What Bruce Greenwood has to say about The Sweet Hereafter

[Egoyan] has a tremendous feel, a remarkable empathy for very subtle, complex emotions -- a remarkable grasp of the multiplicity of emotions people can be in at the same time. That's why he encourages his actors to do things that might be tough to understand or identify with. A lot of times, his characters are challenging to get to know. You have to work a little bit to get past the parts of them that are not so pretty.
Vancouver Sun 12/16/97

In the case of Egoyan he can't imagine himself turning down a role from this director. "It's tremendous working with him," says Greenwood.
Calgary Herald 10/21/99

Billy resents and resists these lawyers coming into town and altering what people are feeling and fooling them and coercing them into thinking that somehow this is going to make it better. He speaks up for that, and that's what I responded to.
Fine Line website

I think maybe you just have to accept it when things like this happen. Your life is going to change profoundly. To wish that it hadn't happened, that you could be who you were, is futile ... you have to let that go and be what it is that this experience has made you. Billy's willingness to do that, contrary to the way many other people react, is what appeals to me. I think it suggests that we can possibly find nobility in the aftermath of tragedy.
Fine Line website

I guess the short version would be what happens to the fabric and psyche of this town when their children are instantly taken away - the complexion of the town changes in an instant!
Movie Television 5/97

For Exotica, no two people who saw it came away feeling it was about the same thing necessarily, or even that they'd seen the same thing. And I think this is similar in a way, that it's open, depending on who you are....
Movie Television 5/97

on co-star Alberta Watson:

Greenwood's favourite scene with Watson takes place later on, in the same motel room. "It was the difficult one where we had lost our children and we're in the room together, discussing how we got to this place. It was a lot to chew on. But she really delivered in scenes like that."
Elm Street 5/98

Bruce's introduction of The Sweet Hereafter for the 1997 Genie Awards:

The Sweet Hereafter is a story about repairing wounds to the soul and the moral choices that have to be made in the process of healing. It's based on the novel by Russell Banks and was shot on location in Toronto and in the interior of British Columbia. The movie takes us inside a town united by tragedy. After a school bus accident shatters the life of this small community, a big city lawyer descends and, driven by his own demons, the lawyer stirs up the anger of the townspeople as he encourages them to allay their fear with blame. And in the ensuing atmosphere of suspiscion and doubt, one teenager manages to tell the truth, her truth, and regain her dignity. Her courage illuminates the path to the sweet hereafter, the realm reserved for those who are at peace with their fate.

What Atom Egoyan has to say about Billy and Bruce

Question: Why do you like to work with many of the same people film after film?
Egoyan: I've just loved the experience of working with them in the past. I suppose they understand my sensibility, and also they can still surprise me. Bruce Greenwood, Gabrielle Rose, Arsinäe Khanjian--these people are capable of transformation.
Back Stage West 3/24/98

Question: Once they're on the set and the film is in production, how much freedom do you give your actors?
Egoyan: Tons. But there are lots of times--not so much in this film, but I'd say in other movies--where actors didn't know why they were doing something. I look at the difference between working with Bruce Greenwood in this film and in "Exotica," where a lot of times he didn't know why he was doing what he was doing. He had to just trust me completely. As opposed to this film, where he inhabited his character: He became Billy Ansell. There's a difference in the relationship we had in "Exotica" and the relationship we had here.
Back Stage West 3/24/98

Question: There was a scene in the script where widower Billy Ansel (Bruce Greenwood) identifies his two dead children.
Egoyan: "I know he was just emotionally wracked by that moment. The actor's job is to be in that moment. The director can't be because otherwise you're not providing the support you need to give. But you don't see that scene in the film. We cut it. It just wasn't necessary." Nor are there pictures of screaming kids disappearing through the ice. "The challenge was to show it as Billy Ansel [driving his truck behind the bus] would have seen it - not to go in and show close-ups of the bus crash. To me that would take away the very haunting aspect of what the man saw that morning and how it would have rooted into his psyche."
Dallas Morning News 12/30/97

Egoyan went on to explain, the casting of Bruce Greenwood was not so simple.
"Bruce, I originally cast as Sam, [Nicole]'s father [who ended up being played by Tom McCamus] and Bruce said that he would rather play Billy, that Billy was the person he really identified with. So I had to step down from playing the role of Billy myself."
University of Toronto Varsity Review 10/20/97

Filmmaking is all about a degree of surprise. You have to be able to surprise yourself and it's also great to surprise the people you know and have them surprise you. It's so great to see Arsinee as a hippie Mom or Gabrielle Rose totally reinvent herself and nobody recognized Bruce Greenwood from Exotica as Billy Ansel.
IndieWire 11/23/97

Question: So why do you use the same actors?
Egoyan: It's watching Bruce Greenwood - whom no one even recognizes from Exotica play a moustached garage mechanic...... It's like having a chest of clothes and surprising each other.....
Jane Hawton Live / CBC September 1997

Question: Most of his film's characters are buried beneath layers of winter clothing - except for Billy Ansel, the one parent of children killed in the crash who refuses to join a class-action lawsuit.
Egoyan: "Billy isn't really bundled up at all - he's very open and exposed," Egoyan says of the subtle but deliberate costuming decision. "It's a defiant gesture. He has exposed himself. He is prepared to deal with the consequences, the elements of fate."
Calgary Herald 11/28/97

Say, the affair....It's basically a very sensual fun affair and there was no point in complicating it, because that's not what that was about.
Hollywood Online

Additional Comments from Atom Egoyan are on the DVD Extras