even flirted with a renewed sense of hope. Calendar offered an opaquely personal gloss on the preoccupation with assimilation already evinced in Next of Kin and Family Viewing. When a Canadian-Armenian photographer and his Armenian-born translator wife (played by Egoyan and his actual wife, Arsinee Khanjian) return to their homeland, the chasm between North American affluence and a culture wounded by war and deprivation becomes glaringly apparent. The failure of Egoyan's alter ego to confront a submerged past leads to the dissolution of his marriage; his moral hibernation is rife with both personal and political reverberations.

While Exotica was indisputably Egoyan's commercial breakthrough, it is also his most problematic work. This elaborately mounted puzzle film unfolds like a quasisurreal parody of a psychoanalytic session: a nubile stripper assumes the role of a surrogate shrink while the opulent sex club referred to in the film's title serves as a commodious couch. Audiences were understandably seduced by the film's rapid-fire plot twists and visual panache, but Exotica's soft-core titillation, as well its facile resolution, seemed to pander to an art-house audience.

Fortunately, The Sweet Hereafter (1997), Egoyan's most recent film, is one of his most textured and compassionate efforts. Like Exotica, this imaginative adaptation of Russell Banks's novel is concerned with personal devastation, the ravages of incest, and the deleterious effects of self-delusion. But the collective anguish of a troubled rural community supplants the urban anomie of the earlier films. The Sweet Hereafter's central cataclysmic event—a school bus accident in which many of the town's children perish—provides the springboard for an open-ended moral inquiry in which a pragmatic litigiousness is pitted against one courageous individual's resistance to bottom-line acquisitiveness. Mitchell Stephens (played with nuanced intensity by veteran British actor Ian Holm) hubristically believes that he can salve the town's wounds with a whopping cash settlement, while Nicole Burnell, a young accident victim, simultaneously resists the lawyer's blandishments and transforms her childhood traumas (the scars wrought by both her father's incestuous advances and the accident itself) into personal triumph.

Egoyan's decision to eschew the predictability of a linear narrative for an intricate skein of flashbacks and flashforwards pays off brilliantly. Avoiding the pitfalls of a tabloidish melodrama focusing on a lurid accident and its outcome, The Sweet Hereafter's insistent splintering of chronology allows us more profound access to a community's dark night of the soul. Egoyan's informal stock company—Khanjian, Maury Chaykin, Gabrielle Rose, Bruce Greenwood, and David Hemblen—display an impressive virtuosity. Usually cast as urban neurotics, these skillful character actors portray small-town bus drivers, motel owners, and mechanics with genuine conviction.

Cineaste spoke with Egoyan soon after The Sweet Hereafter won the Grand Prix at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival and several months before its American premiere at the 1997 New York Film Festival. In the following interview, he speaks lucidly, and frequently wittily, on topics ranging from cinephilia and the

[Porton:] The Sweet Hereafter is your first adaptation of another author's material. Did you feel that it was time to change gears and integrate other perspectives with your own?

[Egoyan:] After I finished Exotica, I felt that I had gone as far as I could, given a certain set of impulses that had formed a lot of my work. I was afraid of parodying myself. It was a very confusing time after Exotica, because it was a film that broke through. I wanted to surprise myself, and I think that any filmmaker wants to, more than anything, exceed his own expectations. And, after a certain point, when you become so identified with a style and approach, you want to challenge people's expectations.

When I read The Sweet Hereafter, I felt that it was a story that I would never have been able to come up with. Yet I saw similarities to my work and I felt that I could serve the material. It was worth pursuing, since Russell Banks was extraordinarily generous. The book was optioned by another studio, but he was prepared to release it and let me make the film. With his encouragement, and also with this need that I felt to challenge myself, I went into the project. It was a treacherous journey, because I was also involved with a studio film myself at that point with Warner Bros. which I had to leave in order to pursue The Sweet Hereafter. As an independent, you have to understand what that all means and wade through it. I think that I was smart in trusting my instincts.

But weren't you initially fond of this Hollywood project?

