Director Atom Egoyan on his Nazi revenge thriller ‘Remember,’ harsh reviews, and the future of film

Atom Egoyan is on a quest to change the way he makes movies. The Canadian director of such acclaimed films as Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter has had a rough few years, with a spate of recent releases including 2013’s The Devil’s Knot and last year’s The Captive receiving the worst reviews of his career (The Captive was booed and widely lambasted when it premiered at Cannes, with The Guardian calling it “offensively preposterous and crass.”)

Egoyan has now returned with Remember, a revenge thriller about an elderly man with dementia named Zed (Christopher Plummer) hunting down a Nazi war criminal. “I’m really trying to learn what it means to tell a simpler story, and whether or not I can make my stories more linear,” says Egoyan when we catch up with him at Montreal’s Festival de Nouveau Cinema.

In terms of story-telling, Remember is one of the most straight-forward films of Egoyan’s career, buoyed by a nuanced performance by Plummer as a confused senior seeking out the Nazi member responsible for the death of his family seven decades earlier. Pushed into action by Max, a fellow Holocaust survivor in his nursing home (Martin Landau), Zed only has Max’s hand-written note to rely on as his dementia often takes over, leaving him a frail elderly man on a dangerous mission.

We caught up with Egoyan to discuss his new approach to filmmaking, what it was like to work with actors of the stature of Christopher Plummer and Martin Landau, and how he views the future of film distribution. Remember is in theatres now.

Bad Feeling: You’ve done quite a few film festivals with this film so far.

Atom Egoyan: I’ve done more than usual, yeah. Well, the last film [The Captive] was released commercially—it had its premiere at Cannes, then we just sort of released it commercially, so I didn’t travel that much with it. And with this film, there’s a really important discussion to have afterwards, so I’ve been really enjoying the Q&A’s, more than usual. So it’s been really cool, I’ve been really loving to engage with viewers at the end of the film. Also, you realize the privilege of seeing a film in a theatre with an audience is something that’s becoming rare, so its just wonderful to take advantage of the festival experience, and with this particular film, to see how different cultures respond. Like, the response we had in Italy is very different from the response we had in London or in Hamburg or in New York, and this one will be different from Vancouver or Calgary. So it’s just interesting, given the subject matter, to see these different sorts of responses.

BF: In general, do you find that sort of audience response helpful?

AE: Well, it’s very important for me for this movie, because it’s very different from the way I’ve made my other films. My other films are more multi-layered and they play with chronologies, and this film is really linear. I’m just learning a lot about how a simple story plays with an audience. I still feel that, in terms of my own writing, I’m drawn towards this more prismatic approach to chronology, but I’m finding that that type of approach… maybe its just because of the response to the last film [The Captive], it might become a formula. So I’m really trying to learn what it means to tell a simpler story, and whether or not I can make my stories more linear. I’m not sure if I’ve mastered that yet, but it’s interesting to feel this play with an audience.

BF: Do you think audiences’ expectations have changed, and that they’re looking for more linear stories now?

AE: It sort of feels like I’ve been really immersing myself in how the audience is responding to this. I did exactly what I wanted to do, which is to find a technique and a way of framing this performance, but it’s a unique character. I don’t think there’s any similarity to any other character I’ve ever read, or seen in a film, so it might just be an anomaly. It’s using clichés in a very interesting way. There are a lot of clichés in the beginning of the film to do with what you think a survivor would experience and feel. And this whole question in the film, that you think he’s motivated by, or that the underlying condition is the dementia, but in fact, it’s his trauma. There’s no subtext; he has dementia, so everything is in the present.

BF: By definition, Holocaust movies are generally set in the past—was it interesting for you to set this in the present?

AE: That’s why I think it’s completely unique; there are no flashbacks. There are some sound flashbacks, but I love that it’s told totally in the present. It’s dealing with it through these characters who are feeling the rage or the residual effect of a decision they made when they came to America.

BF: Has the feedback you’ve received from audiences so far varied depending on their age?

AE: Well, it’s interesting; in Venice it won the prize from the youth jury, so these are people that are like, 18 years old. It’s interesting that a younger audience can feel for him. I think anyone feels for him, that’s one of the parts of the alchemy of this movie.

BF: When you’re working with actors like Christopher Plummer and Martin Landau, does that change the way you work? Do they bring more to the table in terms of character, or is it the same as working with any cast member?

