December 25, 1997–January 1, 1998

movies

 

Staying Open

Cindy Fuchs interviews Sweet Hereafter director Atom Egoyan, suddenly "accessible" after all these years.

Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, adapted from Russell Banks' novel about the effects of a tragic school bus accident on a small town in British Columbia, is garnering critical praise and numerous awards, three at Cannes (including the Gran Prix), plus 16 Genie Award nominations, and talk of an Academy Award campaign. When we spoke on the phone last week, I asked him how he's dealing with the attention.

AE: It's such a rollercoaster. The film's been so incredibly well-received critically. I've never been aware of the Golden Globes before, but because the distribution machine is so caught up in awards, now the fact that we don't make that [the Golden Globes] becomes depressing, even though they weren't even on my radar screen before. You have to keep reminding yourself that that's not why you made the film.

 

CF: How did you think about the potentially sensational subject matter, for example, the troubled father-daughter relationships? Were you concerned that these relationships—where the two central daughters are an incest victim and a drug addict—might seem sensational?

AE: I was aware of that, and there was no way that I could depict the incest the way it was in the book because it has become a cliché. In some ways, it's the dark revelation that everyone waits to know but knows about anyhow. Since the book was written in the early 1990s, so many films have used it. I knew it was crucial to the story, but I wanted to give it an entirely different angle, to show a type of incest that happens a lot, but that films never show. It's where, instead of being a very obvious, physically coercive act, it's a love that becomes confused, where the victim is suddenly drawn into a situation where they don't know how to locate the guilt, and they have to create a mythology around what's happening in order to justify the abuse. That's a more difficult thing to show but I think it becomes more interesting dramatically. Nicole [Sarah Polley] is trying to get back at her father for the abuse, but also trying to deal with her father's denial. That goes deeper to the heart of responsibility and honesty, which are central themes to the film.

 

CF: How did you think about mythology in the film, in the sense of archetypes, but also in terms of storytelling as a way to structure chaos, like the incest or the accident?

AE: The book is all first-person narratives, stories that are told to the reader. In the film I had to find people that characters could talk to. All these people had built up palaces, homes where they felt comfort. So, the Ottos, with pictures of their adopted son in that isolated house: it was a shrine, but no protection against the forces of chance. I guess there's a sense of what man can make and what nature will impose.

 

CF: How were you using the poem "The Pied Piper" [a unifying device in the film]?

AE: What's remarkable about that poem is not only the idea of a town that loses its children, but also this idea of reward and punishment, which is the darker side of this whole story, people looking for a way to deal with this loss through a reward. Something as crass as a financial settlement might give a sense of closure to what is otherwise unbearable. But of course, it's never that simple, and that's one of the ideas that the film presents.

 

CF: There's also the question of how the legal profession encourages this, and the popular image of lawyers as "bad.''

AE: Yeah, the challenge with the tone of the piece was not to trivialize the role of the lawyer. On the one hand, you can think of him as an ambulance chaser, but when he's talking about corporate mismanagement and cynicism, he's not lying. There are situations where a company would decide that it's better not to change a 10 cent bolt, or settle out of court. There are many cases where that happens. So I didn't want you to write off Mitchell. He is convinced that he can find the truth, but there are multiple undisclosed truths.

 

CF: Do you think that we get access to these truths at any point, in clear ways, for instance, when Mitchell tells the story about Zoe almost dying as an infant, to the girl on the plane?

AE: We do, but we also are suspicious of why he's doing it. It's one of the amazing things about Ian Holm's performance; he's able to call into question the whole nature of performance. At a certain point when he's telling that story, you are aware that he enjoys the storytelling, there's a self-consciousness and a pleasure in telling the story, that becomes visible about halfway through. I guess that's what the whole film is about, the nature of narrative. Why do we tell stories and what do we expect to get back? Do we tell stories to soothe one another? To express something of our experience? And how much are we ever expressing?

 

CF: As soon as you're telling it, you're reshaping it to accommodate or attract an audience, even if that audience is yourself.

AE: Exactly. There's also the discrepancy between the storytelling and what actually occurred. One of the most interesting things about making films is that when you're shooting, you're dealing with the nature of depicting. What are you adding to a moment, just by the act of recording it?

