Interview Atom Egoyan

It’s been a while since Atom Egoyan has directed a play in Canada, but Martin Crimp’s Cruel And Tender seems jerry-rigged for his return. Based on an Athenian tragedy by Sophocles, Crimp’s play deals with the emotional fallout of a relationship between a military general at war in Africa, his wife, and a newly arrived African woman who’s suffered under the general’s wartime atrocities. Fraught family relationships played against war and genocide? Sounds like Ararat 2.0. 

At their best, Egoyan’s films have always connected to classical themes of lust and betrayal, in a way which has recalled the timelessness of Greek tragedy. And the presence of wife and longtime collaborator, Arsinée Khanjian, as the general wife, Amelia, and Daniel Kash (whom Egoyan directed in 1993’s made-for-TV hockey picture Gross Misconduct) as the general furthers the distinctly Egoyan-esque feel of Canadian Stage’s production of Cruel And Tender.

Atom Egoyan took some time out of rehearsals at the Bluma Appel Theatre to speak with us about the production, the differences between directing for film and theatre, and the “three As.”

The A.V. Club: It was big news, seeing that you were returning to the stage here. When’s the last time you directed theatre in Canada, 20 years ago?

Atom Egoyan: Yeah. I’ve done a lot of opera here, which is theatre, but obviously a very different process. The last play I did here must have been at the Rhubarb Festival in my late 20s, probably. It doesn’t seem like a long time, but I guess it was. I started doing a lot of theatre here in my early 20s, at U of T, both writing and directing, and my first gig was at Tarragon theatre. But I started shifting more towards film. The thing I find very odd is that when I started making films, I thought that I’d have to produce and find the money and apply for grants to make those first films. When I was doing theatre, I never thought about producing my own plays. I was always waiting for someone else to approach me. There were really no models in the city at the time for filmmaking, and it was a very different approach. Filmmaking then was cool. It was a very marginal activity. 

AVC: How do you gravitate towards stage productions? You’ve done everything from Wagner to Beckett, which is quite a range.

AE: Well you never know when a film is going to happen, and the opera projects are scheduled way in advance, so you carve out your schedule ahead of time. The Beckett pieces have happened with a relatively short lead-time. The hardest thing is committing to theatre a year in advance, or a year and a half in advance. That’s usually when I’m thinking of the next film.

That’s always the biggest obstacle—finding a moment when you’re okay to block off that time. The problem with film is you never know when the financing will come together, or when all the actors will be available. And you never want that to happen when you’re already scheduled to do live theatre. That can happen, but it’s a disaster. 

AVC: On paper, Cruel and Tender seems to overlap with a lot of themes that run through your films. What attracted you to it?

AE: When Matthew [Jocelyn, Canadian Stage Artistic Director] invited me to do something here, we batted some plays back and forth, but this was the piece we gradually came to a mutual consensus on. Martin’s such a great figure that we don’t really know a lot about here. His plays are produced a lot more in Europe. They are challenging, but it’s a really exciting piece of work—got so many theatrical possibilities. And it’s based on a Greek play by Sophocles, The Women of Trachis, which so rarely gets performed. There’s this one scene we’re rehearsing this afternoon, and I think it’s the first scene in recorded literature when there are three characters on stage. Sophocles’ greatest intervention was to stage more than two characters. It’s so great to feel connected to this tradition through Martin Crimp’s adaptation.

And working from theatre is very different than film. The director’s role isn’t mystified, like how people imagine it’s just going to get put together in some magical way post-production in a way only he can imagine. In theatre, it’s all present. It’s all on the table. You can walk in at any time and see what we’re doing. Nothing’s going to be added later, a week after it opens. That’s what makes it exciting, but also very terrifying. 

AVC: Crimp’s play itself contemporizes the Sophocles text, but is there anything you’re doing to bring it even more into the moment?

AE: I think just trying to make the language as accessible as possible.

AVC: It’s very dense.

AE: It’s very dense. And I want it to feel as natural as possible. And also to find a tone. There’s a great deal of satire in the piece. I see it as a story of characters that are totally motivated by lust. I think the backdrop of the War on Terror is interesting. But even that’s like 10 years old now. So that’s not as interesting to me as the psychology of what’s governing these people, which is really sexual hunger. 

AVC: Besides the text being dense, and there being these very long soliloquies, there’s also a lot of overlapping dialogue, which seems very cinematic. Or at least easier to do in cinema, where you can track dialogue on multiple channels.

AE: There are a ton of things that are easier to do on film. One of the things that’s fascinating is that I thought there’d be a lot of music in this. But then of course on stage the actor will find different rhythms every night, so you can’t have specific cues that have to interact with the music in the usual way. It’s more atmospheric. But my job is… it’s really the three As: it’s the Author, the Actor, and the Audience. I’m trying to create this triangle.

AVC: We’ve been watching a lot of Bresson lately, partially because of the retrospective TIFF is putting on, and his films call attention to the dramatic differences between directing actors for film and for the stage. How do you approach the two mediums?

AE: Well this is the opposite of Bresson. I was very influenced by a retrospective of Bresson that I saw here in my 20s. I was interested in this idea of actor-as-model and these very flat performances. You can see that in my earlier work. That being said, I was always working with theatre actors. I met Arsinée doing theatre in Montreal, and we rehearsed those films using a theatrical style. To get that sort of flattened performance style, you either use non-actors, or you train actors to achieve that texture. Bresson uses actors as models. He doesn’t want anything expressive. This is the opposite. I’m trying to find a style that’s somewhere between naturalism and a more classic theatricality.

AVC: You’ve obviously worked with Arsinée before, and even Daniel Kash. Do you take a different approach, directing them for the stage?

AE: Very different. I’m excited to see Arsinée onstage. I’ve seen her before in Europe and in stage productions here, but it’s very different than how she is in the films. She’s a theatrical creature, first and foremost. It’s been one of the best working experience we’ve had. We get to come to work together, and leave, which you don’t get to do on a film shoot. Here, there’s an actual 9-to-5 aspect to it. It’s just way more open. There’s a real sense that they’re controlling the show, as opposed to me controlling the show.

AVC: Do they bring any bad habits from the cinema that you have to break? Or specifically, any bad habit from your cinema that you have to break?

AE: No, not really. It’s a different gear completely. It’s a different set of muscles. I think it’s more a question of when you bring theatre actors to a film, and you have to shape the performance for camera. But when you bring a theatre actor, who is most comfortable on the stage, they just fall back into it. I’ve seen film actors, like very famous actors, who want to do a play for a prestige of doing it, just not have the muscles.

AVC: Cruel And Tender is very confrontational, and almost seems like fringe-y material. Is there a worry of shocking the audience when you’re playing to an audience this big?

AE: That’s a decision that Matthew has made. I applaud him for that. It might be shocking for a traditional audience here, but that’s the direction that I think he wants to push things. It’ll be an entertaining show, and I hope people will respond in kind.

AVC: So nothing has been done to tone that down?

AE: If anything, it’s been ramped up.

AVC: There’s a lot of CAPS lock in the text itself, which you don’t see that often.

AE: Right, yeah. It’s very visceral. The roots of Greek tragedy is that a lot of the violence happens offstage, and you have people talking about it and bringing it back. What I’m trying to do is create the balance between what happens offstage and what we see, like a communal blood ritual. As a culture, I think, in Canada, at this level, we haven’t quite found our feet. We have an amazing fringe culture, and lots of great shows in these converted spaces. But these houses are the most challenging—the 800-seat theatre that’s trying to enjoin the audience that’s into exploratory theatre with a more mainstream audience. It’s been challenging, but I hope this is the play that’s going to help that process.