|
|
|
Atom Egoyan's "Chloe" & Toronto's Starring Role
- Thread starter barrytron3030
- Start date
TJ O'Pootertoot
Senior Member
Bottom left shot of Amanda Seyfried is Cafe Diplomatico and the one of Moore and Neeson by the cab is also College Street (you can see Coco Lezzone in the back).
barrytron3030
Active Member
more pictures and more posters: http://www.6neweb.fr/?p=12639
here is the film's page at sony pictures classics: http://www.sonyclassics.com/index.php
the blog claims the film will be released in france on march 3. that means it will be premiering in france before north america.
here is the film's page at sony pictures classics: http://www.sonyclassics.com/index.php
the blog claims the film will be released in france on march 3. that means it will be premiering in france before north america.
barrytron3030
Active Member
an r-rated international trailer for "Chloe" has been released. i love the french!: http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=62324
Filip
Senior Member
Wow.. sounds promising!
Can't wait to see that; hopefully it will be released in Spain as well.
Can't wait to see that; hopefully it will be released in Spain as well.
barrytron3030
Active Member
The double life of Atom Egoyan
One minute he's making uneasy arthouse films, the next he's a Hollywood gun for hire, shooting the likes of Liam Neeson. Can auteur Atom Egoyan really cope with a dip in the mainstream?
Cath Clarke
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 21 January 2010 23.50 GMT
Article history
Splitting the atom … Canadian director Atom Egoyan. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features
A year is a long time in the movies. Fifteen months ago, I met the Canadian film-maker Atom Egoyan as he brought his low-key indie Adoration to the London film festival. The venue was an anonymous hotel cafe. At the festival's next edition, Egoyan returns with a new film, Chloe; this one stars Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson and Amanda Seyfried, and Egoyan is holding forth in a suite at Claridge's in central London. Things have clearly gone well for him.
At our first enconter, in the cafe, Egoyan was nursing a hangover that made him pleasantly effusive. He wasn't what I expected. Even his actors can be confused; before starting work on Adoration, one of its leads, Scott Speedman, said he thought Egoyan would be "an auteur in a black suit, not communicating very much". Instead, Egoyan joked about failing to meet Penelope Cruz at a party the previous night. "I thought there would be a red carpet, people would part and I would be able to glide directly to her." He smiled. "I gather she was there, but I never saw her." A stern auteur he was not – though he was wearing a black suit and a pair of fiercely designed glasses.
Egoyan made his first film, Next of Kin, in 1984, when he was 24 – "I was very driven" – which roughly puts him in the same generation as Jim Jarmusch, Todd Haynes and the Coens. "At that point independent film-making wasn't considered the cool, hip thing to do," he says. Since then he has directed 12 features – Exotica, from 1994, was the biggest commercially, and 1997's The Sweet Hereafter the most critically acclaimed, winning two Oscar nominations. In 1987, he got a splashy career launch at a film festival in Montreal when Wim Wenders publicly handed over a $5,000 prize he had won for Wings of Desire to the young director. (The gesture backfired somewhat when Egoyan tried paying the cheque in, only for the cashier in his local bank to ask him if he was Wim Wenders. "I was totally crushed. It was worthless.") As well as films, he has directed theatre, opera, television and made art installations. Penelope Cruz aside, it is serious stuff. "Atom has no lowbrow side," a friend of his recently told the New York Times. "He doesn't even have a middlebrow side.''
Watch one Egoyan film and you'll soon be able to spot another. They feel like they've been traumatised, back-ended by a car; the chronology has been knocked out of sequence, characters behave like they're in shock. Recurring themes are loss, missing bits of history and voyeurism. They can leave you deeply uneasy. In one scene in 1991's The Adjuster, the colleague of a female film censor (played by Arsinée Khanjian, Egoyan's wife), sidles up to her pervily in a dark screening room. She responds by pushing his hand up her skirt and laughing manically. I vividly remember watching it in a London cinema years ago. When the lights went up at the end the audience squirmed out like we'd been caught watching something seedy in a Soho backstreet.
