Following his 1994 film Exotica, which explored desire and obsession, Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan was invited to direct the opera Salome in what would become the first of many productions he would helm parallel to his prominent film career. Egoyan’s screen work has been presented in numerous retrospectives across the world, including a career overview at the Pompidou Centre in Paris and similar events at the Filmoteca Espagnol in Madrid, the Museum of The Moving Image in New York, and the Royal Cinematek in Brussels. The celebrated auteur’s work includes the aforementioned Exotica, as well as The Sweet Hereafter, Felicia’s Journey, Ararat, Where the Truth Lies, Adoration, Chloe, Devil’s Knot, The Captive, and Remember.
In addition to his on-screen legacy, the impact of Egoyan’s captivating and controversial production of Salome continues nearly 30 years later, having evolved with the changing times. When the Canadian Opera Company remounted Salome in 2022 without the time or resources to further alter the production, Egoyan became enticed by the idea of updating the show for the current culture, this time filming that exploration as the remounted opera was taking place. “I thought this would be an ideal time to fuse the opera singers I knew they had booked with the script I had written,” says Egoyan. As his production returned to one of the largest stages in Canada for (ironically) the seventh time, Egoyan channeled his ideas and feelings on power, desire, and obsession into his latest feature.
From XYZ and Variance Films, Seven Veils accompanies earnest theater director Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried, with whom Egoyan reteams following 2009’s Chloe) as she takes on the monumental task of remounting the opera Salome, her deceased former mentor’s most famous work. Possessed by memories of her past and emboldened by an obsessive artistic desire, Jeanine allows repressed trauma to take the stage as she reengages with the opera world. As Seven Veils arrives in theaters nationwide on March 7th, Boxoffice Pro chats with Egoyan about his latest theatrical portrait and the power of obsession.
In creating the opera for the film, you draw on your own experiences remounting Salome, incorporating the evolution of the original production through the changes Janine is making throughout the film.
Yeah, and there was an actual remount happening as we were shooting. So I was trying to coordinate the two things, but I’ve been living with this story for a long time. I first saw a theatrical version of it in London by Steven Berkoff. It was a really revolutionary moment. I knew the play by Oscar Wilde, but I could never figure out how you would stage it because it is so purple—the prose is just so rich. He found this way of stylizing it. I don’t come from opera, but the artistic director of the Canadian Opera Company (COC) saw Exotica and thought there was an alignment between the sensibilities, or the obsessions. He was right, but it’s the music that Richard Strauss came up with that is so exciting, new, and unusual. I’ve been happy remounting it a number of times in various places.
When it came back to COC, I just thought it needed something else. It felt like times had changed since 1996, of course, but you can’t change the production. It has to be what it is because you don’t have the budget or the time to do that. Then I started thinking, ‘What if I make a film around it? What if I show the remount and have this character of Janine leaving behind this very troubled situation with her family and with her past? She has these two houses: her childhood house and her current house. Then suddenly there’s this big public house, an opera house.’
She’s thinking that she could escape from her life but actually finds that there are all these restrictions being placed on her. I just thought that would be a great character, a great journey, and an opportunity to work with Amanda again. We had such a great experience on Chloe, and that also meant going back to a time in my own creativity. I made that film 15 years ago, and it kind of matched what Janine was doing in a strange way.
The film operates like a dance of the seven veils, where we as an audience are seeing through a lens and getting more and more intimate with Janine’s story.
A lot of my films have this kind of unpeeling of an onion. Exotica as well, which was the film I had made right before I did the opera. Of course, you can’t change the structure of an opera, but you can create this other structure around it. Oscar Wilde introduces the idea of seven veils. Was he thinking about the seven veils of illusion, like the Buddhist thinking, that they are illusions that we live with? The Eastern philosophers talk about what those veils are. There are certainly seven veils that she’s trying to negotiate in terms of the men around her, between her father and her husband, and the spirits of Oscar Wilde, Richard Strauss, John the Baptist, the person playing John the Baptist, and the understudy of John the Baptist. These are the different people that she’s negotiating and trying to understand in her life and her journey.
Once you think of a character, it’s really then [about] who plays it. In this case it was pretty clear, and I just got super excited about it. Then there was the idea—can you actually direct an opera and make a film at the same time?
There are a lot of layers in the film. The opera itself goes to great lengths to describe how Salome is feeling, which is something Jeanine is also trying to grapple with in her relationship to the prior production, as well as relationships with her mentor and with her father. She ultimately puts herself in her father’s shoes by going behind the camera.
