Interview with Atom Egoyan - Director of "Guest Honour"
Mehrva Arvin speaks with Atom Egoyan about his latest film "Guest of Honour"
Atom Egoyan is a Canadian Egyptian director whose brilliant film career started in 1980’s and early 90’s during the glorious time of north American independent cinema. His first feature film Next of Kin (1984) won him a prize at Mannheim-Heidelberg international film festival. He has been involved in filmmaking and theater and art production since then and has been training the next generation of artists in various institution in Canada and Europe.
I am so happy that we are able to sit down at last. I do not remember was it is 92 in Toronto or 94 here in London when we actually talked.
It was 92 in Toronto. Yes. it was right around the time of Calendar.
That is one of my favorite films and I am so impressed that you remembered after all these years.
Of course. It is interesting I have noticed that a lot of Iranian artist have seen that film. I am wondering what it is about the film. That somehow it strikes a cord , I cannot quite get it but it is interesting.
I think as you know a lot of Iranians had left the country after the revolution and had returned in the 90’s so that story was perfect. It was about going back home to your roots and finding things you thought you knew and didn’t know. So I think that is what is the intriguing point.
That is so interesting because I thought it had something to do with the structure and I have talked to a lot of the Iranian artists who had seen the film and of course that makes sense, I also thought that may be the landscape is similar.
Probably for some people this point might be true
It seems there are 3 kinds of people, the ones who are from this place , people who had to leave and were raised in another community and the the people who are from way outside who consider themselves to have this identity. A play of these 3 levels of consciousness.
For me that was the film. I had just returned to Iran after 20 years in the States and it was my story.As for the Guest of Honor your latest film, I managed to see the film before I met you. The press screening schedule was as such that there were conflicts with much bigger films but I was so excited to see your new work and I was not the only one, there were whole group of hard core Egoyan fans who watched the film together. I truly enjoyed the film. It brought back a lot of Egoyan I knew from the past..Thank you for a great story telling because I think these days people in cinema have forgotten how tell an intelligent story. It was as good as a novel, so tell me more about it
It is just so many possibilities with cinema because we immediately understand what we see on the screen. Somehow it feels so real so given how immediate it feels, it allows us to play with time in a very particular way and actually I have always been interested in notions of displaced chronology. There are 5 different periods in the film. I think it is very clear where we are. In some of the other films, it might be more challenging but I think in this film because of young woman’s different personalities in these different places from childhood to when she was a teacher to when she is in prison and to when she is with the priest, that these are very different places in her life .W also understand her father is dead at the beginning of the film that his life has passed , so every time we are seeing him he is in some space which is held in the memory, either his own memory of himself or our understanding of his presence. I find that these films in fact excite me, the ones that are able to use this. I think each film has its own language, so I think this is just the way my story telling feels most natural to me. It is also interesting film because we see people acting without understanding why they are doing certain things. I am asking a lot from the audience to trust me that it will be explained. You know so we are seeing actions, inspirations of it or the intentions after the fact . For example when he goes to the restaurant to get the information we are looking at him as he is being watched . ..so we understand that after the fact, so it is subverting certain conventions . I am not doing this to be perverse, it is how the story comes to me . I am trying to talk about the characters that creating some sort of crises and normally they will go some place where they will have answers, but they can’t go since they don’t have any place to go to. We gather that may be the David Thewlis character was religious at some point . We see that when he is with the Armenian party . He is talking about event as it is an Eucharist. He says to his blood and I gather may be at some point as a child he had religion but we don’t see that anymore .What we see is that he still needs these strange sacraments. like the rabbit feet in his hands and it is all the needs to find symbols that we can communicate our feelings- or may be like the strange things he finds in the drawer like the ribbons or finding this cell phone that has these information, they becomes strange, sort of an icon as well.
At some point the story evolves around the telephone how it actually dominating us and how it can be used against us.
The 2 men who have had this chance and have tried to impose themselves on her story, the boyfriend who committed suicide and now this bus drive, both using her technology. It is almost as if this place which is most intimate repository of her own identity has become accessed by these other people.
For me it was also interesting to see that you are touching on a subject which you have always touched on. The intricate and complicated relationship that we have with our parents. It is so nice to see she is as much of a perfectionist as her father, this is what happens as sometimes you realize you are so much like your parents, but you want to deny it…..
Horrifying isn’t it ?
Also the way she has been trying to punish herself.
May be again that is the strange transmission of experience that one is not aware of. Because the way she wants to punish herself seems almost Catholic in a way but we gather she was not raised this way. In fact she did not go to the funeral of her teacher but her father did. May be because of his lapsed Catholicism he transmitted this feeling of guilt to her and she needs to punish herself. It is strange how these things affect you – you are not even aware of it. You are right, the way we as children absorb our parents is frightening because it is our primal relationship. We see this marriage and in her case what really concerns me with the film is that the film is an emotional trap. There is no way the father can tell a 10 year old what had happened. He could not say that he was attracted to her teacher, that the mother as she was dying with cancer had given permission that may be after she had died , that may be he could get together with her or may be he did not have an affair, may be it was just something that was in the air but that there wasn’t the permission from her mother. By the time he could say those to her she would not have believed it, so he is in a trap, all he can do is strangely enough is to deny and I find that it is very unfortunate. I don’t know what the situation is in that relationship but strangely enough the only answer he comes to at the end when he smiles as he has his last inspection is that he thinks ,what if I have my funeral at the church, this man knows my history. I don’t know if he plans it since he plans everything but at the end his dream comes true.
