There is a quintessential scene in Atom Egoyan's latest film, Ararat. It involves three characters: Ani, an art historian whose book about the Armenian painter Arshil Gorky has been optioned for film; Edward Saroyan, the filmmaker in question, who is mid-way through shooting a movie about the 1915 Armenian genocide; and Martin, the lead actor in Saroyan's film, who plays Dr. Clarence Ussher, a historically factual character, whose diary remains one of the most important records of the tragedy.

Ani has just heard that Gorky's most important painting -- one in which the painter's mother is depicted without hands -- has been vandalized. The news unsettles her deeply, sparking doubts about her involvement with Saroyan's film. She storms off to speak with Saroyan, and blunders directly onto an active set. The shot she interrupts is taken from the middle of the Turkish siege of the city of Van. Martin, as doctor-hero, spattered in blood, is struggling to save a young child's life. When Ani walks into the middle of this action, demanding that Saroyan speak with her, Martin -- who is also Dr. Ussher, who is also the real-life actor Bruce Greenwood -- looks up from the carnage and yells at Ani, "What is this? Goddammit! We're surrounded by Turks. We've run out of supplies and most of us will die. This child needs a miracle, this child is bleeding to death!... This is his brother. His pregnant sister was raped in front of his eyes.... His father's eyes were gouged out of his head.... Who the f--- are you?"

Sliding in and out of character, for a moment losing track of which part of his anger should be directed at the on-set intruder, Martin/Ussher/Greenwood stares at Ani as he poses the film's critical question.

The scene lies in the heart of the heart of Egoyan country. Artistic media speak to one another -- Gorky's vandalized canvas and Saroyan's ruined shot. Objectivity and voyeurism are nestled. Character is revealed from oblique angles, refracted through other characters. But the scene is also quintessential within the film Ararat because, with Martin's question, Egoyan brings all of those involved to a moment of simultaneous self-awareness. This film about genocide pauses to contemplate itself. The director, the actors and extras, even the audience. The whole constellation of eyes arrayed around this memory of trauma, this film about the memory of trauma, this film within a film about the memory of trauma.

I first encountered the scene in the script, which I read in the summer of 2001, and, as a writer, I was fascinated. Ararat, even on the page, felt like the culmination of a body of work to date, bringing together familiar Egoyan themes with the painful details of personal cultural history. But, much further, within that scene, Ararat became something I find altogether unusual in cinema these days. The film felt, all at once, like a work that could not have been written by anybody other than Egoyan. This is a quality quite beyond a distinctive style, which most directors can claim in some fashion. Egoyan's work, instead, achieves a sense of full and individual 'authorship.' And, in that quintessential scene, in the silence following Ussher's challenge, I thought I heard the author contemplating his own question.

Over the course of the next year -- watching and talking with Egoyan through production and post -- I undertook to find out how he might arrive at an answer.

- - -

Ararat began as a challenge from Egoyan's long-time producer, Robert Lantos. It was delivered in an introduction Lantos gave the filmmaker before a gathering at the Armenian Community Centre in Toronto. Lantos was then beginning production of Sunshine. "A film about my people, the Hungarian Jews," he tells me. "So I said, whenever Atom feels that he wants to tell the story that he really has to tell, I will be there to make sure that film is made."

There was a thunderous ovation in response. "We have Schindler's List, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and The Pawnbroker," Egoyan explains, about the evening. "But nothing similar about the Armenian genocide."

A friendly personal challenge might be considered an unusual launching point for a director whose work has so often been described as cerebral, even dispassionate. But it was the perfect beginning for this particular film. Egoyan -- raised in a fully assimilated Armenian family in suburban Victoria, B.C. -- came to Toronto in 1978 to study, and became involved in the Armenian Students Association at the University of Toronto. Several years later, during the casting of his first feature film, Next of Kin, he met his future wife, Arsinee Khanjian, who, unlike Egoyan, had been raised speaking Armenian and was engaged with the details of her cultural history. During this period, Egoyan had something of a cultural rebirth, one that was manifest in his film Calendar. Over 15 years later, when he took the podium after Lantos' challenge, he found himself looking into the expectant face of the Armenian community, into the face of his own awakening as a young man. Into the very face, you might say, of the question: Who are you?

Right there, Egoyan pledged to make the film. And with the completion and release of Felicia's Journey, he wrote the Ararat script and began to gather his collaborators: regulars, including Khanjian, Greenwood, composer Mychael Danna and director of photography Paul Sarossy, as well as first timers, including Eric Bogosian and Charles Aznavour. In the summer of 2001, the year-long process of producing this very personal film began.

