Where the Truth Lies director Atom Egoyan has said he’s fed up with fans and writers criticising him for ‘abandoning’ arthouse in order to make a big, glossy genre flick. Talking to Empire, the Nicest Canadian Ever said he was frustrated by attempts to pigeonhole his work and that he’d needed to do something different after 2002’s genocide drama Ararat.
“If you kept doing the same sort of film that that would be tedious,” he told Empire. “Once people think they have you figured out as making a certain type of work, it takes quite a bit of commitment to sort of reappraise and adapt to that.”
Showing alarming signs of getting cross, Egoyan said critics too were behaving childishly: “There are reviews which have quite explicitly said that I have no business in this sort of territory you know and you think “Well, why not?” isn’t that what’s kind of interesting, that you go into those genres that you would not expect to be?
Obviously, the next step would be for the Sweet Hereafter director to decamp to Hollywood in a riotous huff, but this isn’t likely:
“That’s probably where the most frustrating aspect is,” says Egoyan. “Ultimately what I will do is go back to making kind of smaller films because I do love those sorts of movies, but I do that kind of resentfully because I kind of feel I’m giving them what they want.”
Anyone who makes laid-back Egoyan use words like ‘resentfully’ should be immediately banished to the naughty corner.