Scott Speedman, Rachel Blanchard, Devon Bostick, Arsinée Khanjian and Maury Chaykin star in Atom Egoyan’s award winning film Adoration. It’s Egoyan’s own screenplay about a boy who unlocks family secrets and becomes obsessed by them.
Egoyan’s films are often dark, intimate and sensational. His best known, Exotica, the story of a girl working in a brothel and The Sweet Hereafter which explored death and incest, have raised eyebrows and received international acclaim. He has won four awards at Cannes and four at the Toronto International Film Festival, among others.
Monsters and Critics asked Egoyan about Adoration and how it fits into his body of work.
“It reaches towards light. But it is also dark, based on a horrifying abuse story which is true. This boy hears the story and refuses to let it alone. It’s personal, very personal. This kid was 14 years old, my son is 14. I started writing plays at 14 when I was a student in Victoria, British Columbia. There was a Victoria drama festival and your friends and parents would come to hear what you had to say.”
“If I were a 14-year old kid now and I had the internet, it would be a whole other game. You’d want to reach a global audience. Fourteen year olds have this illusion of grandeur, so he puts this story out and gets a response. He creates a lot of noise around it.”
Egoyan’s films often explore family dynamics. They are edgy and unsettling because family secrets are secret because they can be earth shattering.
He’s trying to find his own family history. Any kid wants to know who his parents are. He discovers that his father is meant to be this demon, this evil, evil man, a terrorist. So he goes into this dark place to explore.”
“He wants access. Any kid wants to know who his parents are. He can’t believe his father was a terrorist so he amuses himself with a story of another terrorist and finds what motivates him. What emerges is that he can connect to a story that’s been denied him. That’s something I’m always fascinated by in my films. Our histories are not being told, so he finds other ways to access them.”
It’s a recurring idea that drives his vision. Egoyan once said "I think with all directors there are ideas that recur, at least for the ones that have creative control of their films."
“I’m considering making a film based on someone else’s screenplay; no adaptations (like The Sweet Hereafter) just to see what it’s like.”
Egoyan is becoming well established in another field of artistic endeavour, producing and directing theatre, opera and multi media projects. He’s staged them in London, New York and Toronto and hopes to do more.
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