Yeah, because I liked the script and had a fairly good idea of how it could be cast. But, ultimately, it all got bogged down; there were disagreements over casting. There seem to be two reasons to make an independent film. One is as a calling card, so you can enter the more mainstream industry. The other is that it just suits your nature: you can think and do better work when you don't have to respond to a number of other people. I've become so used to having complete control over my own work that entering a studio-driven project will inevitably be fraught with all sorts of difficulties.

You're also accustomed to working with what could be called your own repertory company. Given your working method, I'd imagine that it would be difficult to have to deal with actors who, at least in your view, weren't appropriate for the material.

That's so important. There's a certain degree of necessary self-delusion that goes with filmmaking. You have to be ready to shoot. You have to believe that you're the right person to do it. And sometimes you have to believe that someone is the right actor to play in it. Somewhere deep inside you, you know that may not be the case. But once a project assumes a certain momentum, you have to go with it. And that's when it becomes frightening, because then we lose our rational instincts and you surrender to what you need to believe in to get the project done. It happens all the time, and it's then that mistakes can be made.

What kind of assistance or feedback did you receive from Russell Banks while you were working on the script?

It was very important to have Russell's approval and support, even though it wasn't contractually necessary or anything I needed to do. But since it was the first time I was doing an adaptation, and I was making some major departures from the book, I wanted to get a sense that he felt that I was keeping its spirit. I should use this opportunity to talk about the collaboration I have with the script editor, Allen Bell, who I've been working with on all my films since Family Viewing. When I told Allen what this film was about, he said that it sounded like a modern version of the pied piper. This sent goose pimples up and down my arm, because I realized what an amazing controlling metaphor that could be, and I went out and reread the Browning book. Though this seemed so beautiful and rich, it was important for me to have a response from Russell as well. He loved it and became quite envious of it; he felt that it was something he might have used if he had thought of it. Since I had claimed complete authorship for all of my previous films, I wanted to feel that I was being true to what Russell intended. But he never raised an eyebrow or said that I was moving in a strange direction.

The Sweet Hereafter seems much more determined to offer the audience a sense of emotional catharsis than your early films. Unlike the straightforward trauma of the current film, the earlier films required the characters to engage in some kind of ritual or repetition compulsion.

Or family romance. Emotional immediacy is exactly the thing that makes the experiment of The Sweet Hereafter work so well. Ultimately, all you need to know is that a school-bus accident has occurred and that it's about a community before and after that accident. I wasn't really aware of how simple that fundamental sense of placement would be. Everyone knows how cataclysmic such an accident would be. There is a degree of confusion and timelessness that people will accept because the characters have lost their sense of time as well due to their grief and shock.

Although The Sweet Hereafter marks somewhat of a new direction for you, it also continues to explore the obsession with family dynamics emphasized in your other films, doesn't it? You even highlight this in your director's statement, since you explicitly link the current film with the closing scene of Exotica.

Yes. I find cinema is a great medium to explore ideas of loss, because of the nature of how an image affects us and how we relate to our own memory and especially how memory has changed with the advent of motion pictures with their ability to record experience. Our relationship as filmmakers to those issues has changed radically over the past fifteen or twenty years. And people in our society have the instruments available to document and archive their own history. In my earlier films, I was exploring this in quite a literal way. But the ways in which our ability—and our need—to remember have been transmogrified comes very much into the spirit of this film as well.

There's nothing casual about accessing memory or the way experience is evoked. There's something very self-conscious, quite determined about it—the way people manipulate or use their own experience to get things they want from other people. Or the way some people want to relate to their loss in a very immediate and private way and are threatened by having that intruded upon them. But what is great about this material is that, for the first time, the characters are really full-blooded. They're not schematically conceived. In the other films, there was a more figurative approach to the characters, because that's what those films needed. The characters were lost to themselves, so they were really just shells looking for some sort of purpose. But in this film you have some characters who know exactly who they are and what they're doing. It gives a different dimension to the piece.

Incest seemed like more of a submerged theme in your other films. In The Sweet Hereafter, it moves to the forefront.

On reading the book and working on the adaptation, it was one of those situations where something had become a cliche; the entire depiction of incest in films had become very banal and lazy. I felt that there was another experience of incest that many people have experienced, but that has not been depicted in films—instead of it being a coercive act it becomes something where distinctions are blurred. Lines are crossed, and characters find themselves in situations which are just as damaging—or more damaging—than the other kind of incest. It's more confused; guilt and responsibility are not as easy to assign. These are the incestuous relationships that perhaps have a deeper impact on the individuals involved, because they don't quite know how to extricate themselves from the situation. The reality is that if the accident hadn't occurred that relationship would probably have continued until Nicole was in her twenties and she would have been even more messed up.

