The Old Master

Atom Egoyan on murder, trauma and videotapes.

Atom Egoyan speaks softly and carefully, in complex sentences. Usually, this makes for a great interview, an exchange of ideas and questions, but this time we’re stuck on a faulty phone line that cuts in and out. He’s calling from home in Toronto, where he’s looking after his 6-year-old son, while his wife, actress Arsinée Khanjian, is on location in France.

We can’t help but note the ironies of the situation, because Egoyan’s new film, Felicia’s Journey, focuses on 1) the ways that technology affects memory and communication, and 2) a pair of protagonists (Felicia, played by Elaine Cassidy, and Bob Hoskins’ Hilditch) with troubling family backgrounds. Felicia’s Catholic father has "banished" her from her home in Ireland for becoming pregnant by a neighborhood man who has joined the British Army. Afraid, alone and looking for the father of her child, Felicia arrives in a small English industrial town, where she is befriended by Hilditch, who is unbeknownst to her a serial killer of young women. Their deepening relationship, says Egoyan, brings both characters to a "shocking recognition of their own situations."

Egoyan was attracted to William Trevor’s 1994 novel because it works on "many different levels: cultural, familial, psychosexual." He was especially drawn to the "conflict" between the characters’ different ways of "accessing" history and memory. Felicia, says Egoyan, "comes from a romanticized, 19th-century world, a culture rich in oral traditions. Her father tells her stories about the past, and her only maternal link is her grandmother, who speaks this ancient tongue. Felicia’s still living in this world where she has to write letters by hand."

On the other hand, Egoyan observes, Hilditch grapples with his own troubled past — namely his relationship with his dead mother, Gala (Khanjian) — via videotapes of her 1950s cooking show. "It fascinates me," Egoyan says, "this blurred line between the tape as a way of representing memory or representing the archiving of reality."

When he started work on Felicia’s Journey, following what he calls the "sustained celebration of The Sweet Hereafter," Egoyan was well aware of the pitfalls — the clichés and expectations — of making a movie about a serial killer. "The only way I can understand the preponderance of this particular abnormality in current popular culture," he says, "is that it’s become an occupation. We’re fascinated because it represents the most extreme moral transgression, but it’s done repeatedly. You have these acts unfolding and usually, a character who is trying to stop them. Felicia’s Journey is not constructed that way."

Egoyan sees the film not as a thriller, but as a melodrama where "domestic space" is a site of trauma that leads to self-delusion. He explains, "I’m trying to represent Hilditch’s actions the way he perceives himself. He’s convinced himself that he’s something other than what we eventually gather he is. That interests me, his denial, and its intersecting with Felicia’s denial. Hers is simpler and more identifiable: She’s 17 years old and she believes that this young man loves her, and clearly he doesn’t. But she has to believe that and repeat that to herself."

Hilditch’s pathological repetitions seem, at first, to be rooted in a disturbing stereotype. But, Egoyan says, "I tried to avoid the bad mother cliché. We’re so predisposed toward the bad mother as the site of blame, so anything that even hints of that is seized on. My question is, did any of this actually happen? There’s a fuzzy line between the video as a document and his state of mind."

"It’s a complex relationship," he explains. "Gala was in a difficult position, given what she was doing at that particular time. She had to be focused to succeed; she was probably quite preoccupied with her career. One of the main differences between the film and the novel is that the book sexualizes the relationship between mother and son, and that struck me as being reductive."

"I am of the belief that some of us are genetically encoded or hardwired in a certain way that manifests itself at a young age," he continues. "So what interests me more than blaming the mother is thinking about how this hardwiring has been twisted. Because of the lack of attention Hilditch felt, he has developed a ritual where he can command her full attention: he plays her tapes and redirects her gaze electronically, to be watching him. He can pretend that this relationship was completely nurturing. His ritual has perverted him more than anything she ever did."

Felicia, says Egoyan, brings confusion and intimacy into Hilditch’s pattern. "The moment that Hilditch realizes that Felicia is carrying a child, he’s forced into self-consciousness. I don’t think he’s used to receiving that sort of attention, Felicia’s close gaze and trust in him." Hilditch is a quintessential "product of our culture, where technology is a means to memory and identity, and so, Felicia is both his undoing and his redemption."