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Oscar-nominee Egoyan goes to Hollywood

Tuesday, March 17, 1998
Oscar-nominee Egoyan goes to Hollywood

By JOHN McKAY
The Canadian Press

A "bespectacled, floppy-haired brainiac" is how Entertainment Weekly magazine described Canada's own Atom Egoyan, a cerebral filmmaker whose latest complex and impressionistic feature, The Sweet Hereafter, has nabbed him two Academy Award nominations.

While he is not expected to win the best director prize Monday at the globally-televised Oscar ceremonies in Los Angeles - the film itself did not make the best-picture inner circle Egoyan seems to have a fair shot at best screenplay for the script he adapted from the 1991 Russell Banks novel.

He calls his adaptation of the story of a devastating school bus accident's impact on a small community the hardest thing he's ever done.

"It's by far and away the most accessible film I've made," says Egoyan.

"Even though the storytelling is quite textured and multi-layered, the central event is quite clear."

If you count Titanic's James Cameron as a Canadian director, too, (he grew up near Niagara Falls, Ont.) then this is Canada's best showing yet on the Oscar stage. The Old Lady and the Pigeons, an animated short from Montreal, is also in the race.

But can Egoyan and Cameron be put in the same box and stamped Made in Canada? Their styles, their experience, and even their origins are vastly different.

Celebrity interviewer Brian Linehan says it's a bogus gimmick to try to label the two men as different versions of Canadian-bred cinematic talent because they have nothing to do with each other.

"James Cameron has been in America since he was 17. His formative years were in California," Linehan says.

"He is a filmmaker who makes great big, expensive commercial studio-financed blockbusters. Atom Egoyan is this wonderful guy who makes these brilliant, jewel-like precision pieces of clockwork that are art films."

Linehan predicts a Titanic sweep on Oscar night anyway with L.A. Confidential director Curtis Hanson the likely candidate for the adapted screenplay award.

That said, it seems unlikely that Oscar honors will make that much of a difference to Egoyan's career, since he has made it clear he intends to stay in Canada where he can make the kinds of pictures he wants.

"Hollywood people are very cunning," Egoyan says.

"They tell you what you want to hear, they provide answers to your most intimate fears, they convince you that you can't go further in the direction that you have followed so far."

Robert Lantos, chairman and CEO of Toronto's Alliance Communications, also raises red flags about the American studio system.

"You see, in Hollywood artistic freedom is something you have to battle for and Oscar nominations are a useful weapon," says Lantos.

"(But) if you go to Hollywood you have to make Hollywood movies, with all the restrictive formulas that implies."

Lantos is the closest thing Canada has to a movie mogul and Alliance is backer and distributor for the $4 million The Sweet Hereafter.

He, too, dismisses comparisons to Titanic, which cost 75 times as much as Egoyan's haunting little fable. Lantos likes to point out that on a pro-rata basis, The Sweet Hereafter will actually make more money for its investors than Titanic, seven to 10 times its cost.

And besides, he says, creative comparisons will only impoverish the senses.

"Serious adults around the world are starved for films about human beings. They may be fewer in number than the popcorn-munching teenagers Hollywood depends on to sustain its extravagant ambitions. We are happy to trade the theme park rides and the lunch boxes for low financial risk and high artistic integrity."

Egoyan has flirted with Hollywood before but walked away. And he jumped directly from the heady critical success of The Sweet Hereafter, not into another high-profile film project, but into being librettist and director of a Toronto opera production called Elsewhereless.

Recently it was reported he did win the right to final cut of Felicia's Journey, a film he will shoot in Ireland this fall for Mel Gibson's Icon production company.

Linehan says when it comes to integrity, Egoyan is the real thing.

"I think he's an honorable man who is devoted to what he does, but I don't believe he is as devoted to making movies as he is to his wife and son."

A quick sketch of director Atom Egoyan: Born: Cairo, Egypt of Armenian heritage. Age, 37.

Lives: Toronto. Raised in Victoria, B.C. Married: To actress Arsinee Khanjian. They have a four-year-old son.

Films: Howard in Particular, Peep Show, Open House, Next of Kin, Family Viewing, Speaking Parts, The Adjuster, Calendar, Gross Misconduct, Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter. Operas: Salome for the Canadian Opera Company in 1996, currently librettist/director for Tapistry Music Theatre's Elsewhereless.

Honors: Knighted by the French government Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, made TIME magazine's Global 100, a roster of young leaders for the new millennium, citing him as one of the most important film artists working today. Quote: " I think I can say I'm optimistic but I don't want to be too optimistic because you don't have any control over these things." Egoyan on his Oscar chances.

Source: Moorad Alexanian

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