As it is, I think what happens is not so much that she realizes that she's abused but rather that, seeing her father in such an extreme state of denial, and then seeing him bartering her broken body for a reward, she becomes outraged in a quiet but very determined way. So the effect is quite different than it is in the book. I also wanted to see if I could shoot an incest scene from the point of view of the person who is involved as it is occurring. That scene in the barn is my attempt to show how Nicole would have described that scene at that particular moment. It's challenging for the viewer, because you're not quite sure how to evaluate it. But I think it contributes to the extraordinary power of the ending.

So the point was to compress the experience in one shot so the event takes on a greater resonance by the end of the film?

In some ways, it's not dissimilar from the way the accident itself was shot—from Billy's point of view, as Billy would have experienced it at that moment. As opposed to the more expected Hollywood money-shot point of view, which would be to cover that accident from as many angles as possible, and to try to experience the visceral effect of what it would be like to be in that bus. That wasn't where I wanted to position that camera. As an independent filmmaker, I have the privilege of being able to construct this incredible stunt and shoot it with only one camera from quite far away. I don't think a studio would have ever allowed me to do that.

Jonathan Rosenbaum links your work to films by other Canadian filmmakers like Guy Maddin and David Cronenberg, who treat incest as a symptom of puritanism and repression.

It's perhaps a cliche to think that we're all bundled up so we play with each other. But, perhaps it's fair to say that one of the residual affects of our colonial experience is a very particular view we have of parents or people who are in positions of responsibility. We are all just now understanding our relationship to both what the explicit British colonial influence in Canada was and what the American cultural colonial experience continues to be. We probably have to define ourselves through that very complex relationship between those two forces.

Do you view the concept of the ‘sweet hereafter’ as a utopian antidote to repression?

Of course, because it is a community that is entirely virtual and that exists entirely on principles that the individuals need to sustain themselves in that community. Certainly, at the end of the film, Nicole has arrived at a point where what she does effectively destroys the community as it existed before but paves the way for a new one. To me, that's what makes it such a crowning moment. It's a complete reappropriation of her own dignity by that decision.

There's also a connection between what seems to be the father's key line in Family Viewing—“I like to erase.” Nicole's struggle is against erasure.

Yes. It's a struggle against cultural and personal erasure.

After reading the novel, I was struck by the fact that all of the characters, even the less intelligent ones, were unusually self-conscious. I'm sure that this must have appealed to you, but it's also apparent that you've restructured the novel so that Mitchell Stephens becomes the central character. Russell Banks seemed to regard him as only one link in the narrative chain.

I guess it was just the way I read the book. When I noticed that character, I became very inspired by him. As a director, I'm always drawn to the characters who are close to conducting themselves in the way that I do. There's an aspect of my job that involves manipulating people, that involves trying to seduce people and gather people and follow me into a project. In a way, I, like any filmmaker, am a pied piper. You try to seduce people in order to get money, you try to seduce a crew, you try to seduce a cast. It's all very much about having other people believe that you have a vision that's worth dedicating themselves to. So when I encountered Mitchell Stephens, with his audacity of going into this town and believing that he had an answer for their grief with his claims of moral responsibility, there was something that made me feel very uneasy, yet quite sympathetic towards him and his projected mission.

I understand you were quite impressed by Holm's performance in Pinter's The Homecoming. How did that influence your decision to cast him in The Sweet Hereafter?

One of the thrills of working with Ian was being in such close contact with someone who had worked with Pinter—one of my gods. One of the best gifts he gave me after the shooting was over was a signed edition of The Homecoming. He's a remarkably generous man.

Of course, with the exception of Calendar, all of the previous films have been set in Toronto. The more pastoral milieu of The Sweet Hereafter also transforms your view of the characters. Your earlier films seemed to focus on the erosion of community, as traditional communities were replaced by so-called ‘virtual communities’ governed by technology.

