Film-makers on film: Atom Egoyan

Film-makers on film: Atom Egoyan

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 05/04/2003

'It's one of those amazing intersections of popular culture with the darker and more perverse tendencies of the avant-garde," says Atom Egoyan of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. "It's completely entertaining, but it's also a supremely personal work."

Vertigo has fallen in and out of fashion since Hitchcock made it in 1958. Its stock is riding high at present; it even came close to dislodging Citizen Kane from the top spot in Sight and Sound magazine's recent critics' poll. For Egoyan - who has brought an avant-garde sensibility to wider audiences in films such as Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter, and his latest, Ararat (due for release later this month) - its influence is second to none.

The film stars James Stewart as a detective who becomes obsessed with a friend's wife (Kim Novak), who he has been asked to follow. He suffers a breakdown when he is unable to prevent her death. But when he later meets a woman who reminds him of her (also played by Novak), he seeks to transform this woman into the original object of his desires.

"I love the way it introduces the theme of sexual obsession and perversity through the benign and identifiable all-American persona of Jimmy Stewart," says Egoyan. "He gets himself worked into a state, which is very touching, and it's touching because you can't believe it's Jimmy Stewart; you can't believe he would deconstruct his own persona so magnificently and so movingly. It's a recent phenomenon where we see actors play against type, but at that time, Hollywood was about leading men being leading men - and to have James Stewart in such a vulnerable place was breathtaking."

Egoyan first saw the film "in a butchered TV version" during his adolescence in Canada. "I thought it was a really cool and creepy story about ghosts," he recalls. "I didn't understand the subtlety of it until I saw it again later on. The complexity of the film is that it deals with the push-and-pull between the object of sexual desire being the other, and it being a narcissistic reflection of ourselves. To what extent do we create an object of desire, do we mould it, based on our own wish fantasy? To what extent do we have control over that dynamic, and to what extent do we artificially ritualise those aspects, in order to create an object of desire where one may not otherwise be?"

In many of the film's scenes, Stewart simply observes Novak from a distance. Yet those scenes draw the viewer powerfully into Stewart's point of view - a point of view that grows darker and stranger as the film goes on.

Atom Egoyan, director

Born: 19 July, 1960

Selected films:

Ararat (2002)

The Sweet Hereafter (1997)

Speaking Parts (1989)

Exotica (1994)

"To me, it's the supreme expression of what cinema can be, in terms of its ability to enter into the subconscious of a character so completely," says Egoyan. "And I love the lapses in the film. Like when he brings Kim Novak to his apartment after saving her from the water of San Francisco bridge, and she wakes up in bed naked. You don't have the scene, of course, where he undresses her - you don't even think about it - but the seeds of the obsession must have been right there, and suddenly he had this permission to undress her while she was unconscious. There are so many dark male fantasies woven into that film, in such a benign, offhand, innocent way, that it's at once really thrilling and unsettling."

Vertigo shows Hitchcock at the peak of his powers, using elements of film such as colour, cutting and music to mesmeric, haunting effect. "Hitchcock is obviously aware of every decision he's making," says Egoyan, "yet he seems able to use the instrument in a purely emotional way. He was so good at those technical tricks - but the thing that makes Vertigo so moving is that it transcends all that. It operates at the level of a fever dream. It really feels to be his most personal work; some of the stuff he was dealing with was so private."

There is no doubting Vertigo's influence on generations of film-makers. But Egoyan points out that its reach now extends beyond cinema. "I was involved in a show called Notorious at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford," he says, "where one artist did a reconstruction of Jimmy Stewart's bedroom in Vertigo. It's a room you just got a glimpse of in the film, but from that glimpse, he constructed the whole room! There is a huge movement now towards using film, reconstructing film, or reformatting classic moments in film for further investigation in a gallery space. What's amazing about Hitchcock - especially in Vertigo - is that he seems to anticipate this trend. Moments in the film have such an awareness of their own space, they're almost presented as installations, before anyone knew what that term was!"