After a three-year hiatus from directing feature films, Atom Egoyan is back in preproduction on Adoration, a drama set for a Sept. 17 start date in Toronto. His eleventh movie – and seventh with producer Robert Lantos – explores familiar thematic territory for the Oscar-nominated auteur, exploring intimacy and the nature of our relationship to media.

The ensemble piece follows a high-school student who uses the Internet to misrepresent himself as a figure from recent history, drawing both students and the surrounding community into a tragedy that never happened.

It comes on the heels of Where the Truth Lies, a $30-million drama that was unexpectedly slapped with an NC-17 rating in the U.S., limiting its access to screens. That, combined with negative reviews, led to a box-office take under $1 million in North America.

Egoyan sat down with Playback in his Toronto office to discuss Adoration, the response to Where the Truth Lies, and his ongoing relationship with Lantos.

Do you think people have expectations about what an Atom Egoyan film should be?
I think films are always based on an expectation of what a director should be doing next. It’s only long after the film is over that you can actually appraise the work.

Independently of its maker…
Independent of a lot of things. I’ve found – especially in the last few years – that there’s a greater sense of what people expect me to be doing. [Points to a stack of videotapes.] These are from a retrospective they’re doing in Paris. I was watching a movie which I’d forgotten I’d made in my 20s to sustain my independent filmmaking. [At the time] I was directing Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Twilight Zone episodes, and I even did the pilot for the Friday the 13th TV series [1987].

But the most amazing thing was realizing that at a certain period I was doing these wildly different types of movies. And then suddenly I got into a pattern of [concentrating] on a certain type of feature work.

There was a fork in the road?
Yes. Now it seems to me that I’m interested in genre. Where the Truth Lies is really a film where the style is the substance. I’ll probably always try to balance projects which are personally driven with projects where I’m also enjoying my ability to create images.

Your inspirations range from the experimental – Michael Snow – to narrative, with Antonioni, Bresson, and Coppola…
As a kid growing up in Victoria, the European art films were something that I was aware of later on. But before that it was all American cinema. Not only American, but pop cinema.

One of the strongest film experiences I have ever had was going to see Norman [Jewison’s] Jesus Christ Superstar. I think it’s Norman’s greatest film. What’s really exciting about it is the way he’s moving that camera. I just thought that it was amazing that you could do that. There’s this play between a very flamboyant approach to cinema and this other side, which is very reserved. The idea of contrasting the two has always been of great interest to me.

Until Ararat, your drama about the Armenian genocide, you really didn’t have a negative response to your work.
If you were to go from The Adjuster, Calendar, Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter, Felicia’s Journey, up to and including Krapp’s Last Tape, I would say the ’90s were a very good ride. But the ’80s were full of extraordinary reactions against the work, which toughened my skin.

You need to realize that these things come in certain waves, and that there are periods where it seems you can do no wrong. Ararat may not be the best film I’ll make, but it is without a doubt the most important work I’ll ever do. Maybe it should have been written as a novel first, but that wasn’t the case.

Did you feel a greater responsibility on Ararat and Where the Truth Lies, given the bigger budgets [$12 million and $30 million, respectively]?
I can look back and definitely say that those budgets are completely on the screen. I was trying to take full advantage of [the budgets] to deal with the construction of period, and to do that as faithfully and accurately as possible.

Did you always feel in control?
I always felt in control in terms of what I set out to do, because of the team I was working with. I felt that the huge challenge in Where the Truth Lies – which had me up at night – was how do we actually shoot this film in England and Toronto and make it look like New York and Miami Beach?

Do you feel a comfort zone at a certain budget level?
This next film, Adoration, has the same sort of budget as The Sweet Hereafter [estimated at $5 million]. But like anything else, you have to set out with your investors and producers what it is you’re aiming to do. With Ararat and Where the Truth Lies, there were unusual circumstances which allowed those films to be made at those budget levels. If you’re working on a Hollywood project and you’re looking for studio money, then those terms are very different. That’s not the way that independent film, from my tradition, is constructed, but I understand that model. I’m pretty confident I could direct one of those movies, but if it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, I’m quite happy with that as well.

Adoration seems to have a lot in common with your previous films.
What excites me is that the script is open enough that I can change and modify based on what we find out as we’re shooting. That to me is the ideal kind of structure. That was a tricky thing, to be honest, with Where the Truth Lies. Because it’s a murder mystery, it was written in a very specific way. It’s the first film I’ve ever made where the edited version is almost exactly the same as the script.

Will Robert Lantos release Adoration through his new distribution company?
Yes. [That’s] a relationship that I cherish, and it’s good that’s it been able to survive. It’s unbelievable. I connected with Robert after Speaking Parts [Egoyan’s 1989 feature], and it had an unbelievable effect on my career. What was very exciting about the ’90s was the synergy between the way Alliance Atlantis was growing [Alliance Communications and Atlantis Communications, before they merged in 1998] and how the films were being marketed and sold.

Were there tense moments between you when you went to bigger budgets?
It gets tense when things are out of control, and I try and keep a degree of control on set. It’s tense when you don’t know what you want – and a lot of money is being spent for you to make decisions that should have been made long before. So I don’t find tension [from that perspective].

Both of you believed this would be the film that would break into the mainstream?
Yes. You can blame the NC-17 – which is something that we were totally not expecting. And because of how it was shot we couldn’t really change it. [Also], the first review that came out of Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter was this amazing, dream review. We read it and embraced each other. We thought, ‘That’s it. We did it.’ Then the other bad reviews started coming in.

Do you think that had an impact on box office in the U.S.?
Oh, yeah. It was huge. People had a very strong reaction against it.

How do you stay positive given the fickle nature of audience reaction?
I remember talking to David [Cronenberg] when A History of Violence was coming out, and he said, ‘Oh, they like it this time.’ He’s seen these cycles as well. I was talking to him the other day and I said, ‘I guess it’s lucky you didn’t end up doing Basic Instinct 2.’ That movie was trashed, which was going to happen no matter who directed it. So you just don’t know. You just keep making things. It’s a privilege to be able to be making movies.