They have a sense of community; they know where they're from. They're not lost like urban individuals. This, more than anything else, was the gift Russell Banks gave me. I've never lived in a town like that and I wouldn't have known how to begin telling a story based in a town like that. In making the adaptation, there was a huge challenge, which is that this community is, in some ways, quite virtual and unrealistic. In order for the drama to work, we have to feel that the children of the town completely disappear. If you look at it realistically, there is a school bus picking up kids from the outskirts of town, and there must be a central community, there might be kids who don't need to take the school bus and who just walk to school. So the town is bigger than you feel in the film and yet you never see that.

That's why in doing the adaptation, I couldn't show the crowd scenes, I couldn't show the funeral. If we represented the whole town, we'd diminish the dramatic effect of the story. A writer has the privilege of being able to do that because he's able to emphasize particular people so the background becomes abstract. But the moment you train a camera on a huge fairground and see other children, it takes away the fairy tale-like feeling that I wanted to create.

And your choice of a wide-screen format gives the film the feel of an intimate epic.

Yes, and this large canvas that you have gives you a feeling of vastness. There's no question that it transforms scenes to an epic level. And there's also this relationship to other films about strangers coming into town.

Some of the casting seems to reflect your fondness for narrative ambiguity. For example, was it accidental that the actress who portrayed Alison looked quite a bit like Nicole?

That was entirely intentional and very much a part of my casting. That's what Stephens is spooked by as well. It's probably why he confesses to her as much as he does.

Didn't a controversy erupt when you decided to show The Sweet Hereafter at a benefit for your son's school?

It only generated controversy among the people who were subjected to it. That was a classic example of complete denial—showing this at a benefit to a group of parents who every morning send their children off to a school bus was a perverse decision. But it was not intended to arouse the degree of shock that it did. Russell told me that he couldn't understand how someone who had just had a child could have made this film. I couldn't understand what I was doing until the film was finished and I had some distance.

It would seem accurate to term The Sweet Hereafter your most affirmative film. For example, both Christina in Exotica and Nicole in the current film have been traumatized by incest. But Christina is unable to transcend her childhood trauma, while Nicole succeeds in breaking through and changes. Speaking Parts, on the other hand, could be termed your most pessimistic film.

Absolutely—and The Adjuster as well. Although if you look back at the really early films, like Next of Kin, there's a bit more optimism. I think that The Adjuster went about as far as you could go in rendering the characters almost completely absurd because of their inability to define themselves. There was something quite humorous at some level about the repetitive patterns of behavior that the people were forced to reenact over and over again. Emotionally, the films are obviously quite bleak. There's not really any invitation to identify with any of the characters. As a matter of fact, you're always very aware of the fact that you're watching them, and that becomes what those experiences are about. They're very much about watching, and what happens when a relationship is entirely conducted through a lens, either in a literal or a figurative sense. In a way, the censor's relationship to the images she sees in The Adjuster are characteristic of how all of those relationships work. Material is gathered in an archive, and then stored and preserved.

Were these sequences focusing on censorship in The Adjuster your critique of the practices of the Ontario censorship board?

Yes, this also refers to my own experiences of being censored as a journalist. It is not as extreme as it once was. After the film was made, Tokyo Decadence was banned. The censorship board is a fascinating organization, because there's this casualness about the way the board defended themselves. They had this idea that they existed because there was a need to defend certain social values. Though Toronto was a very liberal city, they're a provincial board, and they felt they had a wider mandate to defend the interest of a wider cross section, people who wouldn't go to art cinemas in Toronto.

In the early Eighties, when I was a student at the University of Toronto, we were experiencing the most vicious period of censorship. It was around the time that The Tin Drum was banned. I wrote an article about that for a student newspaper and met Mary Brown, who at the time was the head censor. She took me to this room and showed me what she called the shock reel. It was literally a reel that had all the scenes that had been cut and were then pasted together. Of course, this was designed to place the viewer in a state of shock. After the lights came on, she came into the theater, and said rather smugly, “And now you know what we do.” That experience was so important because it was so absurd. At that moment, I wanted nothing more than to agree with her, because those were images that I would never want to see. But those images were completely out of context, and some of them were culled from films that I later saw in their complete versions.

