Geek bares his gifts - Interview with Atom Egoyan - The Times, 4 February 2002 by Alex O'Connell
It's hard work being Atom Egoyan. One minute you're winning prizes for your films, then you're writing or mounting an opera, then you're explaining the installation Artangel has commissioned for its tenth anniversary
Aaaarrrr!' groans the film director Atom Egoyan. It's 8.30am; he's just checked his wheelie-suitcase into the hotel's bag-hold and is making his way to the breakfast lounge. `I hope I'm going to be all right,' he mutters. `I took my first ever sleeping pill last night, you see. I feel strange, I'm not sure if I'm awake.' Well, he looks fine to me. He looks right. Never mind Hitchcock and Woody, if Plato had been industrious enough to create a photofit for the Platonic Form of the film-maker it would have turned out a lot like Egoyan: wiry frame, insomniac gaze, specs and mesmerising eyebrows which, when he frowns, look like two obese caterpillars lunging for a kiss.
But move a little closer and you will see that the technology-obsessed director, born in Cairo to Armenian parents but brought up in Western Canada, has more than the one job title. At 41, he is primarily a film-maker - best known for the cerebral Exotica, which won the International Critics' Award at Cannes in 1994, and his Oscar-nominated The Sweet Hereafter. Like fellow Canadians David (Crash) Cronenberg and Robert Lepage, Egoyan has developed a reputation for obsessing over darkness, abstract ideas and for keeping a critical, uncomfortable eye on America.
Many moviegoers, however, will be unaware of his other extra-curricular activities. As well as trying his hand at opera (in 1996 he directed Strauss's Salome for the Canadian Opera Company; in 1998 he wrote the libretto for a new chamber opera, Elsewhereless, and directed Gavin Bryars's new opera, Doctor Ox's Experiment), he has masterminded various visual art projects. Both his parents were painters and Egoyan's CV includes installations for the Oxford Museumof Modern Art, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Venice Biennale. In fact his latest foray into the art world, Steenbeckett, will launch Artangel's 2002 season and mark the organisation's tenth anniversary. It is also the reason I'm meeting him today in Piccadilly.
Full of bounce despite the night's sedation, Egoyan launches immediately into a wildly enthusiastic description of the project. It's rather like watching someone trying to condense the story of their life, a weighty paper on Samuel Beckett (his hero), and a term-long film course entitled Technology and the Movies into 40 minutes. No wonder he takes only two bites of his breakfast toast.
There is something of the film nerd about Egoyan, and it is that endearing box-room fascination with the machinery and the minute technological details of the film-making process that lies at the heart of the commission.
`I thought it would be really interesting to make some sort of testament to the technology we used to use,' says Egoyan. The installation will `act as a mechanical aide memoire for the digital age, a monument to the thousand natural shocks that analogue was heir to'. And, erm, once again, for those of us who are still having problems setting our videos.
Egoyan explains carefully how an old film-editing machine called a Steenbeck will be positioned at one end of a room in a disused cinema which used to be part of the Department of Ethnography at the former Museum of Mankind in London. The machine (imagine six large film spools on a table) will be surrounded by a hanging forest of 35mm film.
The last time Egoyan used the Steenbeck was in the editing of Exotica (1994). At the time there was a fashion among Canadian film-makers to `keep it real' rather than revert to digital technology, rather like the vinyl fanatics who refuse to buy CDs. `There was a huge physical effort involved, not just with starting the machine and the process, but there was a whole set of vulnerabilities,' he says, waving his hands around like a comedy Italian. `The tape could break, get caught in the machine, or fade. It was very, very physical. You were very aware of the bulk. But there was something about the physicality of the editing process I missed. I thought it would be very pertinent to this project so I got very attached to the idea of actually threading up these reels.'
The 2,000ft of suspended film is not any old film, but Egoyan's version of one of Beckett's best-loved plays, Krapp's Last Tape, already screened on Channel 4. John Hurt stars as the old man whose life is fragmented by and trapped in a media machine. `I think it is one of the most important dramatic monologues of the past century,' says Egoyan. `It influenced a lot of people who use video as a cruel means of documentation.'
Meanwhile, in another smaller room, visitors will be able to watch the clean, dust-free, unsuspended, digital version of the same film. The installation will also include a mini-labyrinth of corridors containing props highlighting the way our memories have been forced to change with technology's progression.
| "I tried to find a way of making a film about the Armenian genocide... The best way for me to tell the story of the person making that film." |
Atom Egoyan |
Egoyan now shoots in digital but is concerned about the way it has changed the film-making process. `I was speaking to an editor friend who is working on a directorial debut (shot on digital) and he is overwhelmed by the sheer volume of material. The editor has always been crucial, but now they do most of the jobs that the directors should have been doing months before. Digital is great because it is very spontaneous but it also takes away the power of the gaze. There was a real focus with analogue. The work is about that. The work is about the last gasp of The Graven Image, from a stone tablet or the Old Testament associations. We're realising that there's something deeper that we're leaving behind,' he says, obscurely.
I wonder whether he sees obvious links between his films and his art installations. Egoyan admits that, in both, he is fascinated with the way that we construct stories. `I tried to find a way of making a film about the Armenian genocide,' he says, referring to his forthcoming title, Ararat, which has been shot in East Turkey and is due for an autumn release. `The best way was for me to tell the story of the person making that film.'
The main character is an 18-year-old boy who is working as a production assistant on the making of the historic feature about the Armenian genocide. He is transporting back some 35mm film in big cans from a foreign location when a customs officer asks him to open the cans. He can't because he'll expose the film. So he has to convince them, through storytelling, that what is in the can is really in the can, in a way that is convincing enough for it not to be opened. He has a digital camera which has kept a diary of his trip, so the investigation of the digital material becomes a way of avoiding the exposure of the film.
`I'm also really excited about the idea that technology could have `backwards compatibility' - that the new technology has the power to keep the old technology pertinent,' he says, running his hands through his hair.
He is excited. Crazy excited. So much so that I half expect him to tell me that rather than getting his scheduled flight home this afternoon, he's going to swim back to Toronto, where he lives with his wife Arsinée Khanjian and son Arshile.
What are you like when you haven't taken a sedative, I ask, cheekily. He laughs. `I'm blathering, just blathering, aren't I?' Perhaps, but it's the sort of blather you want to preserve.
A life in pictures
Peep Show (1981) - Snap shots of a photo booth
Family Viewing (1987) - Watching the defectives
Speaking Parts (1989) - Sex, death and videotape
The Adjuster (1991) - Mundane objects of desire
Montréal par vu... (1991) - Canadian slices of life
Calendar (1993) - Life through the lensman
Exotica (1994) - An emotionally stripped club
A Portrait of Arshile (1995) - Armenian art of the matter
The Sweet Hereafter (1997) - Ian Holm's grief encounter
Felicia's Journey (1999) - A Brum deal for Bob Hoskins
Krapp's Last Tape (2000) - John Hurt's recorded delivery