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Ron Burnett: Specifically, what interested me in the film was that a lot of it is about a sense of loss—the loss that occurs not only from generation to generation in video, but also the loss that occurs in people’s relationships with each other. For example, the absent mother the son finally comes to grips with and finds through the grandmother. The question for me—and it’s an important one, I think, in relation to television is to some degree always about loss. So much of what you see on the TV screen is the result of a process to which you don’t have any access. You as a spectator fill in the gaps. What interests me about television is how much we add to it, not how much we take away from it, that we fill the spaces which are there because there are so many. For example, there is a certain moment in the film when the son is in the nursing home and he goes to the television and turns it off because he sees himself in the image—is that correct? Atom Egoyan: That’s a very complicated moment, it’s a moment when there is a video surveillance image of the lead going to the hotel room with a stranger, and then what happens is that the Canadian flag comes out and broadcast day is over, and then he turns off the television. RB: So what is his relationship to the image he has just seen? I ask the question because you see his face but the camera doesn’t give you long enough time to understand what he is feeling. AE: It’s a very good question. I think what has happened at that point is that the film first of all very accurately reflects my own ambiguity towards the role of certain types of media in our lives—that here you have this medium which is able either to trivialize or to enhance our feelings towards things, and I think what has happened at that point is that he has been pushed to look towards this ‘shrine’ as an object of revelation because there are certain things that he has already begun to glean in terms of his own identity, his own past. Yet he is not engaged in a dialogue of any importance. It’s a very important moment because of what happens right after, because he looks away and realizes that the woman beside his grandmother has died. I think that’s an important sequence because it is about this very abstract sense of displacement that he feels the moment he turns off the television. The programme has ended, something has finished, and he has a sense of something having finished its course, and then all of a sudden he turns away and this other thing has just finished its course, this other person—then he moves away and he just pauses for a moment, and all of a sudden his face has a very odd expression; he turns around, he goes back to the beds, he pulls out a screen and at that point the film camera makes a very slow dolly back (at that point he is still obscured from view) and looks over the screen to reveal that he is switching the bodies. Now, there are so many things going on in that shot, because first of all that whole action of switching the bodies is such a detached, contrived, manipulated gesture and yet as a character we know he doesn’t really understand the full implications of what he is doing, that mentality of things just being switched and ‘plot points’ being added to one’s life is something that is obviously derived from his television watching. These sorts of things can happen, identities can be switched, the emotional implications are something that he has not been trained to feel. His whole life has been about separating himself from these sorts of actions. And then of course there is a whole dialogue between the spirit of the film camera, which is something I was focusing on very strongly in the film, the film camera’s ability to physically move through space, not zoom through space—every time we have a video camera the movement is through zoom; every time we have a film camera it is a physical movement; these are very subtle things, of course, and I don’t expect everyone to pick them up consciously, but I think that there is something there that you must be able to feel, there is an energy at work that I must trust my audience will be able to pick up at some level. RB: I agree with you. It’s a really crucial point because I think both audiences and filmmakers underestimate their entire experience of viewing. What interests me is the parallel between the scene you just described and the scene in which his father and girlfriend are sitting on their bed and viewing their own sexual experiences on video. Their own sexuality becomes an object of their vision and in fact becomes a premise upon which they build their own sexual energy. AE: Sure. The whole film is about people being convinced that they can reduce themselves to their archetypes. The father’s greatest folly is that he believes he can be a much more simple person than he is; he is not really able to deal with his own complexity as a human being, and that is where the irony of the film comes off, in terms of the language it employs—where he tries desperately to be a ‘TV Dad,’ to give advice and it’s so pat it becomes ridiculous. I was very interested in that whole aspect of the film, the myth that we can simplify our lives, and that technology allows us to trivialize ourselves, if we choose to use it that way.
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