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Atom Egoyan's latest film, Adoration, explores post-9/11 cultural fault lines and the world of the Internet. A teenaged boy, Simon (Devon Bostick), tells his class a shocking story about his Arab father and Canadian mother. The story becomes an Internet sensation and the aftermath exposes unexpected connections between the boy, his mysterious French teacher (Arsinée Khanjian) and his guardian and uncle (Scott Speedman).

“There's a lot going on. It needs attention,” warns Toronto-based Egoyan, but for many viewers, the film is a welcome return to a kind of highly personal complexity on culture, technology and the spaces between people.

The movie opened in competition at Cannes earlier this year and has its North American premiere at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival. The following interview took place at Cannes, where the film was honoured with a prize from the Ecumenical Jury for promoting spiritual values.

One of the things that's intriguing about this film is its sheer eccentricity. Not only does it keep you guessing in the usual ways, but it has a streak of strange comedy.

I like this terrain. My last couple of films had agendas. In the case of Ararat it was political and with Where the Truth Lies, it had a very commercial agenda. Whether you get it, or whether you like it or not, it's the kind of film I've been working on and the product of my imagination and also the people I've been working with for the past 20 years and this is the kind of film we like to make. It veers between lunacy and despair and there's also a lightness and major cultural collisions.

I also love working with a smaller budget. The script doesn't have to be this blueprint that everyone understands and can attract stars. The story can redefine itself as you're making it. I think that's probably how I work best.

I also think it's very much about Toronto, which all my films, up to and including Exotica, were. Our version of multiculturalism is different than in other places.

Multiculturalism is touted as a success in Toronto, but it's very explosive in your film.

Yes. There's a lot of detonating – personal, literal and cultural. …

And after a rather static, philosophical beginning, things break loose, starting with an unlikely action sequence involving a car being towed.…

Yes. There's a huge shift at that point. There's this piece of equipment called the Russian Arm, which is remotely controlled from a car and goes on top of it to hold the camera. We had this huge piece of metal on top of a car swinging out over the traffic and it was very exciting. I'm not sure how much longer they're going to allow it but we were very lucky. I showed the film to David [Cronenberg] and I knew he would have drooled to have used that in Crash. He had to have the streets shut down for that film.

You also have to give a lot of credit to [composer] Mychael Danna for that sequence as well. He wrote this beautiful musical theme which modulates in a way that becomes exciting.

That physical journey is important for people to say things they never would have been able to say to each other. Simon also needs to take his physical journey. Of course, it's also a movement toward something more conventional.

What excites me is to throw all the balls into the air but then they have to come down and the story has to resolve. Order has to be restored and there has to be someone in the story with a will to impose that order.

When you were writing the story, you put Simon's story before real high-school classes and shot the students' responses, some of which made their way into the film. What did you learn from that?

I'm fascinated by how we encounter other people in a physical space that you just can't read on the screen. There's a performative aspect of personality that's inevitably part of people's behaviour on the Internet. They create a composed narrative.There's a kind of black comic sequence in the film where a group of people on the Internet become obsessed with being recognized for a trauma they escaped. Do you think, in some sense, the Internet accelerates the cult of victimhood?

I'm sure it does. The Internet is this sea of relativism. In order for people to stake claims, ideas will be embellished. People can concentrate their grievances and form communities that have not otherwise been available. Somehow it becomes more immediate to them because someone else is asking them to confess or address something that may not actually exist. Water finds the path of least resistance and, probably, so does sorrow.You show a world where people get boxed into their private and cultural histories, particularly their religious systems. How do they break out of that?

Any myth is a way of organizing the real and the imaginary to a version of an idea people want to believe, whether it's a cultural system or a family code. These myths can sustain us or be very destructive. The characters in the film have fixed on versions of their own truths, which you can't necessarily trust and which don't work for them. But through their love of this boy, their adoration of him, they can make this great leap of generosity and form a new peculiar kind of family. That's why, ultimately, I think there's a lightness and hopefulness to the film.

Because that adoration inspires them to tear off their cultural packages?

Yes. And once they've learned how, they'll continue to keep doing that.