It would be absurd, for example, to evaluate In the Realm of the Senses only from the vantage point of the castration scene.

Yes—or you could make similar points about Salo. That idea of context, and the way in which you see an image, are issues which are really important to me and they are certainly ideas that become part of the narrative structure. I like to replay scenes, moments, or ideas from different viewpoints that challenge the viewer to question the authenticity, not only of where the material or where the images are sourced from, but why those people need to express those views.

That takes us back to The Sweet Hereafter, where we have Mitchell Stephens, a character who is similar to the title character of The Adjuster in some ways. While Noah Render was completely numbed by his own lack of self-awareness, and is not particularly a bright man, Mitchell Stephens is a brilliant lawyer who is able to manipulate and to adapt his course, depending on whom he's confronted with. And yet, he's not a wise person. Unlike Nicole, Mitchell is just destined to repeat an immediately satisfying occupation—immersing himself in other people's grief, but without really understanding how to deal with, in the longer term, his profound sense of loss.

The consistency of your work is remarkable. The deliberate blurring of Nicole and Alison is almost a throwback to the beginning of Speaking Parts, a film where the viewer has a great deal of difficulty in distinguishing the two female protagonists for about the first ten minutes.

It's a problem that other filmmakers don't seem to run into as much as I do. But viewers do feel confused by similarities and parallels in my films. Any viewer is very sensitive to the attitudes that a filmmaker has when making an image. And because I'm so aware of the construct, image, and presentation of characters, and because there's something so delicate about that, people approach my characters with a degree of caution. In a film like Speaking Parts, which is so aggressively mystifying, you are quite untethered in making those decisions. You don't necessarily have anyone pointing you in one direction or another. That's what the film is about, ultimately, the fact that people resemble each other and have the ability to play certain roles based on their ability to remind someone of someone else.

It's always a matter of finding a form or texture which reflects the underlying psychology of what the film is about. In Speaking Parts, it was about substitution, projection, and people living with other people as images and being able to trade or barter those images. The film has to reflect that. So, almost by definition, it couldn't be an easy film to watch. It couldn't be a film where identification was made comfortable or simple. There are films that could deal with those issues so that the viewer might be more immediately entertained. But the residual effect on the viewer's subconscious might not be as strong.

There's a sense in which reality has caught up with what seemed to be the sci-fi premise of Speaking Parts—a world of constant surveillance and instantaneously accessible image banks. I recently heard about a college student who voluntarily subjects herself to twenty-four hour video surveillance through the Internet.

One article I remember reading around that period involved a man whose parents had divorced. He wanted to show his son how happy his parents had been before they became divorced, so he brought his divorced parents together and recreated videotapes of their family life so he could show his son. It probably had an enduring affect on my sensibility.

Surveillance is usually thought of as Orwellian, but in your early films the characters are quite complicit with their own surveillance.

This is a way that the characters find out things. In Family Viewing, there's a real ambiguity about the role of technology. It's the means by which the father controls the family, but it's also ultimately the way in which the boy recovers his past. It's very easy to take a moralistic position and condemn these technologies, but the fact is that they are with us. It's a question of educating people how to use the technology, instead of demonizing technology or allowing it to become casual. It's important to understand how unusual those things are.

I've been editing this Yo-Yo Ma film, and I'm shocked that all this technology really does, despite the fact that it allows us to do something so much faster than it was ever possible to do with a Steenbeck, is make us more anxious. It's not as though we're using the extra time we're given to allow ourselves to rest or to reduce our stress. It's as though there's this lag between what the technology can provide and our own ability to absorb and understand it.

At the risk of sounding simplistic, the ambivalence towards technology in theorists like McLuhan or filmmakers like David Cronenberg might lead one to think that this position is typically Canadian.

As a culture, we are so completely overwhelmed by our access to American identity through technology. All of our major cities are no more than 200 miles from the border. From a very young age, we've all been bombarded with images of a culture that's not ours but seems to mirror certain aspects of our upbringing. But we're fundamentally different in many ways; in order to understand ourselves, we've had to understand our own relationship to these images which have completely crept into our cultural and social makeup.

And, of course, your early films, particularly Next of Kin and Family Viewing, are about both national identity and ethnic identity.

