Quotes by Atom Egoyan

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

Wisdom

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

— Atom Egoyan

Wisdom

There is a certain moment in the film when the son is in the nursing home and he goes to the television and turns it off because he sees himself in the image.

— Atom Egoyan

Wisdom

The father's 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

Life

I suppose I had these concerns but I really felt that I had to keep my scope very, very concentrated.

— Atom Egoyan

Wisdom

It is about this very abstract sense of displacement that he feels the moment he turns off the television.

— Atom Egoyan

Wisdom

The whole film is about people being convinced that they can reduce themselves to their archetypes.

— Atom Egoyan

Wisdom

These are very subtle things, of course, and I don't expect everyone to pick them up consciously, but I think that there is something there that you must be able to feel, there is an energy at work that I must trust my audience will be able to pick up at some level.

— Atom Egoyan

Success

Working on the themes I was interested in, through the context of a particular family, was a very economical way of dealing with a lot of the issues I was concerned with.

— Atom Egoyan

Success

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.

— Atom Egoyan

Wisdom

I have always felt that this story is universal. When I began to understand the details of the history, I felt that the most compelling aspect was not what happened, but what continues to happen and how it is denied.

— Atom Egoyan

Wisdom

I've just been very, very lucky with the film having been introduced in the right way.

— Atom Egoyan

Wisdom

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

— Atom Egoyan

Wisdom

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

Success

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

Success

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

Wisdom

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

Success

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

Success

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

Wisdom

It was very important that it be done in such a way that it be executed with complete conviction. If I had done it both ways, if I was trying to cover myself in case it didn't work, then it would have been to no purpose.

— Atom Egoyan

Success

Once we were in the studio, we realized we were getting certain effects through the shooting of the dramatic scenes on video, shooting off a screen and then getting wave patterns and stuff like that.

— Atom Egoyan

Wisdom

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

Success

That is where the irony of the film comes off, in terms of the language it employs - where he tries desperately to be a 'TV Dad,' to give advice and it's so pat it becomes ridiculous.

— Atom Egoyan

Wisdom

That's a very odd notion because it involves seeing money up there on the screen - if something cost $5 million to make, they want to see that $5 million up there.

— Atom Egoyan

Wisdom