Egoyan, with his leading ladies for Chloe, left, Amanda Seyfried (in the film’s title role), and, right, Julianne Moore
When we think of Atom Egoyan, we think of a brainy, almost willfully anti-commercial filmmaker. It's a prejudice, if one may call it that, substantiated by such demanding Egoyan-written and directed fare as The Adjuster, Ararat and, more recently, Adoration. It's also a characterization the bespectacled, almost elfin Man in Black likely would embrace himself.
But auteurthough he may be, the Toronto-based Egoyan has been squinting behind the camera lens for more than half of his 49 years in a whole lotta contexts. Lest we forget, he made pretty good coin in the late 1980s directing episodes of pulp-ish TV fare such as Friday the 13th, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone.
The fact that his latest feature, Chloe, is, on its glittery, glassy surface at least, an erotic thriller with a big-name cast shouldn't therefore be construed as a cinematic dumb-down. As he likes to say: "I know the language; I enjoy it." Amanda Seyfried of Mamma Mia! fame is the titular character, a gorgeous, pricey but decidedly spooky call girl who's hired by Catherine, gynecologist to the rich and famous (Julianne Moore), to test the fidelity of her husband, a charismatic and flirtatious university professor named David (Liam Neeson).
Admittedly, making Chloe involved "a totally different process and different skill set than what I bring to my 'own' films," Egoyan remarked during two interviews - the first at last fall's Toronto International Film Festival, where Chloe had its world premiere, the other this week, prior to the film's commercial release here (tomorrow) and in the United States. Most significant was having to adhere closely to another writer's script (by Erin Cressida Wilson, an American) - an Egoyan first after 12 self-penned features - and a more linear story than the non-sequential, flashback-within-flashback trajectory that has been Egoyan's signature. Making Chloe also meant "creating a prototype that several people would have to sign off on," most prominently producer Ivan Reitman ( Ghostbusters, Animal House) and screening the results before test audiences.
Another complication had nothing to do with film protocol. About six weeks into the shoot, Neeson's actress wife, Natasha Richardson, died in a skiing accident in Quebec. Production was halted for a week, then Neeson returned to the set for two days of shooting. As Reitman observed, Richardson's untimely death "didn't change the film but it changed us all as people."
Whatever compromises did occur, Chloe easily carries the descriptor "Egoyan-esque," not least because of the director's success in persuading his screenwriter and producers to set it and shoot it in Toronto. In February, no less. As originally conceived, Chloe was to have been made in Wilson's hometown of San Francisco. But after scouting locations there, Egoyan became convinced that "every way of imagining that city [had] been done," that he was "a foreigner" there. So instead of cable cars, Nob Hill and Golden Gate Park, Chloe's milieu is one of wintry exteriors - of skating rinks and chic hotels, street cars and designer houses, slushy sidewalks and Yorkville shops, the Royal Conservatory and the Rivoli. It's what Egoyan calls "the anti- Adoration" - a reference to his 2008 feature using bleaker Toronto locations such as the city's bus depot, freeways, suburbs and parking lots.
Hollywood certainly knows Toronto, having used the Ontario capital as a shooting site for umpteen runaway productions over the years. But for Egoyan, the situation has been akin to the role-playing of Seyfried's character in Chloe: "It gets paid a lot to pretend it's somewhere else." This time, Toronto gets to be itself - or, more precisely, a version of itself. If heretofore audiences have seen other cities as the acme of allure and romance, it's largely because their architecture has been "studied and rehearsed" for decades, according to Egoyan - "glamorized" via the magic of "camera angles, lenses, lighting and movement." Here the magic that helped make London and, yes, San Francisco famous has been applied to the place formerly known as Hogtown.
Could Chloe turn out to be a "dangerous" film for Egoyan? Since its commercial prospects seem brighter than, say, those of his last Hollywood-style film, the convoluted Where the Truth Lies (2005), might he be seduced into abandoning the prismatic, idea-packed cinema that's been his métier?
Egoyan acknowledged he has been getting a lot of screenplays in the wake of Chloe. "There's this sudden interest, like, 'Oh, you do that sort of work.'" But most have been "really terrible." Chloe, he now believes, "was that rare kind of script where, if I had the right actors and the team I wanted, I could bring something to it that was particular. It had enough complexity in the characters to hold my interest."
For the moment, he's content to bide his time. "Directing Adoration and Chloe back to back was exhausting," he noted. Besides, "I'm not in the same place I was 15 years ago with Exotica [his 1994 breakthrough]i>, where I felt I had to seriously consider everything I was offered. I'm much more selective about what I'll even consider reading now.... I want to make sure that the producers, before proposing something, are real, that they're bringing something to the table.... There's a lot of people who are fantasizing in this business, much like the characters in Chloe, and they can be very convincing. So you have to be careful you're not wasting time."