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| Atom Egoyan, director of the Seven Veils, surrounded by his admirers at the Quad Cinema Photo: Ed Bahlman |
On Saturday, March 8, an audience member in the packed theater U of the Quad Cinema after my conversation with Atom Egoyan on Seven Veils asked him: “Which film should I put on when I get home?” Atom responded: “I would play [Michael Powell’s] Peeping Tom backwards maybe. Maybe [Alfred Hitchcock’s] Rebecca, actually some Hitchcock. Carmen is pretty interesting, the Carlos Saura film. Does anyone else have a double bill idea?” Suggestions rang out from Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls and Brian de Palma’s Passion, to Todd Field’s Tár, and of course, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann.
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| Atom Egoyan on Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried) at the Salome tech rehearsal: “There’s no one she can communicate with, she is really on her own.” |
Among those attending were Sigrid Nunez (David Siegel and Scott McGehee adapted her National Book Award winning novel, The Friend, starring Naomi Watts; and Pedro Almodóvar adapted What Are You Going Through for his film, The Room Next Door, with Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore), music producer and 99 Records founder Ed Bahlman, Hunter College professor and Oscar Wilde scholar Richard Kaye, and some of my enthusiastic film students.
Egoyan’s impassioned Seven Veils tells the story of Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried), who is invited to remount the production of Richard Strauss’s Salome, originally staged and directed years ago by her mentor and lover Charles. Their affair is an open secret slowly revealed as being known to everyone. Charles’s widow Beatrice (Lanette Ware) is the director of the opera company and we hear that Jeanine was chosen according to her dead husband’s will.
The initial production was to no small extent inspired by Jeanine’s traumatic childhood experiences with Charles interpreting Jeanine’s father’s obsessions that included filming the girl blindfolded in the woods, a swing with tangerines nearby. Backstage drama, communication hurdles, old familiar wounds festering again, and a private life less than in order challenge her to dive into the words of Oscar Wilde and push ahead.
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| Atom Egoyan with Anne-Katrin Titze at the Quad Cinema Photo: Ed Bahlman |
Anne-Katrin Titze: Tell us a bit about how you interwove the making of this film with the remounting of your production of Salome in 2023 [which originated in 1996]!
Atom Egoyan: The crazy thing is - for those of you who are filmmakers - it had to actually be shot while this was on stage. So I had to remount it and be in preproduction while the singers were in town for the production and while the set was on stage. I thought foolishly that this would be actually pretty simple because it would be like a fly on the wall, but it just became a bigger and bigger thing. I won’t even get into the complexities of it, but it’s not as simple as just filming.
So I was very stressed two years ago and it’s a miracle that this film has actually come together. When it became obvious that we were going to need a larger budget, then I thought of Amanda. She had just won the Emmy for Dropout [in 2022] so her schedule was crazy and still is, but miraculously she was available and we both wanted to work together again, so she came up and I think it’s one of her best performances.
AKT: Oscar Wilde was obsessed with the act of looking. The history of the opera from his play and going back to the Biblical story is fascinating.
AE: It’s totally fascinating because the Bible reference is really quite simple and it is very clear that it is Herodias who asks for the head of John the Baptist and Salome was really an instrument of her mother. But Wilde in writing the play has the line, “This is not about my mother,” which is in the film and it’s really about Salome taking agency there. I think Wilde was also writing about his love of the male body, so it’s a very personal piece of work for him and it’s saturated with this incredible prose. It’s very difficult to stage.
AKT: Simply reading the play you feel as though you’re half dreaming it.
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| Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried) with the sculpted head of John the Baptist |
AE: Yeah, it’s curious how obsessive Salome became as a figure in the 19th century. A lot of writers were really obsessed with her. But it was always a male line - from the Bible to these writers and then Richard Strauss to the character Charles in my production. So I wanted to have this other perspective, Jeanine’s.
AKT: Finally!
AE: Yes, finally, but it’s also interesting what you’re saying and I will give credit also to the opera company because they saw Exotica and felt there was something aligning to themes of that film and what this opera is dealing with.
AKT: Everything is connected with your films and productions. There are always links and layers. This one is filled with layers and veils.
AE: It’s a bit overwhelming, right? This reference she makes of “the most magical of mirrors” is actually a reference to The Picture of Dorian Gray, one of the most amazing novels. It’s really worth re-reading if you haven’t read it for a while.
AKT: Wilde has Herod in Salome say of mirrors: “Neither at things, nor at people should one look. Only in mirrors should one look, for mirrors do but show us masks.”