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A set, for all the seeming chaos, is a good place to watch people. The environment is so frenetic, the cross currents of so many jobs confluent in such cramped quarters, that there is hardly room for affectation. I arrive on the Ararat set in July, 2001, when Egoyan is shooting scenes with Arsinee's character, Ani, her son, Raffi (played by first-time actor David Alpay), and Celia, Raffi's stepsister and now lover (played by Marie-Josee Crozier).

One of the first things that strikes me about the director's style, on-set, is his overt enthusiasm. He is excited by historical material they've shot. He marvels at the technology that has allowed him to see footage with mocked-up sound the day before. Egoyan, in short, does not act cool on-set, something Eric Bogosian thinks is essentially Armenian. "We're not cold motherf---ers," Bogosian says, about the heritage he shares with Egoyan. "We're warm motherf---ers."

But this is also something that Bogosian believes makes Egoyan unique. Directors, in general, he tells me over breakfast, when we speak, can usually be counted on to be the best actors on-set. They manipulate. They hide their feelings. "A Coppola or an Altman," he says, "they have everybody in the palm of their hands thinking they're these loving, avuncular men. When, in fact, they're very calculatingly moving the whole enterprise forward, step by step. But Atom does something I've never seen any director do, ever. He shows his hand."

We're shooting in a khaki-coloured brick building at the corner of Lowther Avenue and Bedford Road, in Toronto. Inside and outside the house is the typical shambles of the half-made film. Props and gear, reflectors, grip trolleys, a craft-services tent and that particular type of person who work the film trades, a sort of Jimmy Buffett halfway morphed into a carny wearing Blundstones.

Amid this action, Egoyan on-set is an interesting paradox. He is, simultaneously, hyper-focused on what everybody is doing and completely unobtrusive. Depending on what is going on at any given moment, he is either the absolute centre of attention, the person upon whom all eyes are fixed, or he looks like someone who has just wandered onto the set. This latter aspect is prevalent between shots, which is to say, a lot of the time. During these long stretches you might see Egoyan walking slowly from room to room, scanning, thinking about the next moves, staying out of the way.

During shot planning, blocking and rehearsals, of course, Egoyan assumes command, and a triangle of communication forms between the director, Paul Sarossy, the director of photography (DOP), and the actors. The collaboration between Egoyan and Sarossy is emblematic of the overall approach.

"Paul is completely painting the frame," Egoyan tells me, having given his instructions and, now, stepping back from the action while lights are hung and the camera is positioned for an intimate shot of mother and son in Raffi's bedroom. "I'm really specific about how the frame should look, but I leave the light to him."

In fact, Egoyan tells me, while he knows exactly what he wants and knows the DOP's job well enough to be very specific, he relies on Sarossy to render the idea. When filming The Adjuster, he remembers, he thought Sarossy had overlit a particular shot in which they were going for a dark and mysterious feel. "And, of course, what he had done is over-light so he could then shoot with the aperture down and achieve a denser black. I'm quite literal-minded when it comes to seeing what I see. I can't necessarily tell you how this will look on film. That's what he does."

Sarossy, a redhead with a bo'sun's pipe around his neck, is also something of the dry wit on-set. Living in Ireland has given him the cadence of Irish speech, and, when he explains a shot to a dolly operator, he says wryly, "Same again, but more lugubrious." Or, talking to the set decorators, he might say something like, "Remove those beige screens, please, they are competing with the actors."

When the room is lit and the actors are on their marks, the shot is announced and the entire set freezes. The air conditioner shudders to silence. Cellphones are powered down. Grips stand in the stairwell like the crewmen from Das Boot waiting for the depth charge. And, at the moment the camera rolls, a bubble of creative pressure seems to shimmer around the director, the camera and the performers. Egoyan's whole body suggests his focus. He will stand next to the camera, staring intently at some fragment of the action -- Arsinee's hand on the sheet or Alpay's face -- all the while working his lower lip nervously with the fingers of his left hand. Or he may stand away, head to one side, eyes on the ceiling, listening to the performance. To the words alone.

When the "cut" comes, this bubble dissolves and the room explodes with activity. The still photographer slides into place, snapping his shots. Craft services announces that popsicles are available outside. The script supervisor scribbles continuity notes in her flip pad. Egoyan watches the video playback with Arsinee and Sarossy, hand again working his lower lip, considering what they have. Deciding if it's what they need.

