Film-makers on film: Atom Egoyan

Thursday 21 July 2005
telegraph.co.uk
Mark Monahan

Atom Egoyan is something of a living legend among lovers of art-house cinema. Born in Egypt to Armenian parents, but raised in British Columbia, he makes films as exotic as his lineage: cerebral, mysterious, astonishingly atmospheric studies of people in emotional extremis.
[...]
Egoyan's masterpiece remains The Sweet Hereafter (1997), a mesmerising fairytale-noir about a lawyer (Ian Holm) who descends on a small, snow-bound town in the wake of a terrible accident, and it's this, above all, that has guaranteed him immortality. [...] Toronto-based opera-lovers have recently learnt to their delight, {Egoyan is} a fine director of Wagner, too.
[...]
The latter offers an insight into Egoyan's appreciation of Stanley Kubrick's magnificent, terrifying The Shining. Made in 1980, it's one of the pinnacles of Kubrick's career (which also famously included Dr Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon[...]), but not, says Egoyan, for reasons you might expect.
[...]
[...] I've been doing a lot of work in opera lately, and it was one of the most remarkable fusions of opera and cinema I'd ever encountered. People ask me whether or not I would ever think of doing an opera for a film, and I think Kubrick achieved that.
[...]
Several of Egoyan's own movies echo The Shining in having solitary, rather strange characters at their core, people dealing - poorly - with unresolved pasts. Egoyan not only acknowledges this, but cheerfully admits to having "ripped off" The Shining's opening, floating helicopter shots that follow the Torrances' vehicle heading off through the mountains. He employs a similar device in The Sweet Hereafter, tracking the doomed schoolbus along frozen, winding roads.
[...]
[...] his most piercing observation.

"The film is largely about triggers," he says, "at which point something is abstracted, our own family can become abstract to us.[...] that becomes the trigger that allows [...] violence against [...] family members. [...] that's where the true horror is: it's in the fact that we're all quite capable of that."

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.