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| Atom Egoyan's Exotica inscribed and given to Anne-Katrin Titze Photo: Ed Bahlman |
AE: That’s interesting too. That’s what we did with when she’s on these chats with her family. We all know that there must be a reflection when we do these calls but you don’t normally see it. Digitally we enhanced that so she’s always looking at herself during the Zoom calls, it’s like a mirror of herself at the same time.
AKT: Memory is important in your work. In Remember memory plays a big role, in this case it is the dementia or partial dementia of the mother who picks and chooses what she remembers. There’s a connection to storytelling.
AE: I think the idea of repressed memory kind of bubbling up during a film because of something that happens has become a cliché. What’s interesting about her character is that she totally understands what has happened to her. There’s nothing hidden. The people around her know as well. Everyone knows about the relationship with Charles, there’s this thing that happened with her father, they know the chain of events that led to this. There’s nothing that’s buried, but what she doesn’t anticipate is that remounting this piece, bringing these elements together is going to provoke this particular response.
A lot of it has to do with the fact that she’s not getting any support from anyone else. That’s the curious thing - why they fulfilled Charles’s wish to have her remount it. Was he giving her a gift? Is it a curse? Whatever is happening is putting her through a process she wasn’t expecting. And there’s no one she can communicate with, she is really on her own. That makes it a very difficult character to play and it’s really quite extraordinary what Amanda is able to generate. It seems like everyone is trying to diminish her at every point and she is trying to find some way to make this experience rewarding to her.
AKT: Everyone has their agenda. It’s great how you show the backstage workings of an opera house.
AE: It’s a workplace and I know it super well. This is very real in terms of the understudies. It’s a cliché but it’s true that if the understudy gets to play a part, it is very often that breakthrough that they need professionally. Or the whole structure what a remount means. There are remount directors, very often the original director is not there to do the remount, and it’s just a technical thing. No one is expecting her to be creative about it. In fact it’d be very difficult for the opera company to give her what she asked for.
AKT: The trees witnessing the trauma she wants.
AE: It is in the production but she’s trying to give it a new life. There is also this frustration that happens when people are just not getting something you want them to do. It happens a lot when you’re directing. Especially theater, not so much in film because you just want to generate that excitement and that feeling and that’s a huge responsibility. And she’s frustrated by it.
AKT: For instance the intimacy coordinator. What really is an intimacy coordinator? What is their training? What if they don’t understand what you are directing?
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| Atom Egoyan: “What’s interesting about her character is that she totally understands what has happened to her. There’s nothing hidden.” |
AE: They are important. I did a lot of directing and in erotic scenes we did have intimacy coordinators and there wasn’t an issue. But I’ve heard horror stories from actors where there wasn’t someone observing it. I have nothing against the role and I think that they’re there to provide support for the actors. But I do think that the time this original production was done by Charles that position wouldn’t have been there and God only knows what Charles was doing in order to get this performance. So she’s in this Rip Van Winkle world where she hasn’t worked in the current conditions of what goes on on set. The intimacy coordinator you see in the film was the intimacy coordinator that we had for the opera. She was just playing her role.
AKT: To be clear, I have nothing against intimacy coordinators, but your film raises interesting questions in that context.
AE: That being said, the moment when she summons the understudy and starts fondling his hair - the intimacy coordinator should have said something about that.
AKT: There are so many ghosts of Charles in the film so that we don’t really feel the need to see him.
AE: I felt that. Do we see Rebecca in any photographs [in Hitchcock’s film]?
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| Atom Egoyan in conversation with Anne-Katrin Titze inside theater U of the Quad Cinema Photo: Paige Nelligan |
AKT: No. There is only the painting. Apropos Hitchcock and painting. In the end of Seven Veils [accompanied by birdsong], when she is walking up the stairs, I had to think of another Hitchcock film where a woman walks up the stairs. The Birds!
AE: Right! Or Suspicion. In one of my earlier films, Felicia’s Journey, where Bob Hoskins is going up the stairs with a little tray of milk, much like Cary Grant did in Suspicion. So maybe I have a thing about stairs.
AKT: I read that Ernst Lubitsch made a short [Salome, die Blume des Morgenlands] about Salome in 1921 that was banned before it was ever shown. With Pola Negri as Salome.