He says he changed his formula dramatically after The Sweet Hereafter – "I felt I'd gone as far as I could go" – though Felicia's Journey, a Birmingham-set thriller with Bob Hoskins and the Armenian-inflected Ararat don't seem all that different. Much more of a departure was Where the Truth Lies, a critically derided take on LA noir, with Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon as a pair of sleazy 50s rat-packers. It cost $25m but recouped just $3.5m. "If you're going to do a neo-noir it has to be an LA Confidential," Egoyan said. He had clearly thought about it a lot. "It has to be exceptional." Adoration, which finally goes on limited release next week was a return to his signature personal storytelling, he told me. He called it "a coming of age story in the time of the internet".
That might be a little pithy for this puzzle about memory, extremism and technology. It's very loosely based on an incident involving a Jordanian, Nezar Hindawi, who in 1986 hid a bomb in his pregnant Irish girlfriend's handbag on a flight from Heathrow to Israel. The bomb was intercepted and he is still in prison in the UK. In the film, a newspaper article with a similar story is read out to a class of Canadian teenagers to translate into French. One boy, Simon (Devon Bostick) writes it up in the first person, imagining himself as the terrorist's child. Encouraged by his teacher (Khanjian again) he carries on the pretence to his classmates. Rather sweetly, Egoyan said one of his reasons for making the film was to get to grips with his teenage son. When he was that age he was reading Beckett and Pinter, throwing himself into local theatre. "But what if I was that child now? Putting on plays for friends, parents and teachers wouldn't be enough, right? You would want to find the largest audience possible."
Egoyan was born in Cairo to Armenian-Egyptian parents, who moved to Canada when he was two. Growing up in Victoria, British Columbia, all he wanted was to fit in. "It was the quest for assimilation, always aware of being outside. The usual." He wouldn't speak Armenian at home, and it was only at university that he became interested in his heritage, relearning the language and culture, and researching the 1915 genocide – in which up to 1.5 million of Turkey's Armenian population were killed. His family had never openly discussed it at home: "I suppose it's why it became so powerful, and why my films seem to contain a history which is suppressed and held."
One sensed a bit of frustration in Egoyan. He admitted there was a limited audience for the arthouse films he makes. "The reality is the world for that film is becoming more and more marginal." Directors such as Gus van Sant and Steven Soderbergh dart between commercial and personal film-making; Jarmusch has maintained his beat-cool and found a younger generation of filmgoers. Egoyan would like to be seen by a wider audience and over the years has been caught up in negotiations with the studios as a gun-a-for-hire. "I've come close a couple of times," he said. Both projects snagged on his casting choices. He can't talk about the second project, but the first was a thriller with Susan Sarandon. This was before Dead Man Walking and the suits decided she couldn't open a picture. "As lucrative as it is, I'm not sure how satisfying it could be to do one of these films, because it's not really my vision," he concluded.
Fast forward to a year later, and Egoyan is at the London film festival with his new film. In the fancy suite at Claridges a makeup artist is on her mobile tracking down the correct shade of lipstick for Julianne Moore. Egoyan's film, Chloe, is an erotic thriller, that second gun-for-hire project, the one he couldn't talk about the previous year. It's a remarkably quick turnabout, by anyone's standards. "It's the nature of financing now," Egoyan says. He seems to be on good form. "It's so difficult, that if something comes together it either takes a very long time or it happens very quickly."
Moore plays a Toronto gynaecologist who becomes convinced her lecturer husband (Liam Neeson) is sleeping around, and hires a classy escort (Amanda Seyfried) to seduce him. It was during shooting in March last year that Neeson's wife, the actress Natasha Richardson, died after a skiing accident in Canada. So, for all the PR bustle you expect with a junket like this, the air is a little heavy. Egoyan, who has worked with Neeson before, on a Beckett play in 2008, describes Neeson's enforced departure as the most traumatic professional experience of his career. They were close to wrapping when Neeson had to leave. "We didn't know when he would be back." In fact Neeson returned within days, "heroically" and in a state of shock, says Egoyan, to complete two days of filming. "It was really harrowing. Also because of the subject matter of the film was dealing with …" He pauses for the first time in either interview, to formulate his words. "It's so clear how precious marriage is, relationships are. How you have to seize every moment."
