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Ron Burnett: This links up with another thing I really liked about the film, which is what I see as an interesting exploration of voyeurism and the ambivalence and ambiguity of the voyeuristic act. You believe you are closer and closer to your fantasies when, by definition, you have to be further and further away in order for your fantasy to work. That tug of war between getting closer and being further away was beautifually represented for me when the parents’ videotapes are erased and suddenly the experience of their lives, or of their sexuality, ceases to exist. In other words, they don’t really have any faith in their own memories or in their experience. They need that object, the video, and they need the kind of present tense experience it offers. Atom Egoyan: Yes, and I think with that in mind, it’s a bit of an odd point, but I think there’s a difference between the way let’s say the old 8mm home movies worked and the way the video works. In an 8mm movie you paid, what was it, $20 for two and a half minutes of time, and were forced to be selective. You had to make decisions as to what was important, what you wanted to record, and therefore there was an active process in your mind where you pre-edited before you shot. Whereas with video you can shoot three hours at a time, and the thing that’s very strange is there is this whole phenomenon of people shooting—you are traveling and see these people shooting the entire experience of going through a city, and maybe in the back of their minds they sustain the illusion that they will edit it all, but I don’t think that’s it. Advertisers use the phrase a lot, of “being able to record their memories,” and that is such a perverse notion! The implications of that are really terrifying, and I tried to make that point in relation to Stan and Sandra’s use of video for their sex games. RB: The film goes through a whole series of crises and at the end, the mother is found, she returns and there is a kind of narrative unity put in place by the film. What made you decide to complete the circle of the narrative in that fashion? AE: There are two elements at play here. When we first shot it, something very, very weird happened, and it’s a good example of how things work intuitively or are improvised: that last scene in the Women’s Shelter was one track, a camera moving through space, identifying where we were, moving up to this video surveillance camera perched on top of a booth, and then the video surveillance camera moved to reveal the scene of reunion, which the film camera then identified. So we shot his scene and, in the rough cut of the film, it became clear that this was not working—there was someting that was really falling flat. Then I had the idea of inter-cutting these home videos which Chris had seen before; this boy moving up to the camera, shielding his eyes. This married so well with the dolly we had of the film camera going up to the video camera that everything we had presented to you visually in the film was not being aesthetically and formally resolved as well. So I think the actual appearance of the mother is in some ways secondary to what is happening, the fusion of the two different types of imagery, which is a much more exciting thing for me. That is the true resolution of the film, I think. When you make a film like this, you must have the highest expectations of your audience. Having worked in situations where we have the lowest expectations of our audience (I’m talking about American commercial television), I automatically thought that you had to marginalize yourself and that there wouldn’t be an audience as a result. This film has taught me that in fact people want to be challenged, right? But still, films like mine have to be placed in a certain context—they have to be introduced in the right way, because people are not about to embark on a normal kind of film journey, you know? This is not a film that tries to satisfy you and keep you seduced on a moment-to-moment basis. For the first 20 minutes you don’t know what’s going on! It sets up a very weird world, and what it’s asking you to do is trust that I know what I'm trying to say—and that’s audacious, because no one’s heard of me! I've just been very, very lucky with the film having been introduced in the right way. Though I am still very vulnerable to audiences—and it happens all the time—where for some reason the energy doesn’t connect and, since the film is very personal, obviously I am made to feel very vulnerable by that. No matter how unsophisticated a film audience is concerning theory or the aesthetics of what it is you’re trying to do, the other thing they can detect (and it’s uncanny!) is whether or not they’re being condescended to. And I think ultimately if you have a very high expectation of your audience and you know exactly what it is you’re trying to express through the medium of film, there will always be an audience for you.
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