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.

Atom Egoyan

Categorized in : People Issues Turkeys

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.

Atom Egoyan

armenia denial holocaust

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.

Atom Egoyan

anxiety ambition feelings

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.

Atom Egoyan

film vulnerable energy

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.

Atom Egoyan

falling-in-love done thinking

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

Atom Egoyan

creative giving believe

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.

Atom Egoyan

design decision people

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.

Atom Egoyan

actors may mean

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.

Atom Egoyan

emotional technology real

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

Atom Egoyan

produce film trying

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.

Atom Egoyan

our-society looks thinking

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.

Atom Egoyan

independent careers dream

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.

Atom Egoyan

technology people interesting

I wanted to make sure that the environment of the shooting itself was not that controlled, and the way to go about that course was to work with as small a crew as possible.

Atom Egoyan

environmental shooting way

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.

Atom Egoyan

cities winter thinking

As a producer, I think one of the most important decisions you make is not necessarily the material you are working on but the production apparatus that you choose to develop the project with, and that determines what funding you go to, it determines many factors.

Atom Egoyan

decisions-you-make important thinking

It is not as though the process of production holds any mystery for me, I know exactly what it involves and I know the predominant concern in shooting one of those things is production values - or as they would say, seeing it all up there on screen.

Atom Egoyan

shooting mystery process

When I was planning Family Viewing, the Ontario Film Development Corporation came into existence.

Atom Egoyan

ontario corporations development

The fathers greatest folly is that he believes he can be a much more simple person than he is; he is not really able to deal with his own complexity as a human being.

Atom Egoyan

simple believe father

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.

Atom Egoyan

grief choices people

I think the situation in Toronto is such that there are funding organizations which make it easy for a film to raise more money than it needs and very often that works against a film.

Atom Egoyan

organization ghouls thinking