Chloe might put him in the big league, but you wonder if Egoyan will want to stay there. Talking about auditioning Seyfried ("She was clearly astonishing"), he mentions that she was picked before the success of Mamma Mia! made her a big name. Any other director would be blessing the heavens, but this one says dolefully: "I don't know if I would have had quite the same response after seeing the film." Which leaves you wondering: how on earth will the director who doesn't do lowbrow cope with Hollywood?
Adoration is released on 29 January, and Chloe on 5 March
source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/jan/21/atom-egoyan-adoration-chloe
One minute he's making uneasy arthouse films, the next he's a Hollywood gun for hire, shooting the likes of Liam Neeson. Can auteur Atom Egoyan really cope with a dip in the mainstream?
Cath Clarke
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 21 January 2010 23.50 GMT
Article history
Splitting the atom … Canadian director Atom Egoyan. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features
A year is a long time in the movies. Fifteen months ago, I met the Canadian film-maker Atom Egoyan as he brought his low-key indie Adoration to the London film festival. The venue was an anonymous hotel cafe. At the festival's next edition, Egoyan returns with a new film, Chloe; this one stars Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson and Amanda Seyfried, and Egoyan is holding forth in a suite at Claridge's in central London. Things have clearly gone well for him.
At our first enconter, in the cafe, Egoyan was nursing a hangover that made him pleasantly effusive. He wasn't what I expected. Even his actors can be confused; before starting work on Adoration, one of its leads, Scott Speedman, said he thought Egoyan would be "an auteur in a black suit, not communicating very much". Instead, Egoyan joked about failing to meet Penelope Cruz at a party the previous night. "I thought there would be a red carpet, people would part and I would be able to glide directly to her." He smiled. "I gather she was there, but I never saw her." A stern auteur he was not – though he was wearing a black suit and a pair of fiercely designed glasses.
Egoyan made his first film, Next of Kin, in 1984, when he was 24 – "I was very driven" – which roughly puts him in the same generation as Jim Jarmusch, Todd Haynes and the Coens. "At that point independent film-making wasn't considered the cool, hip thing to do," he says. Since then he has directed 12 features – Exotica, from 1994, was the biggest commercially, and 1997's The Sweet Hereafter the most critically acclaimed, winning two Oscar nominations. In 1987, he got a splashy career launch at a film festival in Montreal when Wim Wenders publicly handed over a $5,000 prize he had won for Wings of Desire to the young director. (The gesture backfired somewhat when Egoyan tried paying the cheque in, only for the cashier in his local bank to ask him if he was Wim Wenders. "I was totally crushed. It was worthless.") As well as films, he has directed theatre, opera, television and made art installations. Penelope Cruz aside, it is serious stuff. "Atom has no lowbrow side," a friend of his recently told the New York Times. "He doesn't even have a middlebrow side.''
Watch one Egoyan film and you'll soon be able to spot another. They feel like they've been traumatised, back-ended by a car; the chronology has been knocked out of sequence, characters behave like they're in shock. Recurring themes are loss, missing bits of history and voyeurism. They can leave you deeply uneasy. In one scene in 1991's The Adjuster, the colleague of a female film censor (played by Arsinée Khanjian, Egoyan's wife), sidles up to her pervily in a dark screening room. She responds by pushing his hand up her skirt and laughing manically. I vividly remember watching it in a London cinema years ago. When the lights went up at the end the audience squirmed out like we'd been caught watching something seedy in a Soho backstreet.
He says he changed his formula dramatically after The Sweet Hereafter – "I felt I'd gone as far as I could go" – though Felicia's Journey, a Birmingham-set thriller with Bob Hoskins and the Armenian-inflected Ararat don't seem all that different. Much more of a departure was Where the Truth Lies, a critically derided take on LA noir, with Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon as a pair of sleazy 50s rat-packers. It cost $25m but recouped just $3.5m. "If you're going to do a neo-noir it has to be an LA Confidential," Egoyan said. He had clearly thought about it a lot. "It has to be exceptional." Adoration, which finally goes on limited release next week was a return to his signature personal storytelling, he told me. He called it "a coming of age story in the time of the internet".