His work with actors is, in some ways, more subtle, more difficult to evaluate. The flow of directorial advice is almost always sotto voce, Egoyan leaning in close to make eye contact, or to say quiet words next to somebody's ear. Of course, direction is personal. No actor wants the director's comments about a performance aired in front of the crew, who will then be in a position to appraise the subsequent take. "When a director directs you," Bruce Greenwood explains, "you're doing it for him. It's between you and him."

But every actor I speak with will agree on one thing. Just as Egoyan is both the centre of attention and unobtrusive on-set, he works with actors in a way that combines a highly articulated vision of what he wants from a character, with a level of collaboration unusual in the industry. In fact, everyone I speak with will tell me he is the most collaborative director they've every worked with. So consistent is this message, in fact, I might have taken it to be the party line, if it hadn't been repeated in conversation after conversation over the course of a year.

"Atom was very open to my search for the character," Bogosian tells me. "He actually listens, and I know a lot of directors that just kind of humour you and then try to get back to whatever it was they wanted in the first place."

"Atom is actually excited to hear an actor's response to a character," Bruce Greenwood says. "He comes in with the script. You come in with your interpretation. You talk, and it grows from there. I can't really think of another director I've had that with."

Of course, just as words on the page are the mere beginning of things, a conversation about character between actor and director is only a small further addition. A character is created in the unique and unexpected moment captured on film. This point is brought home watching Egoyan direct Arsinee Khanjian. Her character, Ani, whose braininess is based on a particularly smart professor Egoyan had at U of T, is a constant and confident analyzer. In the bedroom shot with her son, Raffi, Egoyan leans in at one point to whisper an idea. Khanjian listens with Ani's sharp-edged focus, processing the private words as Egoyan withdraws to stand in the relative darkness next to Sarossy and the camera. He does not look back at her, even though she stares after him, her expression one of intense calculation, as if she is running the numbers and computing whether an additional piece of data is good news or very bad.

And when they roll, Egoyan stands to one side, eyes on the ceiling, hand on his chin. It strikes me that he is trying to hear right through the words -- which have no doubt been dulled by the endless repetition -- right through to the motive and intent, the essence of the character that is, just that instant, being created. For each character, in effect, a sub-iteration of the question is posed: Who are you? And it is in these fleeting, filmed moments that the answer is collaboratively spoken.

Khanjian now says her line, the emotional spin of the words minutely adjusted. And when the sequence is complete, the room teeters, waiting for the "cut," and Egoyan twists his body, applying English to the silence, feeling for the moment.

- - - The next day, I have a chance to see Egoyan work with a less intimate group. In the scene, a convivial group of Armenians have a drink before a dinner party at Ani's house, and, at a critical moment, her estranged stepdaughter, Celia, appears. It's a typically complex Egoyan shot, with energy sharply changing shape and direction within the space of a few moments.

Egoyan and Sarossy walk the room, visualizing the master shot. Egoyan looks through a loose frame of fingers he holds on either side of his jawline. "Open to here," he says, spinning and moving backward. "Then pull back. Then over." Sarossy hovers at his shoulder, eye pressed to a viewfinder. Arsinee and the other actors trail behind, all trying to see themselves in the shot. The imaginary camera does a three-point turn, taking in the entire main floor of the house, capturing Arsinee's character, Ani, negotiating visually between her son and her stepdaughter. There's a second of group silence as the mood of the movement settles into them. "I think that's the shot," Egoyan says, finally.

Of course, it's only the idea of the shot, and much work is required for it to be realized. Now Egoyan withdraws, and the rest of the team springs into action. Props are arranged. The camera crew marks the floor for the dolly. And a discussion about camera axis arises between Sarossy, Arsinee and the script supervisor.

"Axis is a rule from the birth of cinema," Egoyan explains to me. "Which I've always taken to mean that cinema is the language of dreams. But it's also a part of the process I do not get involved in."

In short, it's a debate about camera positioning. When filming a group of actors (say, four standing in a square, talking) various camera positions are needed to convey the impression of the actors existing together in a comprehensible three-dimensional space. And if the camera crosses an artificial line known as "the axis," you break the viewed reality of the actors being together. In fact, weirdly, if you cross the axis, it can have the effect of making one actor disappear. You lose them, mentally and visually.

Egoyan wanders off to the window. Sarossy and the script supervisor are pivoting back and forth, considering options. Arsinee is standing in various spots by the stairs, trying to visualize herself through the eye of a camera projected onto a screen at some undefined point in the future. Egoyan appears at my elbow again. "You can get insurance for it now, though," he says, straight-faced. "Axis insurance. In case you actually do lose an actor."

