Atom Egoyan

“Wings of Desire. This film changed my life. Wim had won the Grand Prize at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in Montreal in 1987. My film Family Viewing was an honorable mention. When he got up to the podium to actually accept his award, he had heard my film because it was announced before his prize, and he gave me his check for $5,000, and it was this huge, overwhelming, public event, and it changed my life. Suddenly it got all sorts of attention.”

“So this is one of the most amazing movies, Fat Girl, and it’s also crazy for me because my wife, Arsinée Khanjian, is playing the Mother of the two Sisters in this. And for those of you who have seen this brilliant movie, the last half hour is so tense, but it became more tense for me because there’s this drive in a car, and I heard from Arsinée that there was no camera rig. Basically, she was driving the car with the cast in the car, and there was a camera mounted on the hood.”

“I have not seen Working Girls since it first came out. I remember this being a really powerful film for me. It was so unlike anything I had seen. So this is Lizzie Borden, and it had a big influence, I think, on Exotica, probably, just in terms of the tone of it, the coolness of it, I guess, the emotional coolness of it. I felt it was something you wouldn’t have been able to do if it was being made as a commercial film. So this was really, really important.”

“We were talking before about Catherine Breillat and danger in cinema and pushing things and this is certainly a film that really pushes things. This is by Liliana Cavani, The Night Porter, and an absolutely fearless Performance by Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde. Deeply problematic, probably, and once upon a time you could make these types of movies, and you got to make them because no one would be questioning your sincerity and they would be trusting you.”

“This film by Nicolas Roeg, Walkabout. There’s just an incredible energy that this film summons. This is a film about the collision of those two value systems, and it creates an erotic energy. Erotic energy for me is also about this notion of a vacuum, where there’s an emptiness that needs to be filled, and that feeling of it being filled creates this energy, which is erotic tension, actually. It was a defining film when I was a kid.”

“Michael Haneke. I got this fax sometime in the ’80s. This is from Michael Haneke. He’s asking me how I got the video effects in my second feature, Family Viewing, because he wanted to use that texture on Benny’s Video. So that’s kind of crazy. He’s asking me how I did it, he’s thinking that there’s some complicated process I was using, but actually all I was doing is, I had a cable in my VCR, and I was kind of pulling it in and out to get this grainy effect.”

“This is one of my favorite films. This is Pasolini’s Teorema. This is probably the high point of this entire visit. So I’ve just been kindly offered to swap out my single version of Teorema with the box set. Now I get to have The Gospel According to Matthew, which is probably one of the most incredible fusion movies of all time, in terms of style, in terms of actually dealing with the notion of Christ’s energy and his compassion and openness. It’s an incredible movie.”

“This is the complete Bergman. Wow. This is the filmmaker that, if you are interested in the interior landscape of our psyche and the fullest exploration of where that can take you in the cinema form, this is the crown jewel. This is the best. So here I am, I’m just gonna walk out with… I’m just gonna finish with these two things. Two box sets by… I’m kind of overwhelmed. Thank you.”