That might be a little pithy for this puzzle about memory, extremism and technology. It's very loosely based on an incident involving a Jordanian, Nezar Hindawi, who in 1986 hid a bomb in his pregnant Irish girlfriend's handbag on a flight from Heathrow to Israel. The bomb was intercepted and he is still in prison in the UK. In the film, a newspaper article with a similar story is read out to a class of Canadian teenagers to translate into French. One boy, Simon (Devon Bostick) writes it up in the first person, imagining himself as the terrorist's child. Encouraged by his teacher (Khanjian again) he carries on the pretence to his classmates. Rather sweetly, Egoyan said one of his reasons for making the film was to get to grips with his teenage son. When he was that age he was reading Beckett and Pinter, throwing himself into local theatre. "But what if I was that child now? Putting on plays for friends, parents and teachers wouldn't be enough, right? You would want to find the largest audience possible."
Egoyan was born in Cairo to Armenian-Egyptian parents, who moved to Canada when he was two. Growing up in Victoria, British Columbia, all he wanted was to fit in. "It was the quest for assimilation, always aware of being outside. The usual." He wouldn't speak Armenian at home, and it was only at university that he became interested in his heritage, relearning the language and culture, and researching the 1915 genocide – in which up to 1.5 million of Turkey's Armenian population were killed. His family had never openly discussed it at home: "I suppose it's why it became so powerful, and why my films seem to contain a history which is suppressed and held."
One sensed a bit of frustration in Egoyan. He admitted there was a limited audience for the arthouse films he makes. "The reality is the world for that film is becoming more and more marginal." Directors such as Gus van Sant and Steven Soderbergh dart between commercial and personal film-making; Jarmusch has maintained his beat-cool and found a younger generation of filmgoers. Egoyan would like to be seen by a wider audience and over the years has been caught up in negotiations with the studios as a gun-a-for-hire. "I've come close a couple of times," he said. Both projects snagged on his casting choices. He can't talk about the second project, but the first was a thriller with Susan Sarandon. This was before Dead Man Walking and the suits decided she couldn't open a picture. "As lucrative as it is, I'm not sure how satisfying it could be to do one of these films, because it's not really my vision," he concluded.
Fast forward to a year later, and Egoyan is at the London film festival with his new film. In the fancy suite at Claridges a makeup artist is on her mobile tracking down the correct shade of lipstick for Julianne Moore. Egoyan's film, Chloe, is an erotic thriller, that second gun-for-hire project, the one he couldn't talk about the previous year. It's a remarkably quick turnabout, by anyone's standards. "It's the nature of financing now," Egoyan says. He seems to be on good form. "It's so difficult, that if something comes together it either takes a very long time or it happens very quickly."
Moore plays a Toronto gynaecologist who becomes convinced her lecturer husband (Liam Neeson) is sleeping around, and hires a classy escort (Amanda Seyfried) to seduce him. It was during shooting in March last year that Neeson's wife, the actress Natasha Richardson, died after a skiing accident in Canada. So, for all the PR bustle you expect with a junket like this, the air is a little heavy. Egoyan, who has worked with Neeson before, on a Beckett play in 2008, describes Neeson's enforced departure as the most traumatic professional experience of his career. They were close to wrapping when Neeson had to leave. "We didn't know when he would be back." In fact Neeson returned within days, "heroically" and in a state of shock, says Egoyan, to complete two days of filming. "It was really harrowing. Also because of the subject matter of the film was dealing with …" He pauses for the first time in either interview, to formulate his words. "It's so clear how precious marriage is, relationships are. How you have to seize every moment."
Chloe might put him in the big league, but you wonder if Egoyan will want to stay there. Talking about auditioning Seyfried ("She was clearly astonishing"), he mentions that she was picked before the success of Mamma Mia! made her a big name. Any other director would be blessing the heavens, but this one says dolefully: "I don't know if I would have had quite the same response after seeing the film." Which leaves you wondering: how on earth will the director who doesn't do lowbrow cope with Hollywood?
