Atom Egoyan’s career is a rare balancing act. The Oscar-nominated auteur of films ranging from The Sweet Hereafter (1997) to Chloe (2009) is also internationally known for directing bold new productions of operas by Wagner, Mozart and Strauss. And now his dual worlds of stage and screen converge in his 15th dramatic feature, Seven Veils, which opens in Canadian theatres this week. It’s the backstage drama of a young director (Chloe’s Amanda Seyfried) who is remounting a production of the Strauss opera Salome as the dying wish of its creator, with whom she had an affair as his teenage intern. And in a pretzel contortion of life imitating art, Egoyan, 64, shot the film at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts while remounting his own hit production of Salome on its stage for the Canadian Opera Company.

An ambitious return to form for the Cairo-born Canadian filmmaker, Seven Veils unfolds as a hall-of-mirrors psychodrama riddled with incestuous twists, ghostly flashbacks, and wry reflections on cancel culture. And its story is fuelled by a dark undercurrent of personal trauma drawn from the director’s own adolescence.

 I’ve interviewed Egoyan many times over the years, but most memorably in 1999 when he was  promoting Felicia’s Journey – a claustrophobic thriller about of a pregnant teen who is befriended by a paternal predator. That film came on the heels of The Sweet Hereafter, which involves father-daughter incest, and Exotica (1994), in which a father mourns his daughter’s violent death by doting on a stripper costumed in a schoolgirl kilt. I asked Egoyan what was at the bottom of this obsessive theme, and he revealed that as teenager in Victoria, B.C., he fell in love with a young woman who was engaged in an incestuous romance with her father, a respected artist.  The woman, later identified as Gina Wilkinson, became an actor, playwright and director. She died in 2010.

Egoyan’s lifelong obsession with that trauma, which is at the root of some of best films, now resurfaces in Seven Veils more explicitly than ever, as Seyfried’s character is haunted by memories of her venerated mentor and her father while both dealing with a case of sexual assault in her crew and a two-timing husband, who is blithely enjoying on a tryst with her mother’s young caregiver.  And that’s not even the half of it.

Recently, Egoyan sat down for a video interview in his Toronto office, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling shelves of books, films and archives. 

ZOOMER: It’s hard enough to make a movie, or direct an opera. How on earth can you do both at the same time, in the same space?

ATOM EGOYAN: It’s very daunting.  You can’t just have cameras in the rehearsal process because there are union considerations. So it becomes a much bigger production. Then you’re dealing with the schedule of a major star [Seyfried] who’s just won an Emmy for The Dropout and is, you know, busy. On top of that, it was during COVID. You need to have a degree of delusion with any project, but this one in particular. It came together against all odds. 

ZOOMER: When you seized on the idea of directing the film alongside the opera, did you have a story in mind? 

AE: No. I think it came out of the anxiety from mounting the original opera in 1996. The times we were living in were wildly different. There were no trigger warnings. And some people were really upset, saying that it was way over the top, too extreme. But it is a very extreme opera.

ZOOMER: How can opera be too extreme? 

AE: It’s what we did with Salome’s Dance of the Seven Veils.  I just went with this full-throttle sense of how horrifying it could be. There was a staged gang rape, which was upsetting for a lot of people. There were walkouts. I felt that putting that back onto the stage in 2023 raised a lot of issues. I thought, why are we putting on this old production? Why isn’t the COC getting a woman to direct another production? But that’s very expensive. So you’re stuck with this legacy. I wanted to infuse it with a new set of questions through this script where I created a female character, Jeanine, who’s brought in to remount the show. Charles, its original director, was inspired by her, and now that he’s deceased, he’s giving it back to her in his will. Is that a gift or a curse? She now gets to explore this material, but is also under the restrictions of the opera company, which conveniently is run by the wife of the late director, Charles, who had an affair with Jeanine as a young intern. 

 

ZOOMER: I saw Seven Veils premiere at TIFF in 2023. Why has it taken a year and half to release it?

AE: It’s longest I’ve ever waited. You’re waiting for the right U.S. deal. That’s what it comes down to. I’ve also come to understand that it’s a challenging film. 

The hardest thing is to convey that it’s not an opera film. You don’t need to know anything about opera when you see it. The most gratifying response has been from people who don’t know anything about opera and are thrilled by the movie. But it’s a marketing challenge because opera is so embedded into the film. I didn’t understand that when I was making it. Because Salome is so popular, more than any opera I’ve done, I felt that energy could be brought into the film and translate into a popular hit. But there’s something about the opera branding which is a bit of a limitation. 

 

ZOOMER: On face value, opera is seen as high art and cinema as the more commercial art. But while your opera production of Salome has been consistently commercial  – it’s been remounted three times – your films have often struggled to find an audience.

AE: That’s been a sobering reality. I’ve never been in a theatre full of people that have responded the way they do at the end of Salome. People go wild over this production. The runs always sell out.  So I had this fantasy that it could be transported into the film world. But how do you get people into a cinema when they think it’s an opera film? And people who love opera kind of go, “Well, we’ve seen it live at the Met, so why would we see an opera film?” We’ll see what happens.

ZOOMER: What’s it like to be talking about Seven Veils so long after you made it? So much has changed since then with sexual politics and the #MeToo movement. The needle has shifted. And you have a #MeToo moment in the film where the German singer hits on the props woman who’s making a cast of his head for the decapitated John the Baptist. 

