Press Conference: “Adoration”

For the in-Competition premiere of Adoration, Canadian director Atom Egoyan, producers Simone Urdl and Jennifer Weiss, and actors Rachel Blanchard, Devon Bostick, and Scott Speedman fielded questions from the press. The editor’s choice:

Atom Egoyan on the relationship of technology to the story:
“I think that ultimately, we have to find ways to communicate stories to each other… There’s always been a need to transmit and to tell our stories to each other. Technology is just one way that’s used. The issue with the Internet is that we are so saturated with this degree of intimacy with each others’ lives that wouldn’t have been imaginable… What does that mean in terms of being able to sort out all the issues that you are feeling? Especially in regard to these very personal situations within a family. In the case of Devon, his character has not been told certain things about his own family… So he uses the technology to create this other personality which lets him go to that place where his grandfather or his uncle are not allowing him to go to himself. He’s come to a point where he has to be independent, and in that way, the film is really about his journey – both through the Internet, which is very common to his generation, but also to find himself. It’s not really about the Internet, it’s about the Internet being one of the ways in which this young man is able to discover what he needs to know about himself.

“What happens is that, in the course of telling this story, lots of people plug in, and he becomes overwhelmed with all the multitude of different responses. He wouldn’t have dreamed that he was going to create that effect. But that doesn’t bring him any closer to what he needs to find out. All that attention, all that noise is not really solving his issue. And certainly, the film is also about people having to find that person, or that figure, that can tell them something about their own history, be it Sabine and Tom, who both need to tell these stories to each other, or Simon, who needs to hear that story. I think at the end of the film, it’s incredibly generous that Tom is able to actually connect Simon and Sabine in a way that she would never have allowed herself to do, in her own terms, because she is a schoolteacher. But this woman has been watching this boy for years, and has been feeling this emotional reserve of something she could never express. So I’m always more concerned about the emotional issues that these characters are holding, as opposed to the technology. The technologies are just a way of people either allowing themselves or not allowing themselves to feel what is being denied them.”

Devon Bostick on having been cast by Atom Egoyan:
“I read the script right before I auditioned, and I found it so amazing that I had to read it a few times. There’s so much that you can unravel through Atom’s scripts. It’s not just one main plot synopsis, and it’s not just one story. There’s all these different stories, and throughout all these stories, you learn more and more… I was amazed, because I rarely have an opportunity like this. [Once I knew I got the part] I was screaming. I knew that I had to do a very good job, because it would be seen everywhere. I knew how important Atom’s movies are, and all the lessons that are learned from his movies. I was nervous, but I tried to keep it together as much as possible… My scenes started off without any lines, so I was able to meet all the people and get comfortable with the role and the environment. So I was able to ease into it slowly, and it started to get more and more intense, once it got into the monologues.”

Devon Bostick on the dangers of new technologies:
“I definitely feel like… my generation is very in tune with the new technology, and it definitely distorts everything. People hide behind the Internet and through technology. My character puts on a new persona and pretends to be this terrorist’s son. But everyone sort of puts on a different persona, even if they’re not trying to be someone else. It’s because they’re hiding behind this thing. They’re able to censor themselves from whatever they’re going to say, or whatever they’re going to do, because that person’s not actually in the room with you, and it’s very easy to hide behind that sort of thing.”

Atom Egoyan on why the story is about a family secret:
“We’ve gone through that journey, and we’ve seen people share these secrets. These people are increasingly comfortable with each other. I think that Tom’s decision to bring Simon to that apartment at the end is an incredibly generous act. It’s allowing this boy to connect with the one person who can tell him who his father was. And that’s a very generous thing that he does… These secrets are secrets that have been built up because people need to. Every family has secrets, and they’re secrets that are kept because people want to find some sort of myth that can somehow explain and tell a story which may or may not be true, but which they want to have other people believe. That’s just human nature. One of the things I’m fascinated by all the time is just how mysterious it is to me, another human being. It’s not just that simple. A lot of movies make it seem as though it’s the most natural, simple thing, but in fact, there’s a lot of stuff you have to negotiate. So all those issues of intimacy and trust are things that you earn. They don’t just come to you immediately. That’s something that I really find fascinating, and it’s probably why the stories are told the way they are.”

Atom Egoyan on the closeness of the Internet community in the film:
“That idea of it being global is something that I’ve seen before. That’s the cliché of the Internet. But in fact the reality is that it exists in small interest groups. I’m using a technology which I thought would be in use right now, and it still isn’t quite there. We do now have Skype, and we can work in groups. But it will be more fluid in the next months. There’s one shot where we see that it’s spread, that there are lots of people responding. But I wanted to preserve an intimacy, and to show that these are ultimately really close communities that are responding to each other. And not that it’s just drowned out by kind of a global noise. That wasn’t really the tone of the film. This is an intimate story. It’s just about a small group of people. So even though I was using the Net, I wanted to keep it feeling intimate.”