Adoration is released on 29 January, and Chloe on 5 March
source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/jan/21/atom-egoyan-adoration-chloe
barrytron3030
Active Member
here's some pictures to tickle your toys: http://www.ninapeople.com/amanda-seyfried-folle-de-moore-dans-le-film-chloe--a34578.html
erotic indeed!
and some less pole-inducing imagery: http://www.cineblog.it/post/20822/chloe-tra-seduzione-e-inganno-fotogallery-del-film
erotic indeed!
and some less pole-inducing imagery: http://www.cineblog.it/post/20822/chloe-tra-seduzione-e-inganno-fotogallery-del-film
jade_lee
Active Member
I read that Atom is making a movie based on Rawi Hage's book De Niro's game. Read it and LOVED IT!!! The movie could be something amazing!
barrytron3030
Active Member
an interview with seyfried: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/movies/blonde-beautiful----and-twisted/article1460502/
Last edited:
Blovertis
Active Member
On the evidence of Where the Truth Lies, Egoyan has no instinct for mainstream entertainment. The casting was ridiculous (Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon as a quasi-Martin & Lewis, Alison Lohman as an star investigative journalist) and the sex scenes were silly.
This one looks to be similarly overheated.
This one looks to be similarly overheated.
barrytron3030
Active Member
a new poster: http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=26955
i think they photoshopped a section of cumberland just enough to make it look like any american city!
i think they photoshopped a section of cumberland just enough to make it look like any american city!
barrytron3030
Active Member
here's the (vacant) official website: http://www.sonyclassics.com/chloe/
the second international trailer is out - dig it. egoyan exposes more of toronto's cultural renaissance - take that cleveland!
[video=youtube;GNoZxWM5xNc]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNoZxWM5xNc[/video]
the second international trailer is out - dig it. egoyan exposes more of toronto's cultural renaissance - take that cleveland!
[video=youtube;GNoZxWM5xNc]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNoZxWM5xNc[/video]
Last edited:
barrytron3030
Active Member
here's an article from the Guardian that criticizes Reitman, Egoyan, and Hollywood in general for remaking and destroying European films: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2010/feb/23/robert-de-niro-everybodys-fine
a valid criticism. i shuttered when i heard that Ron Howard would be remaking Michael Haneke's "Cache." Perhaps even more frightening is that Steven Spielberg holds the rights to remake "Old Boy" with Will Smith in the starring role.
Concerning "Chloe," i suppose i've been turning a blind eye. Aside from the film being set in Toronto, Anne Fontaine has said herself that she is happy Egoyan is remaking her original.
a valid criticism. i shuttered when i heard that Ron Howard would be remaking Michael Haneke's "Cache." Perhaps even more frightening is that Steven Spielberg holds the rights to remake "Old Boy" with Will Smith in the starring role.
Concerning "Chloe," i suppose i've been turning a blind eye. Aside from the film being set in Toronto, Anne Fontaine has said herself that she is happy Egoyan is remaking her original.
dt_toronto_geek
Superstar
Howard is remaking Cache? Scary. He's such a "safe" Director. Interestingly this Chloe review notes Michael Haneke remaking his own German language film "Funny Games" (in English the second time 'round, subtitles be damned), essentially a shot for shot, inferior remake of his brilliant original.
I was looking forward to Chloe, I'm a huge fan of Egoyan but it doesn't sound very promising after reading a few reviews on it.
junctionist
Senior Member
Hopefully it at least has good footage of architecture and public spaces in Toronto. Even if maintenance and investment isn't where we'd like it to be, our city can look very interesting on film. It would benefit the city immensely to have average people in North America and throughout the world familiar with some of our special spaces, the way an average movie goer can get a good sense of what New York or Los Angeles looks like without even making a conscious decision to do so.
This isn't wishful thinking considering how many Hollywood movies are made here and how much talent moves from Canada to the U.S.
This isn't wishful thinking considering how many Hollywood movies are made here and how much talent moves from Canada to the U.S.