A FIST FULL OF RUBLES
As he prepares a new HD version of his breakthrough film, Atom Egoyan recalls the twists and turns that went into making Calendar
Atom Egoyan’s best film was a fluke of historical circumstance. It was arranged by chance, and chance nearly thwarted it: Calendar almost didn’t happen. Before a new HD version of the film is screened in Toronto as part of National Canadian Film Day April 29, Egoyan took the opportunity to recall his breakthrough’s complicated genesis.
Fate began its mechanizations in 1991. That July, his previous film The Adjuster screened at the Moscow International Film Festival, where it was awarded the Special Silver St. George — an honour that included a one-million ruble prize. The only catch was that the money had to be spent on a production in the Soviet Union. “At the time,” Egoyan remembers, “a million rubles was worth quite a bit, and Armenia was part of the Soviet Union.” It seemed an ideal opportunity for the Armenian-Canadian to make a movie in the place he considered something of a homeland. By the end of the year, though, the Soviet Union would be dissolved — and that million rubles wouldn’t be worth much at all. Egoyan shrugged. “So much for that idea.”
But then a TV producer called him from Germany. “He’d heard of the idea I was tossing around,” Egoyan says, “and offered me $50,000 to make the film I had in mind.” Not that he had much at this point: “All I had in mind was this idea of a relationship.” There would be, he imagined, “a photographer going to make images for a calendar,” and, while there, “his relationship falling apart over these 12 stations — these 12 different churches that he would visit in Armenia.” In the finished product each church is the backdrop of its own self-contained scene, each a single static shot representing the picture composed by the photographer. In the foreground the photographer’s lover chats in Armenian with the pair’s local driver and guide, musing on history and philosophy and occasionally translating observations back to the man behind the camera. As the story unfolds we see the woman’s allegiances change: she arrives with the photographer but by the end will love the guide.
Egoyan and his wife, Armenian actress and longtime collaborator Arsinee Khanjian, set to work filming these sequences across the countryside, until the German’s 50 grand was depleted. During the Armenian sequences we never once glimpse the photographer, and so Egoyan, wanting to keep his foreign crew to a minimum and thinking he could simply dub his lines over with another actor back home, voiced the role on location himself. “But what happened,” Egoyan recalls, “was that my wife and I began to overlap our dialogue in Armenia. We were speaking over each other, as we often tend to do, and it became impossible to extract my voice.” That decided it. “I had to play that character.” Egoyan is rather good in the role, particularly for a non-actor. But he wouldn’t do it again. “It was terrifying. I don’t enjoy acting. I don’t enjoy having a camera on me. I just had to.”
The result, predictably, were reviews that extrapolated a great deal of truth from the fiction. “I think what emerged was that people somehow thought the film was based on something my wife and I were experiencing in our relationship.” When Egoyan presented Calendar at the Berlinale film festival, for instance, many presumed that Arsinee — who had just given birth to their child — was absent for a more ominous reason. “Critics were saying, wait, is this your actual break up? I thought it was so odd. Did they think that if we were actually breaking up I’d have the wherewithal to make a movie out of it?” Apparently so. But while it doesn’t behoove one to imagine Calendar as a thinly veiled confessional, there does seem to loom over the proceedings a certain immediacy. Egoyan agrees. “Somehow it has this feeling of being really direct and personal, and it’s because we’re a real-life couple.”
Much of Calendar’s greatness is derived from its psychological complexity. Indeed, there’s a great deal of nuance in Egoyan’s portrayal of the nameless photographer: as he’s taken to task, justly, for his ignorance of Armenian cultural history, he’s also sympathized with as an easy target for the mercenary guide. “He’s a jerk,” Egoyan says, “but he’s threatened by what he sees happening in front of his lens. He’s someone who on the one hand seems to be very much in control of how to compose a shot, but he has no idea how to compose his own life. He’s a complex and inscrutable sort of person.” What’s extraordinary is how much of this is illustrated without any explication. For Egoyan that’s precisely cinema’s appeal. “What I love about movies is that they can transmit these specific and complex ideas intuitively. You don’t need to have the characters say it, you just get that feeling because it’s so strongly understood.”
Egoyan resists my description of Calendar as an experimental film, but he does concede that the creative process was rather more unusual than he’s accustomed to. In fact, the twist that concludes the film was only introduced at the last minute: the most significant plot point in the movie “occurred to me when we got to the sound mix,” he says, after the edit was virtually complete. But that’s just the sort of happenstance that clung to the film from the beginning — and followed it to the end.
When Egoyan screened Calendar for his distributor, Alliance, they didn’t know what to make of it. “They didn’t want to distribute it because they felt it was going to paint me as hopelessly non-commercial,” he recalls. So they gave it a nominal one-off premiere as part of a mini Egoyan retrospective at the local cinematheque. “But the response was so great that they almost needed to release it theatrically.” Much to Alliance’s irritation, the sole 16mm print of Calendar opened in 1993 at the Carlton theatre in Toronto. It was so popular that it played continuously for nearly four months.
It was terrifying. I don’t enjoy having a camera on me. I just had to