Right. I'm aware that I'm a person who came to this country from another culture and had to form an identity in order to think of myself as an assimilated Canadian. Even though I am very much a part of the mainstream fabric of English Canada, I'm aware of what I had to go through to become that way. That predisposes one to think of identity in a general sense as a construct. My suspicion about what it means to be natural has been an ongoing concern.

In his recent memoir, Black Dog of Fate, the Armenian-American poet Peter Balakian observes that he was encouraged to become “more American than the Americans.” As an Armenian who was encouraged to become totally assimilated, do you see any similarities to your own experience?

That speaks very directly to me. My strongest experience in childhood probably comes from being settled in a town where we were the only Armenian family there and then having to reconstruct myself as an English boy. And learning all those traits and absorbing them so completely that I was more English than the English or thought I was.

Calendar quite deliberately circled around Armenian history; the viewer has to fill in the blanks. You don't mention the Armenian genocide, for example.

Yes, that was quite deliberate. It's a fundamental issue which I'm very nervous about treating casually. It's very interesting the response that some Armenians have towards The Sweet Hereafter, because they almost see it as being a clear metaphor for the genocide. That never even occurred to me when I considered my own attraction to the story. When I hear that, it seems almost obvious. But I was so thankful that this didn't occur to me while I was making the film or I would have analyzed it excessively.

The Armenian genocide hasn't just been repressed. It's this very curious type of denial where, in the face of so much openness about the nature of holocaust, the Armenians are in a curious position where the perpetrators have never really admitted it. There's a vagueness about the whole event. And, as it recedes more and more into our history, as the century has found other events to deal with, the necessity about determining what happened in Armenia at the turn of the century seems to be diminished. Yet, as an Armenian, its emotional consequences are still overwhelming.

Your TV film, Gross Misconduct, has never been released here. The subject, a family's relationship with hockey, would appear to be quintessentially Canadian.

That is one of the best Gothic stories to emerge from this country. It's an incredible, true story about this young boy from a small town in northern Canada whose father always dreamed that he would be a hockey player and trained him with an incredible degree of violence—the father was quite psychotic. He hammered this obsession with hockey into the boy until he was finally invited to join the NHL. On the night he was playing his first big league game that was supposedly being broadcast across the country, the father in the small town turned on his TV only to find out that it wasn't being broadcast in the western part of the country. He flipped out, took a gun, drove to the local TV station and held it hostage and demanded that they broadcast the game. At the very moment that his son was being interviewed between periods on each network, the RCMP ambushed the station and shot the father dead. It could never really make it to network TV in the U.S. because it's a fractured narrative.

Although your films often deal with eroticism, you've avoided explicit sexuality. Exotica is, after all, about striptease. The desire to stimulate the viewer's imagination relates to what has been called the ‘interactive’ nature of your films.

It always surprises me that you can conceive of an erotic scene, but the moment you actually shoot it and construct it, it immediately reduces its ability to excite. And yet, what's interesting about Exotica is that it's interactive in that you know the film is going to unfold in a certain way and you have to determine what you're feeling in response to what you know is inevitable. The film will continue to give out information and give out scenes and give out glimpses of these characters. That is much more attractive, in a way, than a situation where you are genuinely interactive, when you control the narrative.

That's what a lot of filmmakers had to contend with about ten years ago with the advent of the CD-ROM. It was thought that maybe this whole aspect of storytelling would become redundant now that we just need to think of drama as an interactive video game. It's not anywhere near as compelling as having to determine what your relationship to a predetermined story is. One of the results of having a child is that you realize that little human beings want stories. They want to imagine those stories in relationship to images they have as opposed to some controlling set of images.

I read that you were quite taken with Cronenberg's Videodrome. Do you see any affinities between that film and your own work?

I didn't think I was influenced by the film when it first came out. In fact, I had some problems with it. Looking back on the film now, I realize that it did have a tremendous influence on me. This notion of how we are encouraged to hallucinate and the idea that there are shadow worlds that exist in tandem with our reality was, for me, the most compelling aspect of Videodrome. It seems like a very simple film, but what it proposes is very shocking in a literal way. I think the difference between David's work and mine probably is that he gave up a certain formalism, much to his commercial success. His early films, Crimes of the Future and Stereo, are very esoteric, and he just turned away from that very early in his career. He realized that, if he was to continue making films at that time, he had to work within the horror genre. That gave him a certain freedom to take the conventions of that genre and, of course, delusion is quite an accepted motif within horror films. Videodrome explored that in quite a strident and brilliant way. There were also other films which explored this, such as Godard's Numero Deux.