AE: That’s an interesting point, because it suggests a post-#MeToo moment. She tries to take this moment, which she didn’t engineer, and use it in a certain way [as blackmail]. And her lover says that’s wrong. But people in the original story of Salome are obviously acting outside the bounds of good behaviour, to say the least. You don’t chop someone’s head off so you can kiss their lips. Or you don’t customarily do that.  [Laughing] A lot of people in this film are acting outside the boundaries of good behaviour.  And, this might be controversial, but I would say that the opera world is one of the last bastions where bad behaviour is still tolerated in a certain way, because of the way singers are and the kind of the attitude they might have. The German singer playing John the Baptist – I’ve encountered that sort of person. 

ZOOMER: In one of your productions of Salome?

AE: No, it was actually in The Ring Cycle. You have to understand that singers are quite athletic. Singing without amplification over a massive orchestra, what they’re doing is so superhuman that they begin to believe they are invested with this other power. The idea of the opera diva is not entirely incorrect. There are less of those types of people now, but they still exist. There are things that I could explore in the opera world that I couldn’t have if it was about the making of a film.

ZOOMER Such as?

AE: Like with Amanda’s whole approach to the intimacy coordinator in the opera, when she takes the reins and shows what she wants [in an erotically charged scene between two of the singers]. There’s no way that a male director would have been able to do what her character is doing at that point and get away with it. So I found that amusing because it’s so out of bounds. It might seem outlandish, but it’s not improbable.

 

ZOOMER: How meta did all this get? Did you have an intimacy coordinator on the film?

AE: Yeah, that’s absolutely a requirement. It’s not something I disagree with. I’ve dealt with a lot of sexual situations in my movies. I’ve always choreographed them myself and I think I’ve been careful and observant of the actors’ sensitivities. But you hear stories from other sets and you kind of go “Someone should have been there.” 

ZOOMER: From the start of your career, you’ve made very complex films powered by trauma, films full of refracted memories, stories within stories. Seven Veils shares that thematic terrain but all those meta elements are grounded in a single theatrical production. And there’s a reality to it that seems close to home. How personal is this film to you?

AE: Well, it’s super personal, because of what I revealed to you many years ago, the stuff that I was dealing with in the 90s – the woman we’ve talked about who became an actress then started directing. Gina Wilkinson. In giving [the character] Jeanine, Amanda, this ability to direct and take control over fragments of her life that other people had used, I was thinking about how I’ve used fragments of Gina’s life in my work. My original stage production of Salome was between Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter. Gina came to see it. That wasn’t as emotional as when she saw Exotica, because in Exotica the schoolgirl’s dress was the uniform that she wore at school. But this idea of how her figure has haunted me, there’s a lot that’s invested in it.

ZOOMER: What is unusual in this lifelong theme of trauma and abuse is that it’s not you who was abused. 

AE: It’s a very unusual point of view, especially as a child, where you have no context to understand it.  I don’t think I’ve told you how odd it got. Before I started dating her, I had to meet her father and promise I would not touch her. I made that promise but of course broke it. And there’s the thrill of breaking that promise and doing something forbidden. But I had no understanding why he made me make that promise. There was no way to put it into any sort of context . . . The stuff with Alice Munro, how have you been reacting to that? [Referring to recent revelations of how the Nobel-Prize winning author stayed with her partner Gerald Fremlin for four decades while knowing he had sexually abused her youngest daughter, Andrea, when she was a child.]  

ZOOMER: It was devastating. 

AE: It spoke about something in the English Canadian psyche creatively. She’s such a figurehead, and there’s this dark stream that flows through the work, which is beautifully crafted and controlled and observed. But there’s pain in there. There are victims. And she in her real life couldn’t address that.

ZOOMER: Do you ever get over this? Do you think your work will continue to be informed by this trauma as you go forward? Is there a desire to turn the page?

AE: I’ve told myself there are other traumas. Right after Seven Veils opens, I’m going to Berlin to do this original play that I’ve written, Donation, at the Maxim Gorki Theater. The artistic director asked, “Is there something you could do about what’s happened in Armenia in the past ten years?” And I had this idea: I’ve kept all the costumes from Ararat [Egoyan’s 2002 film about the Armenian genocide] in a storage facility. So I make an ostentatious donation of the costumes to the Gorki Theatre. And Arsinée [Khanjian, the director’s actress wife] is sent as an emissary to be interviewed about her role in the film, and her involvement in the Armenian revolution. But the interview turns into an interrogation. The theatre doesn’t really want the costumes. And as it becomes clear the people doing the interview are kind of in her mind, it becomes this nightmare.

 

ZOOMER: Atom, you’re now 64. You’ve been so prolific on so many fronts for so long. Do you see yourself slowing down? 

AE: Not at this particular point. After Donation, in November I’m doing this other opera, Jenůfa, in Montreal, at a 3,000-seat theatre in Place Des Arts. By that point I will be 65. I am aware that I can’t work at the same pace. Also the world has changed and it’s much more difficult to finance films. I’m happiest when I’m thinking creatively, but when you say I have to make this, it puts you in a very vulnerable position, because if you don’t get to make it, it’s crushing.

ZOOMER: What do you do to unwind?

[Egoyan picks up an acoustic guitar that’s propped up against his bookshelves.]

AE: This is what I do. I love this. I play this all the time. I improvise. I put on music and play along. 

ZOOMER: Do you ever play on your own film soundtracks?

AE:  I did. Whenever you hear a guitar on the early films that’s me. And then you realize that there are session musicians who are going to do it way better. But one of the most thrilling things I’ve ever done creatively was when I co-wrote two of the songs on Gord Downie’s first solo album, Coke Machine Glow [2001]. So yes, I am the Yoko Ono of the Tragically Hip.

Seven Veils opens in select theatres on March 7.

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