Talk about dreams come true, another thing you talked about is the whole topic of reputation- I think culturally- it is in some other places it is much more stronger than here.I would divide it into the west and the rest. People act so differently in different places certain things they would try not to do – I was very touched that you decided to talk about this issue
This is something that affected me. I worked very hard for my reputation. I worked from a very young age to be an artist and I have build a reputation. What happened is that at certain festivals not this one but couple of film ago I saw this reputation be attacked and all I had done was to make a film. Some of the things being said were psychologically damaging. I was like, wow- I didn’t kill anybody, I am not a pedophile, I didn’t do anything to hurt anyone, -I am a decent human being I think and I was being publicly disgraced and I had to think about this. Why is it hurting me and why does someone else takes control of what my reputation is. My parents were both artists in Egypt when they came to Canada, they worked really hard to have this reputation as artists- it was very difficult for them so this question of reputation and honor is a part of my culture for sure .I have seen my uncles get hysterically upset .Why is this so important , because I was trying to understand 2 cultures where with my friends, it was different. I have a story about this as a child may be you’ll appreciate . I had an English friend and I went to their house. He and other boys played a trick on me. There was a door with hinges on it . They put me behind the door and said to put your fingers where the hinges were and they put a raw egg there and they walked away. I was like, oh my God I was trapped – if I move my fingers the egg will fall so I stayed there until they came back laughing and took the egg. So I thought this was a great trick- so I invited another English friend to my parent’s house. I told him to put his fingers through the hinges of the door. There was a beautiful rug my parents had brought from Egypt I put an egg on his hand and.. the moment I walked away I heard the egg drop. I thought, why didn’t it work? I realized they did not care, they did not feel shame, it was my parents rug- I realized they had a completely different views, why is it that my friends had realized that I would be trapped. So that said a lot to me, you know the fact that I was different . I was thinking about shame I was a guest in the house and I did not want to be responsible for ruining something but the same thing when it came to my house, was not the same feeling, this was interesting so the title Guest of Honor, it is also this notion that you are somehow invited to this space which is outside of what you actually understand.. You are guest of this concept of honor.
Another topic you touched on in the film is the matter of perception because you see something and decide what it is you have seen. You show the father explaining about the camera but at the end you show something different, it is like going with one’s assumptions. You see something, you never really stop and go back to check to see what you have seen?
And then it becomes an orthodoxy and may be the image is rehearsed when she is in prison and he brings this piece of music sheet that she remembers, may be she would n’t even remember this if it wasn’t for the fact that he brought it as evidence and she remembered how she felt when she was writing this piece of music. So that image comes back to her in a way that it is revealed to her and may be the act that the father started quite innocently but it means so many things,things in the drawers, does she know he found the suicide note, no he never says that . Why would he choose this particular piece of paper?. Why was it wrapped, all these things we don’t understand but her mind begins to go into overdrive, it begins to process these images and brings them back and she realizes this was primal moment for her. These are the images where she remembers from the video of the suicide like when she is coming down the hallway when she does crazy things with her students, there are flashbacks as she has obviously watched which they come back . But I am trying to contrast those which the organic maneuvers of memories .She has experienced through her own perceptional system and the images that actually exists in a way that doesn’t shift which is actually formed by technology. I have always been interested this. In Calendar, family viewing and the early films like how do we sort through our senses of own experience when we have to actually weave not only what we remember but now which has been transcribed to us as an objective reality and of course it is never so objective , as the father says here is the objective reality? I was shooting the video holding my right hand so how can I be actually holding her hand? So it is never as clear as that but it pretends to be . While we know memory is as you know, we choose what we want to remember but technology actually proposes that will even if you choose not to remember it is still transcribed and while you can say that it certainly is, well we have always kept daily journals so what is the difference?. There is something more, it is like what I said before when you see a moving image that feels more like direct transcription of reality where a written journal is not.
Another amazing point in the film specially these days as I have been watching many of them is all this nudity which is shown in films. In this film a big part of the conflict is about the fact that if she has had sex with her students, or has the father actually had an affair? It was such a treat
I think once you actually show that then any sense of ambiguity becomes erased because we actually respond to the nakedness in a visceral way as oppose to eroticism, which is very often, about what is withheld, like what we don’t see. So you can create more of erotic sense than what is withheld. It was interesting to me I was talking today to someone else about this. He said he was in a film class , the professor was talking about erotic films and had shown them Exotica. Which actually is not about sexuality at all so there is erotic energy but it is the erotic energy of discovery, this feeling of magnetic desire to know more which is an erotic energy somehow but it is not a sexual energy.
For the very same reason Exotica is seen a lot in Iran. For a lot of people that visual thing is the important one not the concept behind it.
Yes it becomes like Heterotopia, a term used by Foucault for a place when different realities converge and it is very interesting term.
Can you tell me a bit about the production of the film, I thought it said Egoyan arts?
Yes Ego film Arts. My father had a gallery in Cairo that was called Ego Arts.so when I started making films for the first time when I was 18, it was with Ego film Arts. I have always used it and some other young film makers which we have produced.
Any other projects you are working on?
Yes I am working with an Armenian composer Mary Kouyoumdjian on reflection of life of Arshile Gorky the 20th century abstract expressionist Armenian painter for the Metropolitan museum of Art in NYC in March 2020. I have always had a special interest in Arschile…My son’s name is Arschill. Me and my wife have made a short film about him and I will be using various images I have from him in a form of a projection
Thank you for spending time for a talk with me.
Atom Egoyan photo By Seda Grig - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,