Your admiration for hallucinatory narratives evokes an observation you made some years ago in which you claimed that “nothing is more artificial than mainstream realism.”

I don't know whether I would still agree with that. Mike Leigh has been one of the filmmakers who has really had an impact on me since I made that statement. I was on the jury at Cannes last year and found his use of realism in Secrets & Lies quite a devastating experience. Everyone makes images the way they need to make them. I would be foolish to say that there's nothing more artificial than mainstream realism—it's just artificial to me. I'm completely swayed by the sincerity of many images, which actually allows me to enjoy a film like Private Parts. In a perverse way, it's quite sincere. It's very arrogant to be prescriptive about how a film should be made, because one can always be surprised.

There's an interesting contrast between your films and Leigh's character-driven movies. it's always been possible to offer thumbnail sketches of Leigh's characters, while you've always viewed the characters with a great deal of detachment.

I've always felt that my own characters were in a place where they didn't quite understand what their own feelings were and what they had to contribute to any relationship. And, in a way, that's an enduring influence of my early exposure to the theater of the absurd, playwrights like Ionesco, Genet, and Pinter. They assumed that there was an inherent mystery in the meeting of any two people and that there is a whole nest of motivations and reasons that are completely belied by the casualness of that meeting. In my early films, I wallowed in that; that was a very exciting place for me to explore. I am naturally attracted to the grotesque and extremes of human behavior—the extent that people will go to convince themselves that something is normal and the casualness with which people will embark on modes of behavior which, in any other context, would be quite aberrant.

In Exotica, for example, there's this man who goes to this sex club every night. There's something quite habitual about that and he doesn't quite understand the damaging affect of this type of behavior merely because he's allowed himself unquestioned access to repetition. We think we've found a way of coping with our sense of grief, but in fact we've only distorted it; we're only reflecting it until we think that we've absorbed it. It doesn't cease to astonish me how I can show a film as intimate as Calendar and find that these images, which seem so hermetic and drawn from a seemingly unapproachable personal history, can make themselves public and people can draw from it and find emotional sustenance.

I've always wanted to resist films which have the ability to make people think that what they're seeing is real. Maybe I'm grown out of that at this point. And certainly the challenge in The Sweet Hereafter was to create a very vivid sense of what this community was about and who these people were within a very unorthodox structure. It's completely nonlinear, but because you have a strong sense of who the people are and what the community is about and what the central event is, you have tremendous freedom to play with that structure.

Of course, New Wave directors like Resnais also liked to fracture time. Was this stylistic choice an intuitive decision?

There's no great design. For me, it's the most natural way of telling a story. I love weaving time, because I want to be surprised by the images I make. When I write in a linear way, it seems to detract from my desire to actually direct the film. There's not a lot left to discover when I feel that the story is unfolding from point A to point B. I don't have a problem watching those movies or reading those scripts. But when I'm asked to write or make that kind of film, I get very impatient. I find it more exciting when I'm not entirely sure what the alchemy of it all will be and I have to shoot those images and put them together and find out. There's an element of surprise, there's also a greater risk of failure. All of that drives me on.

And the convoluted structure of a film like Speaking Parts satirizes how talk shows trivialize both historical and personal issues and transform them into entertainment.

Yes, it's very prescient about what's happened to our culture since 1988. On shows like Jerry Springer's, there's this notion of the confessional, the staged moment where the truth is supposedly uncovered in public on television. All the work we do as dramatists to formulate a story seems to be obliterated by the way this type of communication has taken over our imagination. It bludgeons us into taking sides and seems to be the antithesis of what drama can do.

