Okay, ‘return’ might be a questionable choice of wording, because, after all, the Toronto filmmaker hasn’t really gone anywhere ­- except perhaps to the Big Apple, where this summer he remounted his theatrical production of Samuel Beckett’s Eh Joe, starring Liam Neeson.

But, with his latest feature Adoration set to unspool at TIFF following its Cannes bow, the buzz declares that the new film is a return to form for the cerebral director. Many critics were nonplussed by his last two films – projects that, on paper anyway, could fit into well-worn genres: a noirish mystery (Where the Truth Lies) and a historical epic (Ararat).

But in execution, explains the 48-year-old director, speaking in his office in a southwest Toronto neighborhood, they were as idiosyncratic as his earlier works, which were tackled from an arts council, ‘film as creative expression’ mindset – albeit on much bigger budgets.

‘So much of [Truth] came through a now very recently closed-up loophole in English tax law that [producer Robert Lantos] was able to skillfully negotiate,’ Egoyan explains. ‘And so even though we had that sort of a budget ­[$30 million] – and certainly you can see that on screen – it still wasn’t made with the traditional pressures that a film of that budget would have, for better or worse. That film was still being made with a degree of autonomy. That and Ararat were really anomalies that way.’

No doubt audiences’ expectation of genre convention colliding with auteurist sensibility in Truth and Ararat frustrated many viewers, contributing to the soft response both movies received.

Well, with Adoration, people will know pretty much what they’re in for, and that is a pure Atom Egoyan film. Made on a budget shy of $6 million (far less even than Ararat’s $15 million), Adoration tells the story of teenaged Simon (Devon Bostick), who is urged by his mysterious French teacher Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian, who is married to Egoyan) to pretend that a story read in class – concerning a husband who packed up his wife with a bomb, intending to blow up a plane full of passengers – involved his parents.

Egoyan’s script explores some of his favorite themes, such as family histories, the notion of identity, and the unraveling of people’s motivations. Structured in a typically non-chronological way, it’s doubtful the film will win the director many new fans, but it will likely please many of his old ones.

Egoyan won’t engage in any of the ‘return to form’ talk. Rather, he will say that Adoration marks a return to some of the subject matter in older films such as 1989’s Speaking Parts – both deal with how technology impacts the way we connect with one another. But of course technology has evolved so much in the interim. The digital revolution has provided a wealth of fresh fodder to Egoyan’s oeuvre, as the archiving of one’s life on video-enabled phones and group discussions on the Internet figure prominently in Adoration.

And technology is not all that has changed over the course of Egoyan’s career. He has witnessed a sea change in the distribution business. In earlier years, filmmakers would do the festival circuit with film rights up for grabs, in the hopes of inciting a bidding war. But with a glut of product and fewer distribution players today, that is a risky strategy.

And so, at the insistence of Lantos – executive producer of Ararat (red-hot prodco The Film Farm are the producers), as well as the film’s domestic distributor through Maximum Films, and a longtime Egoyan supporter – the ever-crucial U.S. rights were sold to Sony Pictures Classics before Cannes, taking the heat off.

The world is bullish on the new film, with distributors in territories including Germany, Latin America, Australia, the U.K., Israel, India, South Africa, Portugal, the Middle East, Greece, the former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Romania subsequently jumping on board. All that’s left for Egoyan to do at TIFF is gab with a few reporters.

The dilemma, then, is how to market Egoyan’s $6-million auteur statement. The players involved are currently exploring different scenarios. While there still might be a critical mass of filmgoers in Europe who will see a film for its director, North America is a harder nut to crack. Take for example Vicky Christina Barcelona, the excellent new feature from Woody Allen. Local TV ads for the film quite deliberately omit mention of the film’s towering maker – something that would have been unheard of 20 years ago.

Are auteurs dead?

‘They may well be,’ says Egoyan. ‘I don’t think that’s the way to necessarily sell a movie anymore. There are times perhaps when that almost becomes an impediment, because people already feel that they’ve got that filmmaker figured out.’

It might interest you to know that Egoyan, who has been able to find funding for his self-expression for more than two decades now, is hot to work in Hollywood. Why? Well, because he never has, and because he is fascinated by the notion of seeing how his style would function within ‘the system’. Not like Where the Truth Lies, which critics erroneously called his attempt at commercial cinema, but rather he would take on someone else’s script, as his mentor David Cronenberg has done to such spectacular effect on A History of Violence and Eastern Promises.

There are rumors of an Egoyan/Hollywood project going in the fall.

‘I just have to get it out of my system at some point,’ the director says.

Now that would be an exciting new chapter in the director’s continually unfolding career.