Five years ago the admirably adventurous Cairo-born, Canadian-raised film-maker, Atom Egoyan, made his debut in competition at Cannes with a rich and fascinating exploration of disparate troubled characters in Exotica, and received the International Critics' Prize. In 1997 he was back in Cannes with his first literary adaptation, The Sweet Hereafter, based on the novel by Russell Banks. This brooding, deeply moving picture acutely captured the collective pain of a small town traumatised by the consequences of a school bus crash, and it received the festival's runner-up prize, the Grand Prix du Jury.
Egoyan returned to Cannes in May with his ninth feature film, Felicia's Journey, a thoughtful, intensely atmospheric work adapted by Egoyan himself from the 1994 novel by William Trevor. It features a remarkably expressive central performance from the young Irish actress, Elaine Cassidy, as the eponymous Felicia, a naive 17-year-old from Co Cork who succumbs to the charms of her sweet-talking boyfriend, Johnny Lysaght (Peter McDonald from I Went Down) and becomes pregnant after he leaves to work in England.
Rebuffed by her widower father (Gerard McSorley) and by Johnny's cold, withdrawn mother (Brid Brennan), Felicia journeys to Birmingham in the hope of finding Johnny. Instead she catches the attention of Joseph Ambrose Hilditch (Bob Hoskins), an osentensibly mild-mannered, middle-aged bachelor who is meticulous about his work as the catering supervisor at an industrial firm. In his private life, however, Hilditch is just as fastidious at preying on vulnerable young women and murdering them.
Hilditch is utterly fixated by his late mother (played by Egoyan's actress wife, Arsinee Khanjian), a television chef who once rivalled Fanny Craddock for popularity, and he prepares each of his evening meals exactly to her recipes, watching videotapes of her programmes as he cooks. His other videos are furtively filmed tapes of his victims, the latest of which he labels Irish Eyes after first meeting Felicia.
Deftly and effectively employing a non-linear structure which cuts seamlessly between past and present, Egoyan's film outlines the personal histories of the two principal characters and draws them together. The director creates and sustains an eerie, chilling mood of foreboding and fear, as the wily predator cunningly gains the trust of the gullible innocent.
One of Egoyan's most compelling reflections on his recurring theme of marginalised characters, Felicia's Journey gains incalculably from the subtle portrayals he elicits from his two leading players. In his finest performance since Mona Lisa, Hoskins is perfectly understated as he reveals the Jekyll and Hyde personality of Hilditch, and Cassidy, who is from Co Wicklow, is wonderfully natural as Felicia, belying the fact that this is only her second leading role in a feature film. Although widely tipped as a firm contender for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, Egoyan's film was one of several remarkable films which, astonishingly, went entirely un-rewarded by the festival jury chaired by Egoyan's good friend and fellow Torontonian, David Cronenberg. Egoyan had just heard this news when we met for an interview a few hours before the closing night ceremony at Cannes, but there was nothing about his demeanour which betrayed any disappointment he may have felt.
This was his first interview with an Irish publication since he made Felicia's Journey and he was eager to talk about the movie, about William Trevor, about Ireland. "I loved the book," he says, "because it had these two characters who were both dealing with degrees of personal trauma - one quite easy to understand and fathom, who needed to make a journey based entirely on a recognisable emotional need, and the other who was in complete denial, who had probably no organic sense of what his past was and had been completely deformed by a process of repressed feeling.
"What is so remarkable about Hilditch is that, as compassionate and as considerate as he seems, he actually has no feeling. I thought the contrast of those two worlds and the challenge that it provided was just too good to pass up."
Egoyan says that, when he first read the book, he seriously considered transposing its story to Canada. "I thought we could have Felicia come from a small village in Quebec and you could preserve this notion of another culture that way, and you could have her move across Canada and arrive on the west coast, which is where I was raised, to find someone like Hilditch, who could live in Victoria, which is this parody of an English colonial outpost.
"It's a place where people speak with English accents even though they've never been to England, where you have a hotel called the Empress which boasts of a cocktail lounge called the Bengal Bar where they actually hire East Indian young men to dress in colonial garb and refer to people as sahib. I don't know if it's still quite like that, but that was the town I was raised in when we came to Canada. So, I had this heightened sense of English culture."
Egoyan decided against re-locating the story to Canada after travelling to Exeter and meeting William Trevor. "I talked to William and there was a subtext to the story which he is very guarded about speaking about, but which he felt was very important to preserve. He felt the history of violence between Britain and Ireland is not something you could just transpose to Canada, and he was quite right."
In the film Felicia's father is a staunch Republican who makes some extreme political comments and her great-grandmother (played by Maire Stafford) talks to her in Irish about the 1916 Rising. "For me that was very important," Egoyan says. "I wanted to make it clear that she was from another place. Her father doesn't use Irish in the novel at all, but I thought it would be very useful to have the great-grandmother speaking Irish. Especially when what she's saying is this very, very nationalistic statement from de Valera about an independent Ireland.
"The father's republicanism is a very important aspect of this community she's raised in and the world that she comes from. The fact that her father can expel his own daughter because she's carrying the enemy inside her is something that's very difficult hard to find in Ireland now. But it had to seem real for the story. Also, given that the book was written in the early 1990s, I feel that's when the film is set, too."
