Croze control
Ararat star has overcome pain
By Bruce Kirkland, Toronto Sun
Atom Egoyan's difficult drama Ararat is not just a challenge for audiences,
it was a profound experience for most of the actors involved.
Actors such as Quebec-born Canadians Marie-Josee Croze, Bruce Greenwood and Elias Koteas. Each bought into Egoyan's ambitious vision for the film, which tackles the complexities of cultural responsibility and denial while confronting the legacy of the Armenian genocide. The film, which has generated controversy because it shows the Turks perpetrating the World War I genocide in a film-within-the-film, opens Friday.
The 32-year-old Croze is a Montrealer best known for her Genie Award-winning starring role in Denis Villeneuve's Maelstrom. In Ararat, she plays a misguided and deeply troubled woman who commits acts of vandalism and deals drugs.
Croze can relate, psychologically. She spent a decade feeling deeply troubled herself -- to the point of considering suicide. Her troubles started at age three when she was adopted.
"When you're a child, you're completely a victim of the people around you," she tells The Sun. "You don't choose them. I've been through really difficult things: An alcoholic adoptive father and a mother who was depressive. She wanted to commit suicide. People were really dark around me." Croze also has never had friendly relations with her birth mother.
"At a point when you feel there is no justice, when you're a victim, you start thinking that you should act badly," Croze says. "You become someone really dark. There was lots of anger and lots of aggressiveness in me. At 16, I was punk. So I didn't believe in God for a long, long time."
By her mid-20s, she says: "I was thinking: 'I will quit, I'm leaving, I'm sick of it.' I stopped myself because something luminous happened to me."
It was the offer of a role in a French short, Thomas Briat's 1998 HLA Indentique. Croze says that Briat's belief in her became a gift, a second life. "I decided to believe in people, to believe in my work, to believe in movies and art."
That led to her role as a young woman who finds reason to renew her life in Maelstrom. That, in turn, inspired Egoyan to cast Croze in Ararat, as a woman seeking difficult truths. Making Ararat, Croze now says, was "a fairytale" experience.
The 46-year-old, Noranda-born, Hollywood-based Greenwood looked forward to his third collaboration with Egoyan. He feels free enough to joke about Egoyan as a demon taskmaster.
"It's hell, but I have a problem -- I just want to go back and be abused!" Greenwood tells The Sun.
Greenwood admires Egoyan's generosity and his ease in working with actors.
"He suffuses you with his belief in you and it's empowering, it's really liberating. That's a great sentiment to fill a room with. That's a great sensibility to have as an example. So it's really, really positive (as an acting experience)."
Koteas, 41, is from Montreal. Like Greenwood, Ararat is his third Eogyan film. Despite his own Greek heritage, he plays a Turkish-Canadian actor who plays the most evil Turk in the film-within-the-film. Koteas says he understands Egoyan's theme of cultural responsibility.
"I felt that responsibility prior to doing this picture. That was my own cross to bear and I talked to my parents. I'm Greek and, along with the Armenians, the Greeks were slaughtered by them (the Turks) and it was a big deal. So, did I want to be a part of that? But I'm an actor and there's no question: I wanted to work with Atom again."
Toronto Sun
