SPECIAL PRESENTATION: ADORATION

Director/Writer: Atom Egoyan
Producers: Atom Egoyan, Simone Urdl, Jennifer Weiss
Exec Producer: Robert Lantos
Production Companies: Ego Film Arts, The Film Farm
Cast: Devon Bostick, Scott Speedman, Arsinée Khanjian, Rachel Blanchard, Noam Jenkins, Kenneth Welsh
Distributor: Entertainment One/Maximum Films Distribution
International Sales: E1/Maximum Films International

Few Canadian filmmakers have enjoyed the critical acclaim that greets the films of Atom Egoyan. Yet Egoyan wishes he was a different kind of director.

Sitting in his Toronto office, he reflects on his casting technique, specifically the way he dealt with Scott Speedman, one of the principals of his latest film Adoration, which made its world premiere in competition at Cannes and screens as a Special Presentation at TIFF.

‘What other directors in the Hollywood system can do,’ he says, ‘and the thing that terrifies me is that initial conversation: Saying, ‘I’ve seen all your work and this is why this movie would be great for your career.’ There are directors who can do that. They can say, ‘I’ve seen you all through Felicity [the U.S. TV series that established Speedman’s career], I saw you in Underworld, and this is why my film is important for your career now.’ I wish I could be that director.’ But he didn’t. And he isn’t.

Instead, Egoyan is apologetic. It wasn’t in a TV series or a steroid-pumped action feature that he saw Speedman. It was in a small Spain/Canada coproduction called My Life Without Me (2003), in a small part as the grieving husband to Sarah Polley’s dying wife.

‘In Hollywood,’ he says, ‘decisions are made as career choices…that is supremely important. That’s not a role I feel comfortable with in terms of other people’s decisions. They have to decide on their own terms…I immediately want to talk about the character. I cannot talk about how this will fit into other work they have done.’

Of course, this is precisely why Egoyan is the director he is. He doesn’t go with what other people need. It’s not that he doesn’t care about an actor’s career: it simply wouldn’t occur to him to lure someone with the promise of furthering it. He’s only interested – genuinely – in what will work for his film.

For his part, Speedman didn’t need convincing, because he wasn’t seeking the role to build the ‘Speedman’ celebrity brand, but for himself as an actor. Indeed, Speedman was the instigator: he approached Egoyan first, flying himself up from L.A. to persuade the director that he was right for the role. Egoyan initially rebuffed him: the part was written for a much older actor.

Says Robert Lantos, Egoyan’s longtime producer (and executive producer of Adoration): ‘There are actors who are artists who from time to time blow off their handlers and do what they feel like doing…it’s an individual thing. They will do whatever it takes to work with a director like Atom. [And] Atom’s made up his mind that those are the only ones he wants to work with.’

Set in a near-future of ubiquitous online video chat rooms, Adoration encompasses every meaning of the word and its synonyms and antonyms, from the veneration accorded religious iconography to the blind love of a son for a mother he never knew to the hate engendered by persons who don’t share that faith.

As a high school project, Simon (Devon Bostick) creates an alternate terrorism-based history of his mother’s death and his father’s participation in it, and then, with the encouragement of his teacher (Arsinée Khanjian), and without the knowledge of his uncle (Speedman), he takes his story online.

Just as Simon’s fiction takes on a life of its own on the web, Egoyan snaps his trap.

Says Egoyan: ‘We are at a point where we can use a news story and understand it will be absorbed in a multitude of different ways depending on what the individual reader needs to believe. That’s a condition of our society. Simon is using the history cavalierly, as kids will do. So to have some degree of ambiguity, especially as it is presented in this film, is to me very exciting. There are people who find that puzzle structure seductive and others who will just react against it, who want to know what they are supposed to be feeling at all times.’

Jennifer Weiss and Simone Urdl of Toronto-based The Film Farm, producers of Adoration alongside Egoyan, are in the puzzle camp. ‘Atom’s films require patience,’ says Urdl. ‘But it’s very rewarding. They’re so full thematically. And he touches on stuff we deal with in our daily lives.’ Adds Weiss: ‘Whether you love them or not, you know you will have had a real filmic experience.’

While Egoyan’s two most recent features, Ararat (2002) and Where the Truth Lies (2005), have been dismissed as misfires, other parties have seen otherwise. This year Ararat earned Egoyan a share of the $1-million Dan David Prize, an Israeli accolade recognizing the film’s approach to historical representation.

Still, the $6-million Adoration is being hailed as a ‘return to form.’

‘That’s definitely the sound-bite answer,’ says Cameron Bailey, co-director of TIFF. ‘It’s true and it’s not enough. It has all the formal hallmarks of his best mid-’90s work, especially Exotica, for me. At the same time, there’s a kind of fury in one central montage sequence that felt completely plugged into the politics of social groups here and now. That felt new.’

Egoyan’s ‘vision and voice is one of the most eloquent and unique voices in world cinema today – he speaks in a cinematic language of his own creation,’ says Lantos. ‘That’s what attracted me in the first place 20 years ago. That hasn’t changed. The stories have changed, but not the voice.’

As part of his landmark July deal with Entertainment One, Lantos has complete control of the marketing of films he has a hand in. However, as U.S. distributor Sony Pictures Classics wants to avoid the U.S. presidential election, Lantos expects a simultaneous North American platform release in December, potentially under the E1 brand in Canada.