SOURCE: “The Politics of Denial: An Interview with Atom Egoyan,” in Cineaste, Vol. 25, No. 1, Winter, 1999, p. 39.

[In the following interview, Egoyan describes his development of the Hilditch character in Felicia's Journey, his relationship with author William Trevor, and the influence of Alfred Hitchcock.]

Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter (1997) was the Canadian director's breakthrough film. While Egoyan had enjoyed a cult following during the 1980s, The Sweet Hereafter appeared on more than 200 ‘Ten Best’ Lists in 1998 and won him a much larger audience. The initial reception for his latest film, Felicia's Journey, while respectful, has been considerably less rapturous. This critical ambivalence can probably be attributed to assumptions that Egoyan's talent is not suited to the well-worn thriller genre and a feeling that the new film is less innovative and ambitious than The Sweet Hereafter. Cineaste interviewed Egoyan shortly before his new film's American premiere at the 1999 New York Film Festival. He clarifies his decision to adapt William Trevor's novel with his usual lucidity and states his reasons for making a film about a serial killer with an honesty that functions as an implicit reply to his critics.

[Porton:] Do you think that Felicia's Journey benefits from your status as a foreigner examining Irish and English culture? One thinks of other films about Britain made by outsiders such as Antonioni's Blowup and Skolimowski's Deep End.

[Egoyan:] When you do something from outside, you question your right to take a story and tell it. I did far more research than I really needed to do, since I saw Felicia as the embodiment of every Irish martyr in romance and literature. I went through a number of Irish writers, but inevitably you are looking at it from the outside. There's a distance and that accommodates my style very well, since there's a self-consciousness and a tentativeness to my approach.

I had to deal with my fantasy of both Ireland and the Midlands and then with the reality of what was actually there. With Ireland, there was the shock of realizing that what was in the book is very hard to find now. Ireland is very prosperous and a lot of the towns are all tarted up for the tourist industry. You'd be hard-pressed to find a place which we see in the movie; it's an Ireland from the late Eighties-early Nineties.

The bigger issue was with the Midlands, which we all have engraved in our minds from Blake as the home of “dark, satanic mills.” We expect to see faces blackened with soot and chimneys churning out sulphur. It's not like that at all. In fact, I went into a tailspin when we were scouting locations and I realized that there was nothing to distinguish the industrial parks from any in North America. But then you begin to think of how to convey Felicia's initial perception of the industrial park. For example, when Hilditch leaves the car park for the first time, there is a very slow pan around and we see her figure emerge. It's the anonymousness of it that makes it so creepy and the fact that you've decided to train a camera on something which doesn't seem to have any distinguishing features. Then you begin to look at architecture which does look strange from a North American perspective, such as the gasometers, metal Victorian structures which we never had here. And the water cooling towers, which look to us like nuclear silos, appear twice in the film. It becomes heightened and monstrous for us, since we would never have nuclear silos near a major highway!

Some of the early commentary on Felicia's Journey compares it to Hitchcock, but your style seems considerably more meditative and less manipulative.

I see the film as being anti-Hitchcockian, because Hitchcock is all about making the viewer privy to something that the characters aren't aware of. For example, in Sabotage we know that a bomb is going to go off and the characters don't. By contrast, my whole filmmaking approach is about trying to enter into the characters' experience about how they would see themselves. The suspense is more about the dislocation between how they see themselves and how they really are, as opposed to traditional Hitchcockian suspense. The only moment that's kind of a homage to Hitchcock (and I'd also say that, from that point on, the film is sort of Hitchcockian) is when Hilditch comes up the stairs and the viewer knows that he wants to kill Felicia. But I'd say that most of it is an attempt to deconstruct Hitchcock.

Hitchcock has had a huge influence on me, so I can't be totally cavalier. Certainly, when it comes to camera movement, composition, and the role of psychology in the movie, there are similarities. But it's kind of misleading for people to go in expecting a kind of Hitchcockian film.

In a way, this film is more of an essay on the rudiments of the thriller genre than an example of it.

