Atom and Ivan. Or is it Ivan and Atom? Either way, it has a certain ring. They could be a folk duo, a comedy act, or perhaps a tag team of professional wrestlers. But Atom Egoyan and Ivan Reitman are prominent Canadian filmmakers, and they are now, incongruously, joined at the hip—making a movie together. They couldn’t come from more far-flung extremes of cinema. Reitman is Hollywood’s erstwhile king of comedy, who patented the modern frat-boy farce with blockbusters like Animal House, Stripes and Ghostbusters. Egoyan is Canadian cinema’s resident architect of angst, an Oscar-nominated auteur who has explored grief and sexual taboo in narrative riddles like Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter and Where the Truth Lies. The notion of them working together would seem preposterous. But this month they are in Toronto shooting Chloe—an erotic intrigue about a woman (Julianne Moore) who hires a hooker (Amanda Seyfried) to test the fidelity of her husband (Liam Neeson).
Reitman is producing the film, a remake of a French movie called Nathalie that caught his eye at the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival. And he has hired Egoyan to direct it, as unlikely as it seems. “Ivan has very strong opinions about what makes something popular,” says Egoyan before shooting a scene of tense dialogue between Moore and Seyfried in a Queen Street café. “I’ve never given a second thought about what makes something popular. For Ivan, any barrier that’s created between the viewer and the movie is troubling, and in my work, that’s the zone I love to operate in.”
Then how can they possibly see eye to eye? “The question you’re asking is a fair one,” Reitman concedes in a separate interview. Yet he insists he’s a fan of Egoyan’s work, and just wants to make it more audience-friendly. “I’m hoping that this story is as emotionally and philosophically complex as anything he’s done, but presented in a manner that will suck us in as viewers in a way that his other movies have not. That’s the great hope.”
Also at Macleans.ca: Brian D. Johnson interviewed them on the set of Chloe in Toronto—and shot a video of them being photographed for Maclean’s by Hasnain Dattu.
So is Reitman trying to ghostbust Egoyan out of the art house? It certainly looks that way. After hiring Egoyan, he studied half a dozen of his movies, and had “long philosophical discussions” with him about how they could have been more accessible. “I watched them very analytically, just figuring out the DNA of his work,” explains Reitman. He seized on Felicia’s Journey (1999), which “I think may be Atom’s best movie in many ways,” he says. “I pointed out where the story-telling was effective, and what he did that hurt its chances for being an audience-relatable movie.” For a drama about a serial killer, he adds, it had an odd resistance to “whipping up the emotionality for an audience.”
The notion of whipping up emotionality sounds very un-Egoyanesque. But the director, who’s always up for analyzing his own oeuvre, relished the debate: “Ivan can be very blunt and I love that. We’re both really enjoying this process. We’re both redefining some aspect of how we situate ourselves.”
Egoyan calls Chloe “a different beast” from any of his previous 11 features. Scripted by U.S. screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson (Secretary), it’s the first he hasn’t written himself, and the first with a linear chronology. “It doesn’t need the stylistic approach I use on my own material,” he says. “It can be a bit freer, a bit sloppier, and more concentrated on performance.” Chloe is Egoyan’s first movie with no role for his wife, actress Arsinée Khanjian. And his first with no Canadian funding. Entirely financed by French distributor StudioCanal—and produced by Reitman’s California-based Montecito Picture Co., with his son Jason Reitman (Juno) as executive producer—Chloe may also be the first non-Canadian movie in which Toronto explicitly plays itself.
Wilson had originally set the script in her hometown of San Francisco. But Egoyan convinced her and the producers to relocate its carnal intrigue to Toronto. “There’s a unique sexuality in Toronto,” he says, “a huge erotic subculture. We’re way more exploratory than we give ourselves credit for. Ivan told me what he loved about Exotica is the way it depicted Toronto. It’s a city I understand.”
Before the shoot, Reitman and Egoyan spent a week together in Toronto, discussing its style and scouting locations. Base camp was Reitman’s lavish penthouse suite atop the Four Seasons. “There was a lot of room service,” says Egoyan, who talks about the suite like a kid who’s had his first airplane ride. “You can see the lake directly. I loved hanging out there, because it’s a Toronto I don’t know. Something about the city was being revealed to me just by virtue of this incredible nest he had in a place I’d never been to. There was something exciting and soothing about that.”
