A STRANGE THOUGHT occurs while watching Atom Egoyan’s new film, Chloe, a noirish, erotically charged drama that stars Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson and anime-faced “it girl” Amanda Seyfried. Toronto has never been immortalized or romanticized the way New York was in Woody Allen’s early, funny films. Allen gave us Manhattan, but where is our Scarborough, our Etobicoke?
Of course, from Hollywood’s perspective, Toronto is not Toronto. It’s Chicago or New York or Boston or at least an aesthetically and economically reasonable facsimile. It’s a body double in films as diverse as The Incredible Hulk and Hairspray, Serendipity and Cinderella Man. It’s a chameleon-like metropolis that rarely, if ever, plays itself. When it does — in Strange Brew or The Love Guru, for example — it’s merely wallpaper, another of the many extras hanging around the set hoping for a close-up.
Enter Egoyan, whose films often cast his adopted hometown in noteworthy supporting roles, which is uncommon even among Canadian filmmakers, who sometimes try to hide their roots in hopes that anonymity will lead to greater appeal (but usually results in even greater anonymity). Egoyan’s first feature, Next of Kin, was shot in Kensington Market.
Similarly,Exotica,The Adjuster and Ararat made significant use of the local scenery, often in alienating or isolating fashion, which is in keeping with the themes common to Egoyan’s body of work.
Then there’s Chloe, easily Egoyan’s most accessible — and most star-driven — film, which takes considerable care to evoke Toronto’s glamour and warmth even though it was shot in the dead of winter.
“The architectural brand of the city has changed dramatically. It’s been reborn — and for the better — over the last 10 years, thanks to the AGO, the ROM,the growth along Queen Street, which, from the Beaches to Roncesvalles, is one of the most incredible stretches of any city in the world,” Egoyan says during a recent phone interview. “With Chloe, I wanted to reflect that,to bring out the beauty and romanticism of the city that’s been largely absent onscreen.”
It’s that sense of architectural wonder and romanticism that first drew Egoyan to the Summerhill neighbourhood where he’s lived for the last several years. The filmmaker shares a beautiful home with his wife, actress Arsinée Khanjian, who has appeared in several of his films, and their son, Arshile, who is named after Armenian-American painter Arshile Gorky.
Egoyan is 49, with floppy brown hair, round eyeglasses and a scholarly air that lend him a certain middle-aged Harry Potter appearance. Granted, Egoyan is only interested in movie magic,not hexes, spells and potions. And just as Woody Allen adores the Big Apple, he’s clearly having an affaire de coeur with the city he’s called home since moving from Victoria to attend the University of Toronto more than 30 years ago.
Almost every scene in Chloe is instantly recognizable, from hip and trendy Yorkville to cool and classy downtown restaurants like the Rivoli and Café Diplomatico, and each does a terrific job of stealing the spotlight from its far more glamorous — and occasionally naked — co-stars. “Other cities only have pockets of what we have here. But these locations are never used in Hollywood films because they don’t look enough like the cities Toronto stands in for,”he says.
Chloe delves into the mercurial waters of marriage, jealousy and infidelity with its story of a doctor (Moore) who hires an escort (Seyfried) to seduce her philandering husband (Neeson) only to discover she’s being seduced herself.
It’s based on the French film Nathalie,which Egoyan saw at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival. When producer and fellow North Toronto native Ivan Reitman handed Egoyan the script, he didn’t even recognize it as an adaptation. “It felt very new to me,” he says, noting that Chloe explores the titular prostitute’s obsession with the doctor.
“The wife becomes obsessed with these erotic stories that Chloe tells her about the man she thought she knew,and as a result, they enter into this complicated relationship where they are both soothing each other but also tormenting each other,” Egoyan says.
“That was a rich area of psychological drama to explore,which is obviously what I’m most interested in.”
Egoyan is an Oscar-nominated director and screenwriter (for The Sweet Hereafter) although Chloe is his first film that he didn’t have a hand in writing.The script was written by Erin Cressida Wilson — who also penned the erotic drama Secretary, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader — and set in her hometown of San Francisco,which caused Egoyan to balk when he first read it.“I wasn’t sure about the dynamics of the relationships involved in Nathalie, which were very specific and very Parisian, and then to move it to San Francisco — I would be a tourist in San Francisco,” he says. “It’s not a place, a social milieu with which I’m familiar. But I felt if we brought the story to Toronto — and I could show that the city can be just as alluring and as sexy as those other settings — that I could bring something to it.”
As with his other films, casting was crucial to making the story work, and never before has he recruited such a highprofile cast.
“Not only does it matter who you cast in terms of them being right for the role, but it also plays into whether or not you’re able to get funding and distribution,”says Egoyan, who discusses the Hollywoodinfluenced decision-making process with surprising ease.
“Julianne is one of our finest actresses and a true leading lady. Amanda was always my first choice, but she wasn’t a known quantity.She was on the TV series Big Love, but Mamma Mia! hadn’t come out yet,” he explains. (She’s also in Dear John, which bumped Avatar from its seven-week reign at the box office.) “Of course, once [Mamma Mia!] became a huge hit, it made our choice look that much smarter. And a similar thing happened with Liam. I’ve always appreciated his work tremendously, and then, while we were still filming, Taken comes out and is a huge hit.It was a bit of unexpected good fortune for us because again we look really smart for having him in our movie.”
Unfortunately,production was without Neeson for several days after his wife, Natasha Richardson, died following a freak skiing accident in Quebec. Neeson returned a week later to shoot his remaining scenes in just two days. “We were all so worried for Liam,and we were all very grateful when he came back and finished the job. He was a consummate professional, and we were eternally grateful.”
Surprisingly, for a filmmaker with a reputation as a provocateur, an art house darling and perhaps a bit of an enfant terrible known for writing intellectually challenging stories, Egoyan found the experience of shooting someone else’s rather linear script liberating.
“Sometimes,with a script I’ve written,I’m not quite sure what a scene is about until I see it edited together within the context of the whole film, but working from Erin’s script allowed me to focus on bringing out the nature of each scene as we were filming,”he says.
“Scenes I watch now I would never have written myself. I love melodrama, but I’m not capable of writing it well. And remember, when I started out, I was just a director for hire — I shot the pilot episode of the Friday the 13th TV series.”
It’s strange to think that Egoyan began his career working on a TV show inspired by a blockbuster series of slasher films. Then again, even Canada’s foremost auteur filmmaker has to start somewhere.
Web exclusive quote from Egoyan:
"Film records a very specific moment or series of moments that will exist as long as the film does. Unlike a play, which exists only in that moment in which it is performed and then fades into memory. Film becomes a faithful record of all of the decisions you made as a filmmaker, during pre-production, during filming and during post-production. Everyone can see the daring and risky choices you made, the safe choices, and the utterly wrong-headed choices, and those especially will come back to haunt you. That is the power and horror of cinematography."