Canadian director Atom Egoyan makes small films, intimate in scope, in which personal emotional crises take on an almost universal significance. In movies like The Sweet Hereafter and Exotica, Egoyan renders tragedy through the prism of different points of view, folding his characters' conflicting reactions back on themselves until we finally see the big picture.
Egoyan's new film, Ararat, may be his most ambitious project yet, in which he accepts the challenge of trying to capture the atrocities of the Armenian genocide on film. But the Cairo-born director is himself of Armenian descent and questions his own authority. Rather than making a historical epic, Egoyan chose to make a movie about another Armenian filmmaker confronting his issues with accurately telling that story. "Right now, because I've made a movie that's about filmmaking, that has a film-within-a-film, I've been thinking about movies that are about filmmaking," Egoyan says, "and there are some really amazing examples that are among my favorite films." Here, the director names five films that shaped the way he chose to tell the story of Ararat.
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8 1/2(1963, dir: Federico Fellini, starring: Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale)
8 1/2 is a very exciting film dealing with the myth that a director is able, by controlling and making people do things on a set, to come to terms with huge issues in his personal life. It's about a film director trying to literally tame his obsessions. He's making a film, and he suddenly comes to a block. He's facing incredible pressures from his producers and critics and various people expecting that anything he does is brilliant, but he himself feels completely shallow and hollow about any gesture he makes. He begins to split between the practice of filmmaking as a fantasy and the actual logistics of production, and that tension is something I found really entertaining and really inspiring. The enduring image there is of the director surrounded by all the various women he's had contact in his life. In this sort of ridiculous fantasy, he feels he can kind of orchestrate them all to move and act exactly as he wants. Of course, that's the fantasy of film direction, that you get to be this kind of emotional tyrant, so it was this really great exposé and exploration of that myth.
The Conversation (1974, dir: Francis Ford Coppola, starring: Gene Hackman, John Cazale)
First of all, it's an amazing performance by Gene Hackman, an incredibly touching and vulnerable performance. Of all those '70s paranoia/conspiracy-types of movies, that one seems really haunting because it's dealing with a very personal moment for this individual which is completely plausible, and I find it as vivid now as it must have been at that time. It's about someone who is hired to record secret conversations, and he realizes as he is recording this one conversation that it's about something much darker than he could have imagined, something which implicates him morally as a witness. There's one part of the tape that is completely indecipherable, and he spends most of the film trying to filter through until he finds that hidden piece of text which will prove to him that his worst nightmare is true, that he has been the sole witness to someone else's murder. The descent that the character has into this obsession is really well calibrated. It's a really clear dramatic arc, and it's beautifully expressed. Those end scenes, where he's tearing up his apartment, are unforgettable, and his jazz playing, that final image of him in this completely devastated apartment playing his instrument, is just indelible.
Blowup(1966, dir: Michelangelo Antonioni, David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave)
What got me really excited about that movie was it somehow really gets to the glamour of image-making. That image of David Hemmings as this kind of fashion photographer with these two young London chicks at the time. The scene of him photographing them and that kind of dissolving into this orgy of image-making, both figuratively and literally was one of the more enduring images of my adolescent film-watching experience. Cinematically, I just think Antonioni is a hugely important figure. It's not his best film by any means, but it had a huge social impact. Again, it was a very clear metaphor for a certain state of consciousness where someone who seems to be operating without a moral compass is suddenly in a situation where they have to confront their ethics and their responsibility as a human being. Here, he makes a photograph in a park, and as he's developing it, he notices a figure lurking in the bushes. He realizes that he might have been the sole witness in a murder and documented it as proof, but in order to make that document clear, he has to magnify it and get closer and closer. Unlike the Gene Hackman character, where the process of filtration and excavation produces clarity, the David Hemmings character finds the more something is blown up, the grainier it becomes, and the more indecipherable it becomes.
Two Weeks in Another Town(1962, dir: Vincente Minnelli, starring: Kirk Douglas, Edward G. Robinson)
This is not one of my favorite films, but it's a greatly overlooked movie. I don't even know if it's released on video. You probably know The Bad and the Beautiful, which is Minnelli's Academy Award-winning film about Hollywood at the time. Two Weeks in Another Town was made with Kirk Douglas 10 years later. It's sort of like the follow-up. Kirk Douglas plays this totally faded star who goes to make this marginal spaghetti western in Rome, and while there, he rejuvenates his life by taking over the direction of a movie. I think there's something really touching about that film and what it says about the Hollywood fantasy, even as it exists in this remote outpost of film production. It also talks about the process of aging in Hollywood. It's interesting to me that you don't have this [officially recognized] genre of the movie-within-the-movie, because it's something that almost every filmmaker that I know of has tackled at one point. It's a very profound theme, this process by which people try to record or create an environment or community of people engaged in the process of making other people do things that they wouldn't be doing otherwise, dramatizing or constructing scenes, and the way that impacts our own ability to communicate and create relationships.
The Pawnbroker(1964, dir: Sidney Lumet, starring: Rod Steiger, Geraldine Fitzgerald)
One of the most effective films I've seen about the Holocaust would be The Pawnbroker. It doesn't really show us what happened. Instead, we see the consequences on this really traumatized individual after the fact. Rod Sterling plays a pawnbroker in the Bronx in the '50s. He's a Holocaust survivor who lost his entire family, and we see how that person has become hardened to life. He could live this suburban fantasy around him but chooses to punish himself by working in this pawnbroking business where he deals with the dregs of humanity. We see how that person lives with that history, and the historical images are almost subliminal. It was interesting going back to some of these [historical] epics, even things that you consider to be classics like Lawrence of Arabia. Sorry, but that film seems really forced. You've very aware of the pageantry and the construction. You're aware that you're supposed to absorb it in a certain way. There's something almost preordained, a dutiful acceptance of the image as a fact. People who know my work understand that I'm incredibly sensitive to notions of image production, that there's something both seductive and horrifying about it at the same time. I think [Ararat] is a film that deals with people making objects of trauma. On the one hand, the images of the film-within-the-film had to serve a purpose to educate people about what happened and how horrifying the atrocity was, but I also wanted to feel challenged by the way it was shown and to understand that there was something didactic about the manner of presenting it. The viewer can respond to those images on an entirely emotional level or be suspicious of them, and the film would work either way.
