Atom Egoyan Quotes

You can talk about Holocaust denial, but it's really marginal for the most part. What is compelling about the Armenian genocide, is how it has been forgotten.

Don’t get depressed about not being where you want to be. This nagging feeling of anxiety is actually called ambition. Ambition is your friend.

I just think I love the process of making films. It's not tortuous for me at all. I love being with my crew. I love actors. There's a joy to the process.

I think in the '80s, when I started making films, we were all suspicious of these technologies. We were all convinced they would filter out any emotion and sense of intimacy, and the films I made during that period reflected that. In fact, what has happened is the opposite. I think we're saturated with a degree of intimacy we would never have expected, and we're trying to sort through this idea of complete access to each other's lives on an ongoing basis. Our emotions aren't filtered out at all. They're actually accelerated.

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.

I do think you fall in love when you feel that something of your story is being listened to for the first time, or you feel someone else is hearing it as no one else has ever done.

Try to produce your own films, avoid directing for hire.

I'm obsessed with this idea of storytellers and people who have a narrative, and sometimes sustain a relationship because they're telling a narrative and someone is listening to that. Often the nature of the relationship is determined by how well they tell the story, or someone else's ability to suspend disbelief, or infuse into their narrative something which they may not even be aware of.

I mean, if you are directing actors to do one thing and then directing them to do something else entirely because the one thing you wanted them to do may not work, then you are just shattering their confidence in the project.

People make decisions that may have one intent and yet are somehow perverted into something else. And sometimes it's because of design. Sometimes it's because of happenstance. But very often, it's mysterious to them.

My parents taught me to believe that through the creative act, we're able to transcend and give a response to desecration.

The directing process is often a continuation of the writing. This is just a different skill-set.

I love when people are resilient and when they form ways of dealing with grief or dealing with some traumatic episode, and sometimes those are the wrong choices.

Every actor has a different temperament. Part of my job is to know what those boundaries are. The actor has to know you'll be there at the other end, that you're trying to represent them in the best light, who they are as they're harnessing these roles. The methods vary from actor to actor.

I think entire social groups are formed through technologies that could never exist in the real world, and relationships that are a function of these technologies' ability to accelerate feeling and emotional contact.

We're lucky to be making films. My crew and I have been working together for a long time. I think that that's what emanates.

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.

I believe my signal of maturity as a filmmaker iswhen I'll actually acknowledge the fact that the first take is usuallythe best.

I think if you look at the themes that are presented in the film, some are inherently social, and I think that any film which deals with the family is dealing with the smallest social unit in our society - and in a sense it is a question of scope.

Sometimes you think you want to know something, but it's actually more exciting and more resonant when you have to try [and figure it out].

Right now my career is totally schizophrenic, because when an American production like Hitchcock Presents asks to see my work I would never dream of showing them my independent films.

We're still staring at TV screens, right? They're still monitors. But the way information is delivered is different. So it creates an interesting way of looking back at early films, because they're actually relevant in terms of the devices people are using. But the consideration, the debate, around those technologies was very different from what's being presented now.

I’m Armenian, and April 24th was another commemoration of the genocide of Armenia people by Turkey. The perpetrator never admitted the crime. I was raised with that, this question: how do you actually find the truth of such a traumatic event? I'm obsessed with that issue.

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.

One of the huge advantages of shooting in the winter is that locations that wouldn't have been available to us suddenly were, like Yorkville. ... It's just specific streets and specific angles. I think that's what's always kind of shocking about some cities: they are really about intersections.