Remembering and Retelling: Atom Egoyan on Ararat
by Marc Glassman
Atom Egoyan burst on the scene in 1984 with Next of Kin, an improbably funny character study of an alienated WASP who finds his persona pretendingto be a lost member of a displaced Armenian family. Moving away fromhis own Armenian-Canadian roots, the writer/director made three remarkably complex features dealing with technology, identity andsexuality: Family Viewing, Speaking Parts and The Adjuster. But itwas with Calendar in 1993 that Egoyan took his work to another level,leavening his highly structured story of a couple who break up whilevisiting ancestral sites in Armenia with bursts of humour, pathos andsensuality that had not been present in his previous work.
His next film, Exotica, was a huge commercial and artisticbreakthrough. Centred on a strip club called Exotica, the film weavestogether the tales of an accountant, a pet shop owner, a stripper,the club's MC, and its owner into a rich narrative laced with loveand regret. Egoyan turned a potentially exploitative erotic thriller into a dense, intensely felt drama. Exotica was Egoyan's lastoriginal film screenplay in the 1990s. He turned to adaptations,using the works of Russell Banks, William Trevor and Samuel Beckett to make idiosyncratic versions of The Sweet Hereafter, Felicia'sJourney and Krapp's Last Tape.
Now, Egoyan returns to the screen with an original and highly personal work. Ararat is the film that the Armenian expatriate community has been anticipating for a decade. In it, Egoyan addressesa century-old wrong: the Armenian Holocaust. Taking the horrifyingstory of the killing of the Armenian minority in Turkey's eastern provinces during World War I, he has made a deeply moving andpolitically controversial film.
Structurally, it's a typical Egoyan work-replete with psychodrama,questions of identity and meditations on cinema. But it's also muchmore. Egoyan has taken on, for the first time, a highly charged political issue, and Ararat is a strong, emotional tale with athrough line directly to Egoyan's own identity.
Canadian Screenwriter spoke to Atom Egoyan in late June after Ararat screened at Cannes and before the announcement that the film wouldopen this year's Toronto International Film Festival.
Canadian Screenwriter: Screenwriting is a solitary role. You sit in a room for hours working on characters and ideas which may or may not work on the screen. Whatexcites you about the process?
Atom Egoyan: The moments I find most exhilarating when I'm screenwriting are whenI see an activity and I don't quite understand why someone might bedoing it. I actually have to write the script to figure it out. Thatmight seem like a heresy. The traditional notion of screenwriting isthat you start with characters and then you have them do things. I'vefound that I'm really interested in occupations, not only in the sense of the job thatsomeone does but the things that they do to occupy their time. Thosegestures and those rituals excite my imagination. The role of thescreenplay is to understand what led the people to the point wherethey find themselves in these places.
CS: Atom, you are Armenian and people have been coming to you for years,asking you to make a film about what happened during World War I. Youcould have approached this story in a number of ways. How did youbalance your artistic strategies with the need to get the tale of theArmenian Holocaust told in a fairly direct manner?
AE: I had to wrestle with the notion of sincerity. I wanted toacknowledge that there is a great sincerity in someone wanting toshow history, and thinking that by showing it, things are going to berectified. That does have a valuable function in our culture, butit's not something that I can express without some degree ofsuspicion. So I wanted to show that need by having the film withinthe film, the one that's being made by Edward Saroyan. I needed tohave a character who's observing the filmmaking who has all sorts of issues, and is both part of the process and completely outside of it. Raffi is a kid, an ArmenianCanadian, who works as a driver on the production and has all sortsof problems with that type of representation. Ultimately, though, hisexposure to that film changes his life. Something in his imagination is activated by moments that he sees reconstructed for him.
I wanted to address that degree of sincerity in terms of EdwardSaroyan's (Charles Aznavour's) film with respect, but also to question the nature of that project. At this point in our culture, representing history is a very contentious thing. It changes thenotion of history being defined by the victor because the victor is not necessarily the person who won the war. In our culture the victor is the person who makes the best image of what happened. That's loaded. In the case of the Armenian-Turkish situation, it's particularly loaded because of all sorts of political issues, around whether or not it's convenient politically to recognize history. Ifit's not, there's all sorts of images you can introduce into people's consciousness as to why itdidn't happen.
So this combination of having to talk about the sincerity of representation with the banal horror of denial was an essential piece of why I had to make Ararat. To make this film as personal as itneeded to be, I had to reflect on who I was 20 years ago and compare that person to who I am now. Twenty years ago, when I first came to Toronto, I was suddenly exposed to this history; I wasn't raised with it. When I found out, I felt the story just needed to be told: if youexplained it to someone, it would be able to change things. I realize now it's not as simple as that. You can tell someone a story really well, but a week later they can hear another story. It's much more complicated than I thought then, but I wanted to have a character be in that place and combine that with the experiences I've had making films for 20 years.
CS: How tough was it for you to be the first filmmaker dealing with theissue of the Armenian Holocaust?
AE: I'm definitely aware of the weight of it. I sometimes wish thatsomeone else had done it before I came in with my take on it. I knewfrom the beginning that the most dramatic thing about the Armeniangenocide in our present day is the fact that it's been sosystematically denied. That's fascinating. The damage that's beendone is quite profound. The repercussions of that are fascinating toexplore. Everyone knows how a grandchild of the Jewish Holocaustinherits that trauma, but we've had very few dramas that deal withhow trauma is actually transmitted. We have a wealth of Holocaustdrama, but it's difficult togive dramatic form to the weight that an 18-year-old incontemporary Canadian culture bears as part of a generation that hasto deal with a country and a society that still denies their genocideever occurred.
See the Fall 2002 issue of Canadian Screenwriter for the complete interview.
