Atom Egoyan‘s new film, Chloe, is a remarkable achievement in Toronto’s sad sack history of being Hollywood North, the place that doubles for any number of American cities. At last, a big budget work filled with such international luminaries as Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore, and Amanda Seyfried has been made that trumpets its location as being Toronto. It’s no surprise that Chloe was made by Egoyan, Toronto’s preeminent filmmaker. Spacing talked to the Cannes-award winning filmmaker and Oscar nominee about Toronto and cinema.
Spacing: Why did you choose to shoot Chloe in Toronto?
Atom Egoyan: It seemed an obvious choice to set it here because the film is dealing with a certain social milieu, which I know from my experience living in the city. Many of my films have been set in Toronto before. What this film has is the stars, but also it’s using locations that wouldn’t have been available to me with the lower-budget films. We got to shoot in Yorkville and use streets, which we wouldn’t have been able to shoot if we were shooting in summer or with a smaller budget.
Spacing: Toronto plays a significant role in the visual palette of Chloe. Would the film be very different if it was set in San Francisco, which is where it was placed in the first script?
Egoyan: I know the geography of [Toronto] really well and there are places that I invest with a lot of romantic feeling. I wanted, in order to get closer to these characters, to place them in those locations. I also wanted to claim some of the romance that we associate with a city like San Francisco, and to take possession of that and place it in our town, and why not? Café Tosca [in San Francisco] is not as visually resplendent as the Dip [Little Italy’s Café Diplomatico]. It doesn’t have the dynamic qualities that I knew I could invest into a shot from the Diplomatico, with its windows, and access to the street, and streetcars.
Spacing: Capturing the streetscape and café life is obviously important to you. How about architecture?
Egoyan: One of the most fascinating things that film does, is preserve what it meant to move through a space. Still photography can capture certain angles but a film can actually give you a sense of what it meant to inhabit and actually float through a space that doesn’t exist anymore.
Spacing: Looking at Chloe, one of the things that struck me was how much Yorkville has changed physically since the ’60s.
Egoyan: Completely changed. One of the things that shocks me about Yorkville, and a lot of the neighbourhoods that I’m shooting, is how self-contained they are. They’re just a couple of blocks, really, and yet they become larger than that in our imaginations. In a genuine sense, our neighbourhoods form a mosaic. If that’s the condition of our culture — and that’s what we’re taught — it’s really reflected in the geography. There’s nothing monolithic about it.
Spacing: You speak about Toronto with such passion, and I’m wondering…there was a time when you could have gone to Hollywood and you didn’t do it. Can you tell me about that choice? There’s something about Toronto that obviously has become embedded in you.
Egoyan: I love the city. And what I love about Toronto is something that’s remained consistent. I find that it keeps revealing itself to me. It’s a city that people say isn’t classically beautiful. It doesn’t make itself immediately apparent, but it has a culture that is there to be discovered and often in the places where you would least expect it. To me, the defining aspect of Toronto is the ravines. When you bring people to the city, and you show them how quickly they can be immersed in deep forest from an urban setting, that’s really special. That’s very unusual. In half a minute, you’re in a deep and quite desolate sort of setting. Our relationship to any city is based on an alignment with our own personality, why we feel comfortable in a place. It has to do with scale, and it has to do with a sense of feeling enfranchised. I have been really clear about wanting a certain kind of career and that was probably sustained by my choice of staying in Toronto.