Over the past quarter century, Atom Egoyan has accomplished something few others have – he has sustained a career making independent feature films that screen around the world. Given the collapsing global market for indie movies, it is a feat even fewer of the younger generation of filmmakers will be able to emulate.

His latest project, Chloe, with a budget shy of $20 million backed by France’s StudioCanal, sees the director aiming for the box-office hit that has thus far eluded him – not that commercial success has until now been the main objective for the Toronto auteur, who has made his name by exploring the darker corners of the human psyche. Even 1997’s The Sweet Hereafter, despite netting Egoyan Academy Award nominations for best director and best adapted screenplay, took in under US$6 million at the North American box office.

The production of Chloe has also been a roller coaster unlike any he has ever experienced. ‘The whole thing’s been an interesting ride,’ says Egoyan, master of understatement.

It all started a year and a half ago, when he was approached by Ivan Reitman to direct a movie. Yes, Ivan Reitman, the crowd-pleasing ex-pat producer of Animal House and director of Ghost Busters who has more than $1 billion in box office to his name.

Reitman had a script – an adaptation by Erin Cressida Wilson (Secretary) of the 2003 French drama Nathalie…, in which a middle-aged wife suspects her husband of infidelity, and hires a prostitute to try to seduce him. Reitman saw the erotic mystery as a good vehicle for the 48-year-old director if he were to eschew his trademark art-house esthetic for a more mainstream style. Impressed with the screenplay, and already friendly with Wilson, Egoyan jumped on board, marking the first time he would helm another’s feature script.

In casting the project, Egoyan landed a pair of fellow Oscar nominees: Liam Neeson, who starred in the filmmaker’s acclaimed theatrical production of Samuel Beckett’s Eh Joe last summer in New York, and Julianne Moore, who recently shot the Canadian copro Blindness. In Hollywood, he auditioned and cast 22-year-old Amanda Seyfried, at the time best known for the HBO series Big Love.

But Chloe was put on hold while Egoyan shot Adoration, a feature he had penned about the repercussions of a lie told by teenaged Simon (Devon Bostick) in which he convinces his classmates that his father (Noam Jenkins) had saddled his unsuspecting mother (Rachel Blanchard) with a bomb before she boarded a plane full of passengers.

Exploring in a non-chronological structure favorite Egoyan themes including family histories, the notion of identity and characters’ hidden motives, the film finds the director more in his oeuvre. Winner of the Ecumenical Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, it will be released through E1 Entertainment and, in the U.S., through Sony Pictures Classics on May 8.

By the time cameras finally rolled on Chloe, a couple of developments had sent expectations through the roof. Mamma Mia!, starring Seyfried in the film version of the ABBA musical, was released and became a global phenomenon, raking in more than US$600 million on worldwide screens, according to Box Office Mojo. This was followed by the appearance of Neeson’s thriller Taken, which exceeded all forecasts by taking in more than US$200 million and confirming the 56-year-old Irish actor’s continued clout.

And then, tragedy that made headlines the world over.

While the film was shooting in March, Neeson’s wife, actress Natasha Richardson, suffered a brain injury while taking a skiing lesson in Mont Tremblant, QC, and Neeson left to be with her. She passed away two days later. Those working on the film were shocked and saddened – and just a little fearful for the production’s future.

Reitman’s Montecito Picture Company, which is producing, and coproducers Jennifer Weiss and Simone Urdl – Egoyan’s assistant many moons ago – scrambled to rearrange the shooting schedule in Neeson’s absence. And then, just one week after his wife’s death, the leading man returned.

‘He’s totally committed and he’s really happy to be here,’ Egoyan told Playback in an exclusive interview on the film’s penultimate night of shooting at Toronto’s Filmport Studios. ‘This is what he feels Natasha would have wanted him to do,’ the director added.

Somewhat miraculously, the production was able to sneak its bereaved star in and out of town for the four final days completely under the radar of the international paparazzi.

That was one factor in the surprisingly light mood on set. Egoyan’s longtime collaborators, including director of photography Paul Sarossy – who’s picked up Genie Awards for Egoyan’s Exotica (1994), The Sweet Hereafter and Felicia’s Journey (1999) – and production designer Phillip Barker were in good spirits, no doubt relieved that they could complete the film with a minimum amount of disruption. There was also a palpable trickle-down effect of their top man’s warm and calm demeanor.

A bus door opened and out walked Neeson and an assistant. The actor said a quick, polite hello, and in he went. Soon afterwards, Moore arrived, and the crew proceeded to shoot a scene in which she, as a wife clinging to her marriage’s last vestiges of intimacy, clashes with her bitter husband after the surprise party she planned for him goes awry.

Egoyan is as focused on the cinematic form in his films as he is about their subject matter. That’s why he looks back on his first film, 1984’s arts council-backed Next of Kin, with mixed feelings. It tells of Peter (Patrick Tierney), a young man who impersonates the long-lost son of an immigrant Armenian family.

(Egoyan himself was born in Egypt to Armenian parents before his family relocated to Victoria, BC. He has a younger sister, Eve, who is a renowned concert pianist. Egoyan later moved eastward to attend the University of Toronto.)

‘I think the story is really good,’ he says of his debut feature. ‘But it completely failed in what I thought it would do. I thought the handheld camera and these long takes would create this eerie distancing effect, and in fact it made it much more immediate – it made it like an NFB docudrama, which was everything I was trying to resist, and everything I was fed with in my early film education.’

Above all, he recalls the experience fondly because it was while casting in Montreal that he met actress Arsinée Khanjian, the woman who would become his wife and muse. They have a 15-year-old son, Arshile, named after influential Armenian painter Arshile Gorky.

‘The biggest cliché – you fall in love with your actress,’ he says. ‘But at that point that was an amazingly powerful moment in my life, because I just thought someone like her was completely unavailable to kind of a film geek like me.’

It’s no surprise that the director is in a reflective mood about his marriage, as Chloe addresses scenarios that can unfold in a longtime union. It is also the first of Egoyan’s features in which Khanjian doesn’t appear. In Adoration, she plays a mysterious French teacher who pushes Simon into his deception. She nabbed a Genie for her lead performance as an art historian in Egoyan’s Ararat (2002).

Despite Egoyan’s own critical appraisal, he was nominated for a best director Genie for Next of Kin, and it was at the awards show where he first met Reitman, there to pick up a special achievement award. And now, all these years later, the unlikely pair are trying to craft an audience hit.

Where the Truth Lies (2005) has been perceived as Egoyan’s first stab at box-office glory, but the noirish drama is really a continuation of his personal brand of filmmaking with the window dressings of a $30-million budget and a pair of recognizable actors in Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth. The theatrical receipts indicate no different: under US$1 million in North America.

The director describes the different approach with Chloe: ‘The characters all know what they’re feeling at [any] moment, and so they express themselves clearly about what they’re feeling, as opposed to, in my films, where the characters have not resolved at all where they are, and have created subterfuges and created identities which are false.’

He points out, however, that he is not exactly new to commercial filmmaking. After all, early in his career, supporting himself while he made the features Family Viewing (1987) and Speaking Parts (1989), he took on service jobs helming episodes of TV series including Friday the 13th (he shudders at that one), Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone.

‘[Those shows] are very much about an industrial approach to coverage,’ he says. ‘[Chloe] is different because I’m using that language, but I am focusing on performances which are really exceptional and a script that is really exceptional, so that creates a different feel, and it’s what this script needs.’