Atom power

ROGER CLARKE talks to the director who turned Bob Hoskins into a Brummie Atom power

ATOM Egoyan may well have been named in honour of Egypt's first nuclear power plant, speak fluent Armenian and have Mel Gibson as a producer of his films.

But the Oscar-nominated 39-year-old director still finds the exotic in the oddest of places. Birmingham, actually. His new film Felicia's Journey is set there. It's a bit of a puzzle.

It's true the Cairo-born Canadian was (absurdly but predictably) pipped to the post for Best Director Oscar by James Cameron a few years back. That he was nominated at all was something of a miracle bearing in mind the Academy's aversion to anything challenging.

However his sublime adaptation of the Russell Banks novel The Sweet Hereafter, a work of almost overwhelming emotion concerning the death of a busload of schoolchildren, touched a nerve. In a world of cheap emotionalism his tale of loss and bereavement seemed as austere as icicles on a church roof.

Not that Egoyan is a gloomy, introspective sort. Quite the opposite. He talks quickly and cleverly, and easily gets into raptures over things. When I met him in the ENO building in St Martin's Lane (which appears to have become his second home after he directed a new opera there last year), he simply couldn't resist popping his head round the door of the auditorium as some large woman in rehearsal belted out an aria from Strauss. "I got so blase when I worked here, but just listen to that, isn't it amazing?"

In fact, everyone agrees that Egoyan is one of the nicest guys in the business and not at all like his tortured, dark films (which always seem to feature his wife Arsinee Khanjian) such as The Adjuster and Exotica. He may look like a perennial film student with his oval horn-rimmed specs and tousled chestnut hair that looks as if a fellow Scout has snatched his cap, but he's really quite the grown- up when it comes to filmmaking.

Felicia's Journey is based on a novel by veteran writer William Trevor, and tells the story of a naive young Irish girl (Elaine Cassidy) who comes to England in search of her British squaddie boyfriend. Unfortunately she is befriended by a catering manager who just happens to be a serial killer - Bob Hoskins. Will Hoskins add the poor, waiflike girl to his list of murdered women?

Egoyan is puzzled by the London reaction to Hoskins's rather taxing Brummie accent. We tend to scoff at the murdered vowels, it seems. "I don't really understand why Londoners find the Birmingham accent so comical and strange," he observes with the ghost of a frown, "when they don't object to Manchester, for example."

In a divergence from the book, Egoyan invents a new strand of the story where real-life wife Arsinee plays the wonderfully demented mother of the young Hoskins. In video flashbacks she is revealed to be Fanny Cradock crossed with Joan Crawford, a celebrity chef of yesteryear in the era when celebrity chefs wore ballgowns while perfecting their prune canapes.

"I didn't know about Fanny Cradock till my production manager got videos of her shows in the preproduction period," says Egoyan. "And she was talking in a fake French accent and had hired two kids to pretend to be hers."

Pretending is quite a key theme in his 11 or so features, but Egoyan has been somewhat in flight from the one and only bout of pretending in his life.

After the success of Exotica in 1994, he briefly sold his soul to Tinseltown.

"I said I'd direct a Warner Bros thriller called Dead Sleep," he recalls, still appalled by the memory, as if the title of the film was also a description of his state of mind back then. "I went through a year living at the Four Seasons hotel trying to get one of six actresses, including Jodie Foster, Meg Ryan and Sandra Bullock, for the lead because that was what the studio wanted. It was only after a year I discovered that all six had already passed on the project and I had been brought in as a hot new director to tempt them.

"Then they wouldn't let me approach Susan Sarandon till she had a hit with Dead Man Walking, and by the time that movie was getting some heat Sarandon was really angry with the studio and passed on my movie. So I found myself going to the Oscars and when she got her award I was really thinking angrily, 'Well, if I can't get you I'll get someone even better.' It was a form of complete denial and madness."

His work since then seems a reaction to the Hollywood norms: operas in Ottawa and London, a film about dead children (expected to be box office poison after Lorenzo's Oil bombed) and then this film about a portly caterer in Britain's dowdiest city. Yet there's an undeniable charge to Egoyan's take on this industrial hinterland: he's seen it in a way that no English person would and coaxed a superior performance from an actor much gone astray in recent years. Frankly unless you're a Brummie you'll never get used to Hoskins's relentlessly nasal accent but it ideally suits the cruelly detailed nature of the film. How can anyone die in what sounds like a Vic Reeves sketch?

Felicia's Journey is released in London next week.

Copyright 1999
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