A filmmaker needs a savvy producer-champion to help navigate the cruel waters of the commercial film industry, and Atom Egoyan is fortunate to have tied his boat to Robert Lantos early in his career.

‘I wouldn’t have had my career if it wasn’t for Robert,’ Egoyan says.

Lantos heaps praise on the filmmaker for his ‘unique eye’ and ‘immense talent,’ while Egoyan credits his frequent partner with such shrewd moves as raising $30 million for the copro drama Where the Truth Lies by taking advantage of a recently closed loophole in U.K. tax law.

It was Egoyan’s 1989 feature Speaking Parts – one of several of his films that explore the role technology plays in relationships – that made Lantos take notice.

‘That was the one that really turned me on,’ says Lantos, then CEO of Alliance Communications. ‘After that I sat down with Atom – who was intimidated by the size of Alliance and by my alleged domineering reputation – and I said, ‘Let’s make a film.”

Lantos’ interest in the young filmmaker was not part of a business strategy, but rather a personal passion.

‘He was making films unlike those made by anybody else; who had a fascinating and authentic and one-of-a-kind voice; whose films were clearly not going to attract a mainstream audience, but that were going to travel through the world,’ Lantos says.

To allay Egoyan’s fears, Lantos told him that if he could make a feature for $1 million, all the executive would require was a title and a final copy. And that’s the story behind The Adjuster, produced by Camelia Frieberg, who had been working with the director since being production manager on Next of Kin.

The typically elliptical drama, focusing on ethically dubious insurance adjuster Noah (Elias Koteas) and his wife Hera (Arsinée Khanjian), a censor, won the award for best Canadian feature at the 1991 Toronto festival.

Egoyan’s next feature was the sidetrack Calendar, a micro-budgeted drama backed by Germany’s ZDF Television, before he would take his career to the next level with Alliance on 1994’s Exotica. The film had the salacious setting of a strip club, but is in fact a downbeat drama, featuring among its odd relationships that between family man Francis (Bruce Greenwood) and young dancer Christina (Mia Kirshner).

With stateside distribution from Miramax Films, the intricately structured movie took in around US$5 million in North America, and ran away with nine Genie Awards, including best direction and screenplay for Egoyan and best motion picture for Egoyan and producer Frieberg.

The next film, again with Frieberg producing and Lantos as exec producer, would scale even greater heights.

Russell Banks’ novel The Sweet Hereafter, about the communal impact of a deadly school bus crash, made for compelling – if disturbing – source material. Egoyan’s adaptation was uncompromising, and he got a first-rate central performance from British thesp Ian Holm as a cynical lawyer.

The film was accepted to screen in competition at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, and was seen as a legitimate contender for the Palme d’Or. Lantos was so bullish that he tried to sell it in the then-fiercely competitive U.S. indie market ahead of the French fest. He arranged a Toronto screening for the major Hollywood distribs, letting them know that the first company to agree to his terms would get the film.

‘We ran the risk of no one saying yes, and then the film would be burned, because there was no one else left to show it to,’ Lantos recalls. ‘But we thought the film was powerful and that it would work.’

A couple of days ahead of the screening, New Line Cinema co-CEO Michael Lynne, impressed by the script, asked Lantos to be candid about the film’s prospects.

Lantos’ response: ‘I can’t tell you that it’s going to set the box office on fire, but it is brilliant and it will get extraordinary reviews and it will win prizes.’ That was enough for Lynne, who signed on sight unseen, and the screening was cancelled, much to the ire of New Line rival Miramax Films.

The film’s subsequent slew of international kudos include the FIPRESCI Prize, Grand Prize of the Jury and ecumenical award at Cannes, eight Genie Awards including best picture, and best direction and adapted screenplay Oscar noms for Egoyan. The Academy Award nods came despite only a modest campaign by New Line.

Egoyan attributes his coup rather to influential reviews in The New York Times and Los Angeles Times.

‘That was the point the [Academy] membership was voting and they all checked it out,’ he says. ‘You can’t buy that publicity.’

Next came the Canada/U.K. copro Felicia’s Journey, Egoyan’s adaptation of the novel by William Trevor about an unlikely serial killer. The film allowed Egoyan to work with a $15-million budget and actor Bob Hoskins, and although it hardly represented an artistic decline, audiences were cool to the film, likely due to its grisly themes.

After Atlantis Communications bought Alliance in 1998, Lantos cashed out to return to his true love – producing. Up until then, the exec had been too busy running a company to get hands-on with productions.

‘On the early films there was no interference [from Alliance]. It was such a symbiotic relationship. It really just took me to this other level,’ Egoyan explains. ‘As I began to trust Robert and got to know him, I wanted him to be more involved.’

So Lantos himself would produce 2002’s Ararat. In fact, he planted the seed of the idea in the director’s head.

Lantos flew from Hungary, where he was making the multi-generational Jewish epic Sunshine, to introduce Egoyan at an Armenian-Canadian function where the director was being honored. Fresh off making a film about ‘his people,’ Lantos publicly challenged Egoyan to write a movie about his own heritage. Spurred on by the remark – and the resulting applause of several hundred guests – the director announced that would be his next project.

At the center of Ararat is the First World War-era Armenian Genocide, but it does not tell that story in a straightforward manner. It instead explores how history is rendered, following a fictitious film production in its own attempt to make a movie about the early 20th century atrocity. Legendary French singer Charles Aznavour plays the director of the film-within-a-film.

While some viewers were frustrated by the film’s indirect approach, others applauded its meditative take on such a complex topic, and it received a best picture Genie. Egoyan today feels it’s his most important cinematic work.

‘I will be forever grateful I was able to make that movie,’ he says. ‘It’s certainly not the most elegantly structured, but I think it’s the most provocative on a number of levels.’

Lantos and Egoyan next teamed on the showbiz noir Where the Truth Lies, and then Lantos took an executive producer seat on the soon-to-be-released Adoration, produced by Egoyan and The Film Farm’s Simone Urdl and Jennifer Weiss.

‘It’s never been a conventional relationship,’ Lantos says. ‘He would simply come out of the blue one day and say, ‘I’ve written a script’ or ‘I bought the rights to a book’ or ‘Here’s what I want to do.”

Currently Lantos and Egoyan don’t have any projects in development together – but then they never do.