Reitman Sr. returns to Toronto with Chloe

• Director: Atom Egoyan
• Writer: Erin Cressida Wilson
• Producers: Ivan Reitman, Tom Pollock, Joe Medjuck, Jeffrey Clifford, Simone Urdl, Jennifer Weiss
• Cast: Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson, Amanda Seyfried
• Production company: Montecito Picture Company
• Distributor: E1 Entertainment (Canada)
• World sales: StudioCanal
• Budget: $20 million (reported)

When Ivan Reitman saw Natalie at TIFF in 2003, he didn’t care for the movie but he wanted to acquire the remake rights. ‘It seemed like a great idea that wasn’t realized.’ So he made a deal with Natalie’s producer StudioCanal to do the film in English. And he hired the widely admired Erin Cressida Wilson (Secretary, Fur) to rewrite the screenplay and hopefully realize that great idea. The result was Chloe.

Toronto-born Reitman made his career in L.A. but his TIFF connections have grown stronger of late. (His family donated the downtown block on which TIFF’s Bell Lightbox is rising.) It was inevitable that through Reitman’s bond with TIFF he would connect with another filmmaking TIFF habitué, Atom Egoyan.

As a director, Reitman knows the rarity of receiving a script that has been, as he puts it, ‘thoroughly worked out.’ He knew what he had in Chloe and, having chosen not to direct the film, he realized that it would be a perfect fit for Egoyan’s sensibility. So Reitman picked up the phone.

‘Atom really responded to it,’ says Reitman. ‘It was sympathetic to the kind of films that he has made but more organized in the storytelling than the dream-like films he had made in the past.’

The plot is pure Egoyan. A woman who suspects her husband is being unfaithful hires the stunning Chloe to bait him. But the tables turn when the woman herself falls for Chloe.

Armed with the script and Egoyan’s reputation, Reitman, alongside partner Tom Pollock at the Montecito Picture Company, drew a prime cast. Julianne Moore came aboard as the wife; ingénue de jour Amanda Seyfried took on the title character, and Liam Neeson, whom Egoyan had directed on the New York stage, took the role of the husband.

The strength of the project brought its own surprises. Montecito, says Reitman, typically co-finances its films. The company had a U.S. distributor in place when StudioCanal exercised its option, as the copyright owner, to fully finance the project.

Next came the decision to move the action from San Francisco to Toronto.

‘Chloe is a story that lends itself to an urban location,’ Reitman explains. ‘I’m from Toronto. Atom’s from Toronto. On one of our early chats we were walking in the city and discussing how Toronto is so rarely used for itself. Everything that is special is usually discarded.’

Reitman and Pollock met with Jennifer Weiss and Simone Urdl of Toronto-based The Film Farm, who had produced Egoyan’s Adoration. ‘Given that we were using Atom’s historical crew, his camera, his costumer, it made sense to keep the team intact,’ explains Reitman. Joe Medjuk, a Montecito associate, was on set every day and Reitman says the shoot was ‘very harmonious.’

Of course, outside events intervened. Neeson’s actress wife, Natasha Richardson, died after a fall at the Mont Tremblant ski resort.

‘That was the most tragic moment on any movie I have ever worked on,’ says Reitman. ‘You have to forget about everything you’re doing and deal with the extraordinary sadness this lovely man is facing.’

On a technical level, Neeson had only two shoot days left and he returned to shoot them immediately following the funeral. ‘He came back and did it in the most professional way,’ says Reitman. ‘And then he left to mourn.’