Oh, I’m so glad you picked that up. Yes, she is directing from that point. I also think what’s interesting about the character is that you see a lot of situations where someone is dealing with a trauma that’s buried, and the film kind of almost formulaically creates these moments where something breaks them out of that. She’s really aware of what’s happened to her. She’s talked about it. The people around her know the story of the father and the story of Charles. Everyone knows the history, and it’s as though she thinks she’s got that under control. But what she doesn’t expect is that being in this environment puts her back into feelings of being observed or feelings of having things imposed on her. Things surrounding creativity, things around the text of Oscar Wilde.
She somehow wasn’t thinking all of this would affect her the way it does. She becomes completely obsessed with this erotic moment that she finds on the archival tape that she’s following. She thinks that represents something that she has lost or she can’t [recreate], and that creates a kind of madness in her. I don’t think she’s thought about that relationship for a long time, but suddenly it comes back with a vengeance. It becomes this obsessive love story. If she wasn’t in this environment, I don’t know if that would be there.
The fact that she’s put herself in that situation.
Yes, she’s accepted the invitation. As she says, they didn’t have to let her know, but there’s something going on with the director of the opera house, who was married to the man that she had the affair with. Clearly, she went into it quite blithely, or maybe just trying to escape something in her present, but she goes back into something that she thought she had come to terms with only to find that’s not the case at all.
What are your thoughts on the relationship between art and sexuality?
I think erotic tension or erotic longing is about filling a vacuum. There’s something that you feel is absent in you, that if you are in the presence of that person, that body, it will fulfill this hole in you so that there’s something that becomes really essential. We can feel that towards a work of art as well. We can feel that in making art, it’s fulfilling something, and it’s giving us this liberty. There’s so much possibility and they both have to do with a feeling that there is creation involved. They’re creative about this act. It’s so complex and so layered, but it can also be manipulated. Especially when you’re in the presence of young people.
I think there was something obviously problematic about the relationship Charles might have had with this young woman, but it was of a time. It wouldn’t necessarily exist now without parameters being put on. That’s the other issue too; you don’t want parameters placed on your creative impulse, yet you can’t behave badly. There has to be some sort of balance. I think the film is exploring that. What you see happening with some of the characters, which is just really bad behavior, is the result of something that they have entitled themselves to believe is possible because they are in a creative space, or they have a certain power or influence. Then you see the consequences, and you also see the limitations of institutions to deal with this properly as well.
You’ve worked in both opera and film, but this is the first time that you’ve synthesized the two. What was that experience like for you?
It was powerful. They’re wildly different forms, but it was possible because Salome is a relatively simple story and we tell you the plot at the beginning. It was the music—being able to work with this incredible music. It wasn’t just the narrative; it wasn’t just Oscar Wilde’s text. It’s amazing music. To have eight minutes of music without singing, “The Dance of the Seven Veils,” was really a gift. To reinterpret that and to use it a number of times, and then also at the end of the film, where we’re using the end of the opera, we take out the singing, and you’re just hearing the score. That was also really interesting, because you see that this music has influenced a lot of early Hollywood composers, especially Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Waxman, and certainly Bernard Herrmann as well.
It’s a very theatrical story, and in today’s market, a theatrical release isn’t always a given. What’s it like for you as a filmmaker to have a theatrical release?
It’s taken a long time, but I’m so grateful it’s getting a theatrical release. I cannot tell you. When I think of where we were two years ago as we were trying to shoot it, it just feels like a miracle that I’m here now. It means the world to me. XYZ Films and Variance Films have been incredible. I’m coming down to New York to do Q&As at the cinema.
You’ve had a few chances to experience this with an audience. What’s that been like for you?
Showing it at the Berlin International Film Festival was a peak experience because it’s an opera city; there are three major opera houses there. When we showed it there, Ambur Braid, who plays Salome [in the film and the opera], was doing another opera in Berlin. Then when we had the world premiere here at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), we showed it at the Four Seasons Centre, where we shot [the film] and where the operas were actually presented. We turned it into a huge cinema for the premiere at TIFF, so that was pretty exciting as well.
Have any of your foundational experiences at the cinema shaped you as a filmmaker?
Speaking of music and drama, Jesus Christ Superstar. I remember when that album came out. I listened to it over and over and over again; I just loved it so much. Give me any scene, and I will tell you what anyone is saying. Then when I saw Norman Jewison’s film, it was just ecstatic. There you go, cinema and music. It was just the way that the camera moved, the colors, and the location; it was really foundational. I love European art films, but that was a big film for me. I went back to see it a few times. At the Haida Theatre, in Victoria BC, on the west coast of Canada. I still watch it. It might be my desert island movie. And here is Salome, another Bible story.
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