AE: Well, in the case of both of them, they bring a legacy of films that they’ve done before, and a history of what they have come to represent as actors, so that’s pretty distinct. I would say that I’ve felt that before working with Julianne Moore, or working with Reese Witherspoon. Landau I had worked with 30 years ago when I did an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and so there was this incredible sense at that time that I was working with someone who’d worked with Hitchcock, and I remember talking with him about these scenes he’d done in North By Northwest, and just like, pinching myself. It’s incredible that he has that kind of continuity with that tradition. So you’re aware of that on set.

And with Christopher Plummer, there’s an amount of preparation that he does for every moment that he plays. He’s not an actor that likes to do a lot of takes, and he’s very disciplined, he likes to do things as efficiently as possible. They are there because they love to act. They are there because these are great roles for them, and I think that most of the time when someone has asked me, “What’s it like to work with movie stars?” I say, “When they come to the set they are not movie stars. They are actors who are there because they have responded to these roles.” You just hope that the younger actors around them understand that they are part of this legacy.

I’m in awe that I’m working with them. I’m in awe that I’m working with Christopher Plummer, who’s the finest actor this country has ever produced. I’ve seen him on stage as Lear, I saw him in No Man’s Land at the Roundabout, and I’ve read his autobiography where he talks about that production, so I’m a huge student of his career, and he knows that. I think that’s one of the reasons he really felt comfortable with me, because I really value him. But I don’t value him more than I value any great performance. I mean, I’ve worked with Ian Holm, who is not as famous as Christopher Plummer, but is another extraordinary actor, he plays the lawyer in Sweet Hereafter. Part of my job is to infuse any actor with the sense that there’s something special. Because they are something special, they are creating something which is extraordinary, they’re incarnating another human being, and that’s the only magic that’s happening in front of that camera. If they can pull that off, then it’s miraculous. I never take that for granted.

I think actors feel that too. I know that I’m the only person on that set who’s responding to what they’re offering. It’s not like theatre, that’s played for an audience. But when you’re on that set they’re depending on you. It always shocks me when I hear stories of directors who are not attentive to that, or are watching their monitors, far away from the actual performance. I’m right beside the camera. I’ll tell you one thing that’s interesting, some of the younger actors are freaked out that I’m so close to them, because they’re not used to that. I’m as close as possible to the lens, because I want to enjoy this moment that I have, where I’m seeing them do this work—which, the older actors, the Plummers and the Landaus, they totally get. That’s where they’re used to having directors sit. But the younger generation is flipped out by that. There’s another human being watching them that closely. That’s where I find the generational shift. They’re used to being their own show.

BF: You mentioned how important the theatrical experience of this films is to you- what are your thoughts on streaming / VOD services versus the theatrical experience?

AE: Well, it’s changed a lot. My distributer in the US for the last two films is A24, and they have this relationship with Direct TV, and when they came to me with Captive and said they were going to trigger this deal, I was horrified. But then, that film was so demolished critically, that actually, that ended up being an amazing deal, because so many people have seen it. Look at the ratings on Amazon Prime, it’s unbelievable how popular that film is, and I don’t think it would have had that access if it wasn’t for VOD. And yes, of course it’s designed for a theatrical experience, but many people are commenting on the cinematography, and are able to actually read that because they’re watching it on a large screen. So yes, it’s a privilege to see it in a full theatre, but it’s just not practical anymore. You have to adapt to that condition. That’s maybe one of the reasons I’ve been travelling to all these festivals is because I get to have that last vestige of that experience that I dreamt about in the festival cinema. That experience I used to have of going to a packed theatre to see Exotica or Sweet Hereafter, or even a film like Chloe, that’s just becoming rarer and rarer.

The problem is really this: this thrashing that I had at Cannes with Captive, it still got attention for the film. And so you want people to love it, or maybe really hate it, but then you compare that with the experience of a film like Adoration, which went to Cannes, had a good response, won a prize, but no one saw it. It’s as though you need an extreme response to kind of even trigger people wanting to catch up with it on VOD. Everything is available, so how does anything get attention? There’s a lot of noise.

It’s interesting, I was in London at the London Film Festival and they were doing a retrospective of Tarkovsky and his influence, and I’m going, “I don’t know if that career would be possible now.” I don’t know if people would have the patience for that kind of film. Do we still know how to read these films? Because they were made in a culture where people were committed to being in that cinema. There was a commitment to that experience.

I had this amazing experience here in ’87 with Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire, Paris, Texas), my film had won an honourable mention, and he very publicly gave me his prize. That just changed my career. It’s a miracle when a film is able to find its audience at a festival and take off. It’s still possible, there’s just so many more films being made.

Remember is in theatres now.