Atom Egoyan’s black suit is rumpled. But as always, he’s alert and probing, hungry for conversation. And he’s had a lot of that recently, traveling with his new film, Ararat. Alternately cheered and damned for its representation of the Turkish army’s massacre of a million Armenians during World War I, the film has become “controversial.” He’s received e-mails calling him a “hatemonger.” All this is new for Egoyan, whose work is characteristically deliberate, elegant and above all, explores the relationship between art and interpretation.

These ideas are also at the center of Ararat, which visualizes the massacre at Van in a film within the film, and focuses its interrogation of art and history through the vexed, tragic story of Arshile Gorky, a survivor of the 1915 massacre. Once in the U.S., Egoyan recalls, Gorky "remade himself, with a new name. He was the most famous survivor of the massacre at Van, the only person who created a masterpiece from the ashes of this experience." He smiles. "But he felt he had to became a Zelig character, redefine himself to accommodate this new reality."

The central presence of Gorky's most famous painting, depicting himself and his mother (who did not get out of Van), underlines the film's interest in mother-son relations. "There's an important scene with Gorky's mother and the child, telling him that he'll never forget what's happened here, what will happen here. While mothers and sons embody the transmission of culture, the film is also about the transmission of trauma."

The film, says the 42-year-old Egoyan, explores this transmission, through books (one character is an art historian), personal memories and a film-within-a-film, also called Ararat, directed by Edward (Charles Aznavour). "Histories," Egoyan says, "are communicated by artifacts that we can appreciate, but we don't usually understand how they were made. And history is not just about telling a story. Someone has to receive it, to be curious and investigate."

Some of the reception for Ararat has left Egoyan "baffled." He says, "People have conflated the film within the film with my movie. Edward's film is not Œtruth.'" He sees films as soliciting specific, culturally conditioned responses, however varied. "There's this atavistic effect that the film image has." While watching Edward's film of the massacre, within Egoyan's film, "we break down the frames, we are in that space, especially when you're dealing with such violent imagery." He laughs, "You fight for final cut, but in the end, you're at the mercy of viewers."

At the same time, he sees distancing -- from responsibility for other people -- as another type of violence. "Any sort of tyranny or terror is about denying someone else's humanity. But people need to understand that there are other histories, other perspectives, that you cannot abstract to that point of denial."

His own perspective is complicated by what he calls "the lot of diaspora," part of a community living in a host country. Cairo-born, of Armenian descent, raised in Victoria, British Columbia, Egoyan moved to Toronto at 18: "You take comfort knowing that the place that you live in recognizes [the genocide], even if Turkey cannot."

But ultimately, he says, Ararat focuses not on institutional relationships, but on "moments between individuals, negotiations not between countries, but between mothers and sons, or strangers in a hallway. These only break down because people assume privilege," of history, class or race, and then, "don't feel a need to engage." During a discussion with the half-Turkish actor Ali (played by Elias Koteas), the young Armenian, Raffi (David Alpay), "compares the Turks to Hitler. It's a response that every Armenian has in his back pocket, but it stops the conversation dead."

Egoyan has recently begun working outside of films, trying to generate other sorts of conversations, other ways of interacting with audiences. After directing the Canadian Opera Company production of Salome in 1996, he wrote and directed an original opera, Elsewhereless, composed by Rodney Sharman, which premiered in Toronto in 1998. He's also done several installations, including Steenbeckett, for London's Artangel, and Hors d'usage, for Montreal's Musée D'Art Contemporain, which opened in August 2002.

Egoyan leans back in the overstuffed sofa, thoughtful. These experiences, he says, "are very specific to the people who can get to see them. And that's made me thankful for what film allows. But I think there's an installation aspect to my film work as well. I became acutely aware of this in Cannes; there's a scene in my film, showing the premiere of Edward's film, and those moments collided. We were seeing his audience watching the premiere of his film, and then we see ourselves watching this premiere. It was very exciting, that alchemy."