What's perverse about Speaking Parts is that the producer actually has a point. He's taken what is probably a very uninteresting and melodramatic script written by Clara and changes it into what may well be quite an innovative television program. Does that give him the right to take that story? And who has the responsibility to tell the story and at what point does the own person's talent or vision weigh on their right to keep that story and to be the conveyor of it. That is a very provocative issue for me. In Speaking Parts, you have a premise which deals with helplessness—our society is divided into people who make images and people who watch images. Authority is granted to people when they have the ability to turn themselves into producers. Nicole succeeds in producing her own history by the end of The Sweet Hereafter. She takes the format of a talk show where people are encouraged to tell the truth and then subverts it. I was really inspired by her ability to reconstruct her own sense of experience.

It's more hallucinatory in Speaking Parts. When Clara appears at the talk show, we imagine that she shoots herself or Lance imagines that she shoots herself. We're not quite sure whose inhabiting what role. That whole last reel is just a bombardment of various images and projections.

Did you consciously avoid the shot/reverse shot pattern in your earlier films? You often followed a close-up with a moving camera shot.

Coming from theater, I was very unsettled by the idea of manipulated time and the ease with which you could distort and break the moment of observation. What was powerful about a camera was the way it looked, and the moment you cut away from its look, you diminished the responsibility of the gaze. I was very consumed with that for the longest time. All of my earlier films continued to deal with characters who felt lost. I thought that the camera was the way to embody the look of that person as they watched the people they left behind. I was very attracted to long unblinking shots where you would really feel the power of observation. I felt that cutting away would corrupt that. It might have been that, on a purely technical level, I didn't understand coverage. I didn't go to film school, no one had really explained it to me. No one ever told me what I was doing was wrong. But I certainly learned from some very obvious mistakes in film grammar that I made during the early shorts.

I feel that cinema syntax is based on images that we project in our own mind when we dream. This is probably the reason why we found a grammar for cinema so quickly, as opposed to the other arts, where it took centuries of evolution to find and determine notions of perspective. Cinema came really quickly, because I think we found an instrument that allowed us to conjure the way we dream. And, perhaps, in our unconscious state, we have an 180-degree line that we don't cross. And maybe we use master shot coverage in our dreams. I guess we'll never really know that for sure. But it seems only natural that cinema, which has remained so unchanged since the beginning of the art form, conforms to something that we've all been watching for eons. And that's why a lot of those experiments of the New Wave, which tried to break those conventions, never really took hold.

Since you're a cinephile, I suppose there's always a tension between film history and your personal vision. You once mentioned Teorema as a film that impressed you, and there are at least some superficial resemblances between the Pasolini film and Next of Kin.

Yes. I'm taken with this idea of an interloper, somebody who finds their way into an environment where you wouldn't think they would be welcome, but where they find or make their own welcome and insinuate themselves. This theme recurs in The Sweet Hereafter as well; this lawyer comes into people's homes and makes himself indispensable. Where this comes from, or why, I'm not quite sure. As a child, I was always aware of going into other people's homes and seeing how friends from different backgrounds lived their lives. I also felt that I was intruding or coming into a situation that wasn't mine.

Your work seems to have generated a certain amount of critical misunderstanding over the years. Some of your harshest critics, for example, failed to acknowledge the bleak humor of those early films, didn't they?

If you don't see the humor, you're not going to enjoy the films at all. I noticed this with Family Viewing especially. The way I can test an audience is the scene in the nursing home when the father makes a mistake about which grandmother he's giving the flowers to. There are people who take that moment really seriously and I never quite know what they can make of the rest of the film. There's an obliviousness that the characters have to the consequences of their actions which is very funny.

The early films were considered ‘cold’ by certain critics and viewers.

It has continued to an extent with The Sweet Hereafter, but less so. I just find it really odd, because, for me, a film like Speaking Parts is operatic!

You cannot get warm and cuddly with the films. That's maybe what people are talking about; they can't simply sit back and have a story told to them and identify and lose themselves. They have to be always aware of their position and their relationship to these images. There are people who will even see this new film, and given what the subject matter is, find it distant and not really understand that, if it wasn't distanced, it'd be a TV movie! The more classical way to shoot this is to be right up there, with them, whatever that means. I'm always aware of certain things: Why am I shooting this? What is it about this story that needs to be shown? What am I hoping to achieve by depicting these people? If that means that I'm a formalist, fine. Formalism is a concern with the process of depiction and that informs every gesture I'll ever make in movies.