If there is a heaven for Canadian film, Atom Egoyan is surely eligible for sainthood. Since his first short in 1979, Egoyan has gone on to write and direct some of the most acclaimed movies in the history of Canadian cinema, including The Sweet Hereafter, Felicia’s Journey, Exotica, Calendar, and Ararat. (His next film, Adoration, is currently in post-production for a 2008 release.) In recent years, Egoyan has become involved in a variety of other art fields as well, directing for the Canadian Opera Company and creating acclaimed art installations.
Egoyan is also in his second year of a planned three-year stint teaching at the University of Toronto. Transgressions: An Approach to Interdisciplinary Practice, is an undergraduate course comprised of 12 students from four art disciplines (music, cinema, visual arts, drama). On a chilly January afternoon, he agreed to discuss his course, the Canadian film industry, and the artistic possibilities of digital media.
The Varsity: This is your second year teaching at U of T. How did this job originally come about?
Atom Egoyan: Well, it came about when [University College drama director] Pia Kleber approached me because I was giving a lecture on campus a few years ago about Samuel Beckett’s work. She saw how engaged I was and how much I enjoyed communicating these ideas, and she was familiar with the work I’d been doing with the COC and opera. I think what a lot of people don’t realize is that I’m as involved lately with these other art forms as I am in film. I was really excited about making connections, and she got excited about the idea of bringing that curiosity to U of T, selecting students from different disciplines, and making those type of connectionsm which I think were really a huge part of when I was coming here in my early twenties.I came here to study one thing and I ended up graduating wanting to do something else, and it was a result of my contact to campus theatre and the Hart House Film Board, and I was studying music as well.
[University] is a really amazing time in one’s life, and any way to facilitate those processes was interesting to me. It’s a really focused group of 12 students from four different disciplines. There’s three music students, three visual arts students, three cinema students, and three drama students, and it’s called “Transgressions,” because ultimately it’s about going places you’re “not supposed to go.”
I think what I’m doing this year, which is different from last year, is getting the students to present ideas as early as possible so that everyone’s involved in the process. Last year was more formal, lecture oriented. What we’re doing this time is making the presentations part of the course so that the ideas are fl owing through practical application. I think it’s more fun and more engaging.
TV: How are you able to meld the four different disciplines?
AE: As a filmmaker, you’re naturally using all those mediums anyhow. This year I’m in the process of shooting a film, and maybe going into another movie and also [in post-production] on a film, so they’re seeing not only how film is made, but also how music is applied. Tomorrow I’m leaving to go to L.A. to work with my composer, so the students have seen the rough tracks we use to identify where music is needed in the film, and they’re going to be at the recording session for the music that we’re doing in February.
TV: So your current film is like a teaching aid?
AE: For [music], yes, they’re seeing it at a practical level. But obviously I work with actors, I come from a drama background, and any way you can compose a shot there’s a huge background of visual arts that’s being applied. Film by nature is an art form that involves and inhabits these other spaces. But beyond that, I’ve also been involved in installation work, opera, and theatre work, and I can draw from those experiences as well. One of the places that students get most excited is in this world of installations: places where there is a cinematic element, but certainly a visual art, musical, and a dramatic element as well.
TV: I’m interested in your thoughts on the general state of the Canadian film industry, because I’m sure you know as well as anyone else that Canadian film has always had trouble establishing a commercial niche.
AE: That would be the challenge in English Canada, because we make our films in the same language, and we show them in the same theatres where you can see American products with much heavier marketing. It’s just difficult to create the same level of awareness for our own product, even if it’s better. That’s just a challenge.
TV: Sometimes there are proposals for theatres to show a mandatory number of Canadian films on a certain number of screens. Could this be a solution?
AE: I don’t think the quota system is the way to work. The way to work is to be able to promote the films as heavily as possible, and to allow them to develop through word of mouth. The problem now is that films are in and out of theatres so quickly, they don’t have the opportunity to develop. If the films are being positively received, they don’t have the time to develop their own audience. That’s the biggest challenge. The only way you can actually create a success if [the film] isthat’s not heavily, heavily marketed, is by people telling each other to check it out, but that won’t work if the film isn’t playing at a theatre.