And back to the window he goes, hand on his chin.

When Sarossy and his team have set the shot, the Armenian extras are escorted inside where they are arranged in place. Two men stand in the background, fake-grazing a dining-room table covered in Armenian food. Eggplant. Dolma. Kofta. Topig. Kadayif. The living-room extras are poised on couches and chairs. The woman a little stiff. The young men rather purposefully lounging in their assigned spots. "This is tricky," Egoyan whispers. "You have a gathering of Armenians and usually there is this explosive energy. But I can feel people getting nervous."

"Here comes a break in the clouds," someone calls, from the front window.

"Right," Sarossy says, hand on the camera trigger. "Let's shoot that shot."

They get it eventually. The extras relax. They nibble food. After one false start, where everyone on the couch manages to sip their wine at the same instant, they achieve that paradoxical on-camera rhythm where you pay absolutely no attention to something you are doing with mind-bending deliberation. One guy, listening to Alpay recite a poem, ad libs a mocking heartthrob with his hand: pa-pum, pa-pum. Egoyan loves it, shaking his head, smiling as he watches the video. "That was really, really good."

And in the background, just over my shoulder, two crew members -- who, as a type, are not known for starry eyes about the film business -- are infected by the frank enthusiasm that permeates the set.

"Handsome!" "Yeah, and notice how he framed up those two in the dining room in the back ground? Then: zoot, zoot. Back into the living room. Very cool." "Classic Egoyan, really."

- - -

Of course, the shot itself is a fraction of the finished product in any film production. Only, more so in the case of Egoyan, whose stories invariably revolve around complex, multiple timelines and for whom, as a result, editing is an enormously important part of the process of authoring his stories.

"The most vulnerable moment actually comes at assembly," Egoyan tells me, referring to the moment when a rough cut of the film with temporary sound is produced. "All of the mistakes are glaring. All the things that don't work are obvious. And no matter how many times you've been through it before, there's a moment of panic. But, then, the next day you're in the editing room and you start dealing with the issues."

When we meet again, this process is complete. The picture has been locked, although not without surprise adjustments. Scenes between Alpay and Christopher Plummer (who plays a customs agent who's interrogating Raffi on his return from Armenia) have been retooled, to focus on Plummer and his reactions. "When a confession is played out on the face of a person receiving the news, you get an entirely different emotional journey," Egoyan explains, happy with the result.

Now it is time to layer on the sound, which is, again, in Egoyan's case, a complex and critical phase of the process. "The score roots the film," Egoyan has said.

In fact, the work of Egoyan's long-time composer, Mychael Danna, began many months before. "Typically, composers don't get involved until final cut approaches," Danna tells me. "But with Atom, because our relationship goes back so far, I actually read early drafts of the script and we begin discussions at that stage."

And here, again, Danna describes a work relationship that is characterized by both vision and collaboration. "I've never worked with anyone as musically literate as Atom," Danna says. "But Atom also has this unique faith and trust in my work. And when you're trusted, you respond to the absolute highest level of your ability. These are my favourite film experiences."

Danna's completed score combines traditional Armenian melodies with original composition. No simple character themes either. Instead, Danna and Egoyan have crafted a complex musical foundation for the images, based on four pieces of music representing the film's core concepts: the diaspora, the dream of homeland and the abiding notions of Mother and Father. Those themes, plus the late addition of a song by the Armenian punk band System of the Damned. A song called PLUCK.

"Politically Lying Unholy Cowardly Killers," Egoyan explains, laughing.

Now, at Toronto's Deluxe Studio One -- which looks like the NORAD war room with its thousand-dialled console and computer screens and wall-height video playback screen -- Egoyan and his sound team are painstakingly fitting score and sound with the filmed action. His editor, Susan Shipton, is here, along with recording mixer Daniel Pellerin, sound designer Steve Munro and Ross Redfern, who originally recorded the location sound.

The team combs through the frames, tweaking the mix, laying in the foley (non-location sounds, recorded in the studio), adding the sound effects and the music. Every birdsong outside, every gunshot in every battle scene is considered. Every string of spoken words, every passage of Danna's music must be balanced. This has been going on for a month already, and, in the days I watch, only a few minutes of actual film is completed. This despite the fact, Pellerin emphasises, that Egoyan is one of the most organized directors around and makes no picture changes during the mix. If this were a Hollywood film, executives would be hovering at this stage, poring over market-research data and demanding the film be tweaked to meet the demands of test audiences. But here, too, Egoyan the author is evident, standing next to the mixing board, staring up at the playback as the five-second loops of tape are played and replayed. As every brush stroke of sound is painstakingly applied.

