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Atom Egoyan talks about his new film, Adoration

Auteur’s 12th feature stars wife Arsinée Khanjian and Scott Speedman

by Paul Chaderjian

Published: Saturday May 02, 2009

Writer and director Atom Egoyan on the set of Adoration. . Sophie Giraud / © Adoration Productions. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. All Rights Reserved

Beverly Hills, Calif. - Atom Egoyan's 12th feature film, Adoration, opened in Los Angeles and New York on May 1.  The film will open in other cities across the United States in the weeks ahead.

The Canadian-Armenian director-writer-producer was born in Egypt in 1960 and grew up on the western edge of British Columbia, Canada. His films are familiar to audiences around the globe. He has scored nearly 50 top prizes for his films, received two Oscar nominations, and won multiple Canadian Academy Awards. His movies have premiered and competed at Cannes.

Adoration, in classic Egoyan style, explores how individuals connect to one another. The film is about an orphaned Toronto teen named Simon (played by Devon Bostick) who reads an actual news story of terrorism to his class and pretends that he is a key part of it. The story – concerning a 1986 incident in which a Jordanian man put a bomb in the luggage of his pregnant girlfriend – is also posted on the Internet. The intriguing reactions and dialogue that ensue help Egoyan explore how humans connect with one another, technology, and the world. (See Vincent Lima's review in the Armenian Reporter.)

Armenian Reporter: Why Adoration and why now?

Atom Egoyan: Because I've been thinking a lot about when I started writing plays. Our son, Arshile, is at the age now when I started writing plays, and it became this really huge revolution for me that I could actually dramatize things in my life, and I put on these plays for my friends, and parents, and school, and, of course, if I was doing that now it wouldn't be enough. I'd want more people to see it, and I would presume that I could get more people to see it because of this strange invention called the Internet, which allows anyone to post and find a global audience if people are paying attention.

Creating drama around loss

So I started to write about a boy who is orphaned and wanted access to his parents, and the only way he could find that access is through creating drama around it. And that wasn't quite working the way I wanted to. It wasn't developing properly, and I reacquainted myself with this story that I remember happening in 86, where this Jordanian man put his lover, his pregnant girlfriend, onto an El Al flight. She was pregnant with his child, and, unbeknownst to her, he had put a bomb in her handbag. And I remember thinking that was the most evil, unimaginable act that any person could do to an unborn child.

Then I thought, What if this character, whose father has been demonized, suddenly imagines that he is that child, and uses that as a way of exploring his own lineage? And where the mother has been completely transformed into an angel, and where the father has been transformed into an absolute demon? And then a teacher, who gives him the story, seeing the reaction, encourages him. And why would she encourage him? Then questions begin to arise, and you find yourself suddenly in the midst of it, and that's what happens.

You start to explore something, and suddenly it raises other issues – much like my previous works. Ararat, for instance, started to be written as a conventional historic drama, and then that raised certain issues and then you explore that, and you try to always ask yourself, Why is this fascinating to you? Is that relevant? Is that story worth being told? You make those decisions and then decisions about at what scale you tell it. How many people are you expecting to watch it? – because it is business, you have to be aware of that. You have to be responsible to that.

So it's a series of considerations that are both intuitive and also rational. The intuitive side of you, as an artist, is trying to have your antenna, feelings, your culture, and compel you to determine the issues that are most important and pressing. But then there's this whole other side, which is quite rational, which is based on the business of filmmaking.

AR: So what started as the idea of this one character, and his truth, gave birth to a couple of themes you're talking about in Adoration, including how this character embellishes the truth, and how as humans we present ourselves as something other than our true selves. Talk about those themes.

Constructing a personality

AE: Those themes are the themes of surrogates, the themes of, actually, how you get access to places that you're not supposed to be in. I think some of that comes from my experience as an immigrant. I remember being in Victoria, and wanting to fit in. There wasn't an Armenian community to speak of, and so I really wanted to assimilate, yet I was different than most of the other people in that very homogenous, Anglo-WASP society.

So that process of constructing yourself and taking up certain manners and learning another character so well that it became your own was part of my upbringing, and I think it's part of a lot of immigrants' upbringing. A lot of them have the assurance of a community to situate themselves in. But once you have that experience, you become aware of the possibility that our characters and our personalities are constructions. It's a way you begin to see things. Sometimes I wish I didn't respond that way, but it's a natural process for me to ask that question which Christopher Plummer asks Raffi in Ararat: "What has brought you to this place?"

There's a multitude of different narratives that we bring to a moment, where we interact with someone else. Some will remain mysterious. Others will become really obvious, and I'm fascinated by the mystery of a meeting between any two people. It's loaded with so many different possibilities and ways it can go. And in many of these dramas it doesn't go the way you think it might or it should. And that can seem really troubling or disturbing. And things don't resolve the way they should. They don't have the desired affect, and that is true and warped as well.