TV: When Foolproof [an attempt in 2003 at a commercially-viable Canadian thriller, on which Egoyan served as Executive Producer] came out, it had a really big promotional campaign by Canadian standards, but when it didn’t do well at the box office, I think I detected a certain amount of glee from the Canadian press.
AE: That was because it was being marketed as an American movie, and there was a lot of attention around the fact that the film was trying to replicate an American style of marketing. The media ultimately singled that film out. When you take all that aside, it’s actually a really fun film. It’s not a “brilliant” movie, but it’s certainly as good as a lot of American product that comes out every week. The problem is it’s still not perceived as being, as…“escapist” as an American film, and I’m not quite sure why.
TV: Very often I see interviews with directors who have a strong reputation and a bunch of awards, working for 30 or 40 years, and they say that despite all of their acclaim, they still struggle to get their films financed. Since you’re working with relatively big budgets for Canadian productions, is it the same for you?
AE: Oh, yeah. But it depends. Sometimes it’s easier to get a bigger budget because the project is using bigger stars and it might be a more formulaic type of story or genre, and sometimes to get a medium budget is way more challenging, because you’re not using the industrial conventions of how something would be financed. Right now I’m waiting to see whether or not I’ll be shooting a film that might happen in a month and a half, and it’s a budget that’s entirely based on “industry” than one that is “artistically driven.” Every project has its own problems and issues. Sometimes it falls on your lap, other times it can take years. The only way it becomes easier is if you’re hugely commercially successful, and people think you have a Midas touch. For better or for worse, I’m not in that position. I mean, my films are not, you know, “blockbusters”—there’s a very specific audience for them.
TV: Do you see the filmmaking landscape in Canada as very different from when you started 25 years ago?
AE: Oh for sure, I think it’s totally different. When I started 25 years ago here on campus, there wasn’t really an independent Canadian film scene. Films were being made, but under the tax shelters provided by the Canadian government, and they were very commercially oriented. And here’s the thing, too: there wasn’t anything “cool” about making films at that point. I was one of the few people making films at the Hart House Film Board. It was difficult to get people involved and interested in filmmaking as a practice. It’s kind of weird to look at it now, because there are all these magazines about filmmaking, and all this culture around indie movies wasn’t there at all. In a way that was good, because on a practical level, you had access to the equipment: you didn’t have to line up, it was just sitting there on the shelf. There was a huge movement in student filmmaking in the ’70s, and that’s when all that equipment was purchased and set up. But by the early ’80s, that faded away, and the culture that I was graduating into was not particularly receptive to low-budget Canadian films. Today that’s totally changed, and I think with the advent of digital technology, those miniscule budgets that I made my first films for would actually be considered quite substantial today.
TV: A democracy in filmmaking is definitely emerging, with MiniDV cameras and YouTube.
AE: Yeah, it’s quite amazing. The whole mystification of the filmmaking process has been completely eradicated, and that’s only a good thing…as long as we preserve a sense that making images is special. It’s not an activity that you just toss off. Good film images are ones that are the result of a number of decisions. The real problem with digital technology is that it makes the process potentially casual, and that takes a rigour out of an important part of what filmmaking is about. The one advantage of having to pay a lot of money for film stock is that you had to choose what you wanted to shoot quite carefully. Now that’s not an issue, and perhaps that makes it difficult to focus on why you need to shoot an image. I suppose with literature, it happened long before that—anyone can write a story, and certainly with a word processor and the Net, anyone can post a story or a blog. But to strive for excellence, you have to use a very specific set of criteria, and you have to deal with selection, with a certain formation and distillation, being very concentrated in why you need to write, why you need to record the piece, why you need to film something. Those are decisions that have to be considered. They can’t be casual or else the work won’t have value.
TV: When YouTube started, I assumed that the cream of the crop would rise to the top—only the really interesting stuff would become the focus of attention. But the fact that the “Leave Britney Alone” guy has over 2 million views shows that, like any art medium, both good and bad stuff will find popularity.
AE: Sure, but I don’t think it’s a question of popularity necessarily— that’s never going to be the criterion of something that’s really excellent. We’re only talking about getting work out there. As to what its reception is, or who ends up seeing it, that’s a whole other issue. But it is true that if you make a really great film, you can actually control the broadcast and the distribution of it in a way that was unimaginable before. That has been a revolution.