- - -

"A film is a summation; it's some part of everything you've been through." Egoyan told me this on-set in July, 2001, in our first conversation. In Augus, 2002, I finally get to see the summation.

Now that I have seen the pieces come together, it is immediately clear to me onscreen what movies can do, what is their fundamental power. How, for example, Danna's music can been seen to layer meaning and emotion under the images. How performances seemed louder live than they ultimately do on film. Emotions that seemed overwrought are now smooth with light, with movement, with sound and with the expanse of a visual narrative stretching around them -- as opposed to the shambles of a set.

It is also fascinating to observe, in this particular case, how the film work of Egoyan and his director character, Edward Saroyan, have been starkly differentiated. Personal and idiosyncratic, on the one hand. Epic, formal, even broad, on the other. (Saroyan has Mount Ararat visible from the city of Van, which it is not.) That larger-scale film -- with its horrifying scenes of genocide and its glossing of the details in service of the root point -- is not as personal a vision, is not authored in the same way as is Egoyan's film, the contemporary drama that sometimes nervously frames the epic.

All this notwithstanding, as a writer, I am biased toward the word. And having read the script -- having been introduced to this story with only the bare words spoken by the characters -- I find myself now watching the performances most closely, listening for the lines. As Egoyan, the author of those words, has himself told me, "When it's my own material, I see all these characters as having various aspects of my own personality."

And, having been fascinated a year before by a quintessential scene, by the query hovering over that scene and the implied quest for an answer, I am focused when that moment comes, when Martin/Ussher/Greenwood looks up from the carnage of history -- gazing up into the past of a Saroyan film in production, through the still more recent past of Egoyan film in production, and right up into the present of the screening in this empty Fifth Avenue theatre in Vancouver -- and asks his question: Who are you?

Saroyan's cameras whirr to a stop. His crew members' voices may be heard to complain incredulously at Ani's intrusion. And in the seconds that close the scene, I think I do hear something like an answer from the author, or at least from his onscreen proxies: Ani, Martin and Saroyan.

Ani reels at her own blunder, realizing all at once what a tiny cog her personal story is in the midst of this enormous project. Realizing, perhaps, that there are limits to what can be understood about history through the sheer exertion of the intellect, of the will. Martin, too, is a participant in the drama. He struggles to separate himself from character, from a terror he has been tasked to feel. As Ussher, he is, doubtless, remembering the words of a woman who witnessed the horror and said to him, "How shall I dig out these eyes of mine? Tell me how."

And what of Saroyan, the director of the film-within-a-film? His expression after Ani ruins his shot is both angry and vulnerable. He appears to be asking himself, Indeed, who am I? And what is this film that I have made? Will it communicate the truth? Will it transmit the trauma of history in a way that is beneficial? Or is it a thing of exquisite, but ultimately useless, beauty?

Asked further about his identification with characters in the story, Egoyan told me he identifies most with Raffi, the young man who is transformed by his exposure to the story of his own cultural heritage. Raffi, whose father was a terrorist killed in an assassination attempt and who is torn apart by this aspect of personal history. Reunited with his stepsister, Celia, after a trip he has taken to Mount Ararat, he tells her, "I felt his ghost. The ghost of my father." This statement captures, in effect, who Raffi has decided that he is in the midst of this history and this drama. He is the person, finally, who, through a long journey to the mountain itself, has managed to feel the ghost. To feel it with his hands.

This is near the very end of the film. Saroyan's project is over. Egoyan the filmmaker is firmly back at the helm. In the following scene, as if to punctuate this point, we are shown an audience leaving an auditorium after one of Ani's art-history lectures. And when that fictional audience has left its auditorium, presaging what we, here in the real present, will do in just a few moments, Ani walks over and touches the slide of Gorky's most famous painting: his mother depicted with no hands.

"Gorky's homage to his mother was bound to take on a sacred quality," she told her audience. "His experience as a survivor of the Armenian genocide is at the root of its spiritual power. With this painting, Gorky had saved his mother from oblivion, snatching her out of a pile of corpses to place her on a pedestal of life."

It would seem to me that Atom Egoyan -- in a film that touches ghosts and invokes the power of collective memory -- has now done something similar.

© Copyright 2002 National Post

National Post article