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  • Filmmakers shine northern lights on American society

    Filmmakers shine northern lights on American society

    "From the English-speaking Canadian perspective, this is an incredible
    year at Cannes."

    Los Angeles Times
    5/22/2005

    BY KENNETH TURAN

    CANNES, FRANCE - CANADA. The United States looks different from there.
    Ask Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg, Toronto residents and good friends
    who have films in competition here - films that turn out to share a
    potent point of view vis-a-vis the United States.

    It's not just that Cronenberg's "A History of Violence" and Egoyan's
    "Where the Truth Lies," both based on novels and both changes of pace
    for their directors, are set in the United States. It's that their
    north-of-the-border attitude has given them a different take on two
    pervasive American problems: our culture of violence and our fealty to
    celebrity.

    Both directors refer to media guru and fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan
    when discussing their own work in relation to the United States. "Does a
    fish know about water?" Cronenberg asks metaphorically. "Living in a
    tributary, not the ocean, McLuhan had a different perspective. The
    insights he had into America would not be possible to anyone living in
    America. Stepping away has a lot to do with it."

    "A History of Violence," written by Josh Olsen from John Wagner and
    Vince Locke's graphic novel, is, at $32 million, easily Cronenberg's
    most expensive film. More to the point, for a director whose previous
    work, from "Scanners" to "Naked Lunch" to 1996's "Crash," has usually
    played out on reality's farthest shores, this one deals with a
    convincingly happy family (parents Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello and
    their two children) in Millbrook, Ind., "a Middle-American vision of Eden."

    "I enjoyed that aspect of the film, it was kind of a free gift," the
    director says, looking calm and collected despite very little sleep.
    "When you're inventing weird stuff, you have to start from scratch so
    the audience gets it. The dynamics of family are so understood you can
    start from a higher level and go further. You get the gift of emotional
    intensity, people relate and are drawn in in a way a bizarre fantasy
    never could accomplish."

    "Violence" is a forceful, riveting film about the pernicious effects of
    violence that easily combines an absorbing and disconcerting plot with
    underlying social concerns.

    "It has a simplicity, such a transparency, that you can see through it
    into something else that is underneath," the director says. "And that
    something else is quite disturbing."

    "You can't pick up a newspaper or go online without seeing violence
    close to home," Cronenberg says. "In a way, every act of violence in the
    movie is justifiable, it's set up deliberately so that anyone would have
    done it or wanted to. But killing is killing. As a kid I remember
    watching something on TV that brought home the horror of state-sponsored
    execution. If you're an American, you have a current administration that
    says killing under certain circumstances is very desirable, and the more
    wonderful at it you are - "shock and awe' - the more you can
    congratulate yourself."

    Like Cronenberg's film, Egoyan's project also began with a book, but
    this was a mainstream best seller by Rupert Holmes that dealt with a
    young reporter circa 1972 (Alison Lohman) who investigates the
    mysterious murder of a woman 15 years earlier that led to the breakup of
    the great comedy team of the age, Vince Collins (Colin Firth) and Lanny
    Morris (Kevin Bacon).

    It was a book so unlike the projects Egoyan ("The Sweet Hereafter")
    usually takes on that the filmmaker admits even his own agent was
    surprised. But the energetic and articulate director says that
    "sometimes I get taken into a world so completely outside my own I get
    excited by the possibilities, by something latent in the material that
    provokes and engages me." One of those things was what the film depicts
    as the potentially corrosive and destructive effects of Hollywood-style
    show business celebrity.

    "As a filmmaker who works in Canada, I'm both inside and outside that
    world, and I love the distance I have from it," Egoyan says. "The
    entertainment industry is clearly America's major export, it's something
    that we as Canadians have a profound respect for as well as an awareness
    of its mechanics. It was exhilarating dealing with the rhythms of
    American culture; one of the film's most exciting aspects was being in
    the belly of the beast."

    When he's taken meetings with major stars about roles, Egoyan says, he's
    come to "understand the pressure they're under to make the right
    decision, how vulnerable they are in that position."

    "If they commit, they have to be able to defend that decision, because
    ultimately a whole battery of people have to follow them through the
    process of making that film," he says.

    Egoyan might be speaking for both directors when he says that he's
    trying to create in the viewer what he calls "the transgressive feeling
    of not being sure you're supposed to be watching, of being in a place
    where you shouldn't be but you can't get out of it. Something dangerous
    might happen, things might go too far. You don't fear for the
    characters, you have a very distinct sense you yourself might be affected."

    Then there's the matter of this film festival, and the place of films
    like his and Cronenberg's within it.

    "From the English-speaking Canadian perspective," Egoyan says, "this is
    an incredible year at Cannes."


    PHOTO CAPTION courtesy of the Associated Press:
    Atom Egoyan, far right, says "it was exhilarating dealing with the
    rhythms of American culture" in making "Where the Truth Lies," which
    stars Colin Firth, far left, and Kevin Bacon.

    http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20050522/1011738.asp
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