Directors like Hitchcock seem to know what an audience expects. I can have a fantasy audience in mind, which is infinitely curious and exploratory, and wants nothing more than to be mystified and is very trustful of my intelligence. My audience is not the one that Hitchcock imagined. I assume that the audience might want to be self-conscious and I don't have any fantasies about engendering a collective response. It's antithetical to the way I work, but I imagine that Hitchcock probably found nothing more pleasurable than the monolithic nature of manipulating a large group of people in a dark room. My fantasy is based on quite a subjective journey through my projected imagery.

Perhaps there's a double edge to the film's style, since it seems that you're trying to create both a creepy ambiance and poeticize the landscape as well.

Take the conversation that the father has about Irish history within the ruins of a castle. There are two things working here. First, there's the decision that the father makes to take Felicia to that place to tell her that story. He reinforces the impact of that story by putting her in the ruins of a castle that was destroyed by Cromwell and saying that this is the nature of the English monster. Then, there is a point when she's having the abortion and has this dream where the image comes back to her. The castle, which is an edifice used for defending an idea, can be used as a prop for a father telling a story. That's not a conscious decision he made, he just thought it was the right place to take her to tell that story. But there's a latent history there that is being sourced. I find that those sort of things are really fascinating, like the moment when Hilditch takes that little mannequin and says, “Can I keep this?” He's someone who's in complete denial of consciousness, and as soon as he sees this little totem which might represent himself, he uses it to objectify himself. This becomes doubly significant when it comes back later: a shot of him waking up in the morning with this totem is intercut with shots of the castle.

The poignancy of Felicia's plight is that she's no more at home in Ireland than she is in England.

What I ultimately found so powerful about her passage is that she comes from a place where oral tradition is very important, where stories are told, where a great-grandmother speaks in an ancient tongue, letters are hand delivered and everything is done by direct contact and transmission. She then enters into this universe where she's lost, but through contact with evil and ultimately through the recitation that Hilditch gives of the names of the women that he's taken away, she uses this oral tradition to reconstruct her own dilemma. That history actually reflects her own experience and she almost has a sacred duty now to commemorate those names. That is very much based on her tradition. Irish culture is all about remembering the names, but the names that her father has given her don't have meaning for her anymore, whereas the names that she's just heard from the mouth of this killer do.

She therefore gains access to personal history rather than political history.

Exactly, which is also political history in a different way. Notions of history and retrieval are important in the film. I don't think that Hilditch has any conscious memories, except when he meets her because she's going to be a mother. He finds this disturbing, so when he steals that money from her he goes back, for the first time probably, to an actual organic memory of an original sin when he first stole money. That wallet finds its way back to the end of the film when he's digging her grave. The combination of finding this wallet and the meaning that it has, combined with having to deal with these two female evangelists staring at him, shakes him. It's not what they're saying, but the fact that they're looking at him. He has to return the gaze.

This story seems simple, but the issues are multilayered. After the structural ambitions of The Sweet Hereafter, which attempts a portrait of an entire community, I was looking for something more intimate.

Did the idea of adding the video extracts of Hilditch's victims, as well as the excerpts from his mother's cooking program, come to you early on while writing the script?

Yes. In the book, he makes reference to his victims as being part of a picture gallery. Trevor envisioned it photographically, but video seemed a natural extension of that. The way it links with the cooking-show videos is related to the fact that he comes to associate the archival evidence as providing access to a control of intimacy. He's been taught to believe that this sort of control is empowering.

Do these videotapes explain his trauma in an almost psychoanalytic fashion or does his psyche remain opaque?

I hope it's opaque—in the book it's a bit too literal. That was one of the big problems that I had with the book. The book is beautifully written, but it's actually quite reductive in terms of why Hilditch is who he is. I don't agree with Trevor's psychoanalysis.

