Mar. 24, 2010 - Issue #753: Zion I

Moody swings

Atom Egoyan makes his first foray into someone else's script in Chloe

Atom Egoyan did not become an internationally respected auteur by ceding his vision to anyone, which makes his latest, Chloe, unique to his oeuvre for two reasons. Not only is it somewhat rare for the moody and introspective filmmaker to lean on instantly recognizable actors—in this case Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson and the lighter Amanda Seyfried—but Chloe actually marks the first time the acclaimed Canadian director has worked from someone else's script. Egoyan is no stranger to bold choices, but this isn't exactly the same thing.

But Chloe, adapted from the French original Nathalie, does fit in with Egoyan's pet obsessions. An erotically charged tale of Catherine (Moore) who hires call girl Chloe (Seyfried) to prove her suspicions about her husband David's (Neeson) fidelity, its mature thrills feel rather close to something he could have undertaken himself, which goes a long way towards explaining his interest.

"I don't think this is a script that I could have ever written, and yet it felt very personal, so I'm grateful for that," Egoyan explains. "This is something that [screenwriter] Erin [Cressida Wilson] has been working on for a long time, and something we talked about was her own shift from being Chloe to being Catherine. I really think this is a script that is clearly written by a woman, so it was something that I felt really privileged to have had access to."

And that in itself seems like a particular challenge. Told mostly from Catherine's perspective—to the point where the reliability of her judgment becomes one of the film's central tensions—it does not seem immediately accessible to a male sensibility. Though Egoyan credits the script's emotional depth with providing an avenue in.

"That monologue that Catherine gives underneath the awning, where she talks about feeling like she's disappearing, that really struck," he says. "The things she's saying there are just so—yes, they're kind of melodramatic, inasmuch as that's unfiltered emotion, but it's done with such conviction and feeling."

The other challenge, then, becomes imprinting his particular sensibility onto someone else's work, although for Egoyan, that was not a forefront concern: unsurprisingly, he has come to trust his instincts, even in a situation that isn't his normal working condition.

"[Trying to put your mark on it], that's not something you do consciously; you really try to erase that, in a way," Egoyan says. "If you chose this material, if you're passionate about it, it will get across anyhow. Anytime you're trying to do that in a conscious way, well, you probably shouldn't be." V
 

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