AE: Wow, I didn’t know that. There is an early silent film of Salome as well which is online, but not that one. Anne-Katrin, you told me you used to play Salome as a child - [to the audience:] she brought a tangerine, because her childhood play culminated with a tangerine on a plate, representing the head of John the Baptist. I didn’t know this!
AKT: No trauma whatsoever! [I had told Atom that at around age seven, a girlfriend and I liked to dress up our toy animals with veils, scarves, and pieces of fabric; the tangerine as head was an aside at the end].
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| Atom Egoyan on the backstage of an opera house: “It’s a workplace and I know it super well.” |
AE: Maybe I was channeling that somehow! Because this question has come up about Charles, I watched Rebecca, which I hadn’t seen for a long time. And it’s astonishing to me how you are influenced by things in these films. I think there are shots that were shot from the missing Rebecca’s point of view. That impressed me a lot.
On Saturday evening we continued our conversation:
AKT: You made this film in connection with the remounting of the opera in 2023 and there’s a lot of very interesting doubling going on. For example with the names. It took me a while to get why the father is called Harold - because it sounds like Herod!
AE: Right. And Jeanine is like the feminine of Johannes, John.
AKT: Exactly. The father figures who want to see too much get the same name! There’s also Charles whom we don’t see, who returns haunting her as little Charlie, the podcaster from hell.
AE: Yeah, who obviously had an odd relationship with Charles as well. There’s a lot of balls in the air for sure.
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| Ararat at Columbia University in 2003 signed by Atom Egoyan to Ed Bahlman (personal details removed) Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
AKT: A combination you always have that I think is very much in the center here, is a very real work environment that everybody can understand in some shape or form. And added to this are the metaphors, the symbolic layers that always tell us more about the world we are in.
AE: For the most part I tend to try and not explain too much. The thing is with this text by Wilde, it’s above explaining too much. It’s about when you can’t get to have something, you express it, and you try to own it in words. I think that once she has this idea of writing this letter to Charles, she is grappling with this idea that her words don’t seem to quite be able to express what she is feeling, so she keeps going back to the Wilde text. That either works or doesn’t and I think there is this frustration that she’s having with the performers as well. She is on her own. I don’t think I have ever written a character that’s so completely on their own and trying to navigate this.
AKT: I have a question about a sentence the mother says. There are two things she could have said and I was wondering if you kept it vague on purpose. Is it “I hurt you” with a t or “I heard you” with a d? Both would make a lot of sense.
AE: It wasn’t in the text. She actually generated that. I think she’s saying “I hurt you” but it’s interesting. When you’re translating or dubbing…
AKT: You have to make a decision!
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| Q&As with Director Atom Egoyan at the Quad Cinema |
AE: Yes, and we went with “I hurt.” Actually when it came out I wasn’t sure that I wanted it because it felt a little much but I went with it because it’s so sincere and it felt so so right. It’s interesting to me that with all the directing she [Jeanine] is doing, the most consequential moment of direction is when she is directing that moment in her own childhood home. She is getting the woman who is sleeping with her husband to deface the painting.
AKT: A gentle beheading!
AE: Yes it is. It’s a gentle beheading.
AKT: In your films fairy tales and folktales always echo large. Some of my fairy tale students are in the audience so I have to ask about that. You have the Pied Piper of Hamlin in The Sweet Hereafter and Bluebeard is always near anything you do, in Felicia’s Journey especially. Were there any tale influences here?
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| Seven Veils poster at the Quad Cinema Photo: Ed Bahlman |
AE: Look, the father is obsessed with this play. For whatever reason she’s been raised with this play, this text. It’s an odd fairy tale. It comes to us from the Bible, but it’s not a fully formed tale. Why she became such an object of fascination during the 19th century for all these writers, from Flaubert to Huysmans and all these painters and why it became such an object of fetishisation?
It is this idea of femme fatale but then I think Wilde does something different. He uses it as a way of expressing his love of the male body. It is giving him license to express something that he wouldn’t have been able to do at that time. Then there’s this whole idea what John the Baptist represents. He’s a weird transitional character.
He’s still Old Testament, even though he is able to anticipate this notion of forgiveness but there’s still something so severe. We went really far with this production; he never looks at her. He’s wearing the blindfold. There are things that we are imbuing this myth. But it’s not really a myth. How do you feel about it? Do you consider Salome to be a myth?
AKT: A folktale, a myth?
AE: Not really?
AKT: Not really. No, it has too many gaps.
AE: Yes, many gaps!
Seven Veils is screening at the Quad Cinema in New York through Thursday, March 20.