Serial killing in our culture has become a job. Films have treated serial killers like lawyers or doctors. It's become so commonplace in our cinema that a shorthand has emerged, and part of that shorthand includes an ignorance of why some of us are genetically encoded to do these kind of things. Studies have demonstrated that if children do very sadistic things, like pulling the wings off flies, that's an indicator. But, as a child, I did certain sadistic things, like burning bugs with a magnifying glass, and I didn't become a serial killer. There are certainly upbringings that can enhance these qualities and others that can hold them in check. I'm cautious about easy explanations and this film isn't about that. All we need to know is that there's a relationship that he has with his own personal history, which is about denial. That's what interests me—the psychology and politics of denial and how that affects both of these characters. She, in a very identifiable and common way, is in the throes of first love and is unable to see how things are. She is incapable of sensing that Johnny has no feelings towards her and that he's a cad. Her denial is very clear, but his is much more submerged and we don't need to reveal it specifically. Trevor felt that he did and I find it a fault in the book.

Perhaps Trevor is stuck in a literary tradition where he has to tie up the loose ends. On the other hand, earlier in the book, the reader experiences a kind of vertigo as he attempts to figure out what's actually happening.

That's my favorite part of the book, when you don't actually know what's happening. It's kind of perverse that this was what attracted me to the book. It's sort of like the Russell Banks book where what attracted me was the demolition derby which I didn't even end up filming. In Felicia's Journey, I was intrigued with the thirty pages where she escapes and he gradually gains consciousness of the fact that she's left—and once he becomes conscious of that fact he kills himself.

Appropriately enough, Hilditch's house is both enormous and seemingly claustrophobic.

The first dolly through the house is taken from the height of a young boy wandering through the house and finally encountering himself in the kitchen. It's the same path he takes at the end as he decides to commit suicide. When you document a house that a person has travelled through many times, there are certain trajectories that are loaded.

It was a great privilege for me to create a set. I had never been able to afford one before. The nature of the films I had done before meant that I had to build rooms in warehouses and wait for trains to stop. You just don't have the control that you do when you're using a huge studio like Shepperton and I took full advantage of that. For instance, when you make a set like that and want to populate it in England, there are prop houses where they've kept everything from every film that's ever been made. I don't know if it's done here. In Canada, we don't have that depth. For instance, I needed a mixer from the 1950s and had five choices of models that had been stored; that seemed really remarkable. When you're making a period film, it's a real treat to be making it in a culture that enshrines the notion of collection.

It's quite surprising that the British press and public don't take Bob Hoskins seriously as an actor these days.

He's overexposed in England. He did a whole series of ads for British Telecom and there are a number of films that he makes for that market that we don't see. A lot of people winced when I mentioned that I was planning to use him in the film. It's not like here where he's regarded as a fine actor. He sort of reinvents himself in this film, since we're used to seeing him in very expansive roles. This is very far away from his performance in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Did you have as close a relationship with William Trevor on this film as you did with Russell Banks on The Sweet Hereafter?

It was close. I sent him drafts and we met a number of times. The main difference is that Russell loves movies and movie culture. Russell is coming to the opening tomorrow night, but William never would. He's just not into the film scene. Russell was visible and on the set and wanted to be a part of it. William enjoyed reading the drafts, but he is from a different generation and is less interested in the hype and tensions of contemporary film production.

Although the Hoskins character is the most psychotic of any of your protagonists, you've remarked that, unlike some of your other anti-heroes, he emerges successfully from a pattern of repetition compulsion.

What I wanted to say is that, unlike some of the male characters, he achieves a kind of ironic breakthrough. Certainly, some of the female characters, like Nicole in The Sweet Hereafter, do emerge from their quandaries. Most of the male characters are suspended, and he actually makes a decision to change his life by sentencing himself to death. What I find striking is the that the police will come and find this man hanging in the kitchen and these bodies in the garden. It will be publicized and people will go, “Oh, he got away with it.” But, when someone decides to kill himself, he's not getting away with it. By the end of this film, we understand that action even if we don't condone it. That's what makes the film so provocative. I love when people come up to me at the end of the film and ask, “Is it OK to feel sorry for him?”