 

CF: In the context of your other films, critics are saying this one is more "accessible," whatever that means. Did you think about that while you were making it?

AE: I was aware that the characters are more classically identifiable than in my previous films. In Exotica, you're asked to be seduced by the characters, to be drawn into the world of the film and gradually, enough of these people's pasts is revealed that you can understand them, but you're not asked to identify with them. In Banks' book, you are. I had to make a decision to change, while keeping my form of storytelling, I had to locate these people in a more specific way. So you can identify with Dolores and Billy and even Mitchell, to an extent. So in that way the film is more "accessible," but what's fascinating to me is that, given the fact that the characters are more accessible, you can even go further with structure. There are so many time frames in this movie, it's constantly moving back and forth in time. But since people feel more confident with identifying with characters, they can go along on this ride more readily. That wasn't conscious, but obviously, from the response the film's gotten, it's something I've learned.

 

CF: Is this a direction you now have in mind, to reach something like a larger audience?

AE: I think that it's difficult to deny that once you've had a taste that your stories can reach a wider public, there is something seductive about that. I never would have agreed to that 10 years ago. My earlier films were made for very limited audiences. I was surprised to find that anyone was watching them. Over the years I've become quite attracted to the idea that you can use alternative ways of storytelling and that audiences are more curious and exploratory, and open, than most mainstream movies make them out to be. So it's exciting to have that revealed to you. I've structured my life very carefully, so that I can be quite free in the choices I make. I don't have to make a certain kind of movie to support a lifestyle, because I live modestly.

With film, it's all about distribution. There are certain types of alternative films that will never get the chance to be exposed. When you find your career suddenly being accelerated, as long as you can keep your vision of what it is that you want to do, I don't think there's anything wrong with finding new audiences. You have to remind yourself not to compromise, you have to realize that there are limits, it's not just a matter of finding a bigger and bigger audience, but of finding a bigger audience for what you want to do. Those two things are very different. You can always appeal to a larger audience, but finding a larger audience for what you want to do, is a challenge.

 

CF: It strikes me that, for someone like James Cameron, there are prices above and beyond millions of dollars. Titanic is, in many ways, the same film he's been making for years, dressed up in archetypes and high drama and major effects. And now this personal story, about apocalyptic love and boys who have to die to cut their girls loose, has become this behemoth.

AE: You know, it's fascinating for me to watch Titanic, because all I can think about is that that accident took two hours to happen. And then I look at the bus [which sinks in The Sweet Hereafter], and I think, that took 10 seconds.

 

CF: And you could argue that the personal dimensions of both films are most acute from the long shots, showing the ship and the bus sinking. That image of the bus going down, from Billy's point of view, as he's trapped on shore, so far away it's just devastating.

AE: There's a horrific shot of the Titanic going under from Kathy Bates' point of view, but I don't think that could have lasted two hours.

 

CF: Do you have a picture of the people who are coming to see your films?

AE: I imagine people who are receptive to this film or this type of filmmaking, as being discovered, as opposed to changing their ways of looking at films. I imagine that there's all these latent viewers, waiting for films like this to enter into their lives. That goes back to this idea of finding a larger audience for what I want to do, instead of imagining that I have to change. I like to think there are people who are surprised that a film can take them to these other places. There are films like Titanic where you know what the package is about and you lose yourself into it because of the craft, you know what you're getting into. Most films deal with the incidents of our lives, like what happens. But few films try to deal with the experience, what it means to go through something, to find a way of using film language to chronicle an experience instead of just recording an incident.

It's a tapestry, a matter of trying different combinations and seeing what works. Some of the combinations you arrive at by the time you have your shooting script, others extend into the editing process. That's one of the great joys of how I make films, I've been relatively cushioned from that process of test screenings and having the film molded by public response. But it's an ongoing process. I can't say that I have a crystal idea of how certain pieces are going to fit before I'm going to shoot. I know what the canvas is and I know what the palette is. With this film, it was finding the poem, "The Pied Piper," and going back to the draft, and realizing that it was this perfect controlling image. It's a matter of being open.