All the Irish scenes were to be shot first and Egoyan and his team undertook an extensive search for suitable locations before he finally found Glanworth, between Mitchelstown and Fermoy, in north Co Cork, which fulfilled all his requirements. "It was difficult finding the right town because of the prosperity of the country," he says. "We looked all over. I wanted to keep it in Cork, but it was very hard to find a town whose main streets hadn't been painted brightly and didn't have a booming tourist trade.
"So, we were lucky to find Glanworth, which is a beautiful town, a jewel of a town. It has a wonderful inn where we stayed, the Glanworth Mill Country Inn. It's an inn devoted to writers and I actually stayed in the William Trevor Room. There was a bust of William looking fondly down on me as I went to bed every evening.
"Glanworth also has this extraordinary castle which was destroyed by Cromwell. Suddenly those scenes with the father became very vivid, that he would actually take her there and would re-iterate this history within those ruins. It's really about people living in ruins, either in the ruins of a castle or in the ruins of a house in Birmingham.
"There was a lot of parallels between the two characters. Both those children, Hilditch and Felicia, have been deformed by this idea of a history which has been imposed on them and probably doesn't really have anything to do with what they are. In Felicia's case, history is passed on through words, from her father and her great-grandmother, and in Hilditch's case, it's passed on through images."
Egoyan is surprised that Pat O'Connor is the only other film-maker who has brought William Trevor's work to the screen - O'Connor has filmed two Trevor stories, The Ballroom of Romance and One of Ourselves, for television, and Fools of Fortune for the cinema.
"His film of The Ballroom of Romance is really great," says Egoyan. "I was really inspired by it, and I thought Brenda Fricker was so good in it. It's shocking more films haven't been made from Trevor's books, because they're great stories and he creates this wonderful universe. I think Trevor is a most remarkable writer, one of the great writers of our time."
The writer had not seen Egoyan's film of Felicia's Journey before it went to Cannes in May. "No, but he read the scripts and he's been extremely supportive," Egoyan says. "William came to visit the set once, at Shepperton Studios, where we were filming Hilditch's house, and he loved the house. He thought it was absolutely perfect. It was very interesting to contrast the relationship I had with William to the one I had with Russell Banks doing the last adaptation, The Sweet Hereafter. Russell just loves movies and he was very excited to come on the set. William, I think, respects films, but I found it really touching the way we became close outside of this project.
"As I started reading his other work I realised how he is able to extend his characters with this compassionate sense of detail, but he's also able to see their foolishness. It's a wonderful combination. It's never cynical but there's a tremendous humour there, and the challenge was to preserve that. But I couldn't do it the way he does it in his books, which is through the sheer power of observation. I couldn't do that by a literal process of adaptation. So, for me, it was a matter of inventing things that would preserve the tone of William's work and give the film its tone."
The uses and abuses of video technology have been recurring motifs in Egoyan's movies, and he returned to these themes to find a way of expressing Hilditch's mother fixation - by having him endlessly watching tapes of her cookery shows and replicating her recipes - and of chronicling the fates of Hilditch's earlier victims. "In the book William does refer to a picture gallery," Egoyan notes, "and he sees the other victims as being part of a gallery. So the invention of the girls being videotaped is another way of doing that. But the cooking show is a complete invention to create this figure of a woman who is suspended in time, who was quite successful and who probably wanted to involve her child with her success with all the best intentions, but the boy was hideously shy and always felt that somehow he was disappointing the mother. But now, of course, he doesn't remember any of that organically, just the tremendous sense of approval and of comfort he gets when he cooks for her and resurrects these meals she devised."
Turning to the subject of the key Irish actors in his film, Egoyan says they were mostly "people who transfixed me or moved me with a recent performance", citing Gerard McSorley's work in The Boxer and Brid Brennan's performance in Dancing at Lughnasa. Quite by coincidence, he notes, his wife, Arsinee Khanjian, played the same role in the recent French-language premiere of Lughnasa.
AS FOR Elaine Cassidy, it was really a matter of just searching and finding her, Egoyan says. "I was really drawn by her humour and the lightness with which she handled this scene where Hilditch was going on and on. She's very natural, and I thought she could be innocent without being annoying, which is a real challenge for this character because you don't want to slap her around and say wake up. You have to believe she's so besotted, and Peter's so charming with her. Those scenes in the pub were improvised actually - all that stuff about her mother passing away when she was four and that moment where he reaches over and touches her - and she was great there. You really believe she has fallen in love.
"I was surprised how little Elaine knew about Irish history, but she did all this research on her own. Before that her whole sense of the Easter rebellion seemed to be based on what she'd seen in the movie, Michael Collins. In that respect I think she's quite representative of a lot of the younger people I met in Ireland, in that it's not an urgent part of how she defines herself.
"For me, it was a great process of investigation and, as an Armenian, I found it very moving to see a man evoking 1916, when you think of the Armenian genocide in 1915, and it's something I'm aware of carrying. And the weight of carrying something and just wanting to get it over with and not live with it anymore was something I felt strongly about when I was thinking of her evolution. That scene where I put in the great-grandmother speaking another language was again very much part of my upbringing with my grandmother."
Tapping into another motif familiar from Egoyan's films, Felicia's Journey continues his preoccupation with the male tendency to control and destroy. "I'm really obsessed in my drama with father figures who go to absurd lengths to try and exert their control," he says, "and I'm really suspicious of any sort of paternalistic structure, because so much of people's unhappiness and misery is the result of those structures.
"I think one of my responsibilities as a dramatist is to try to decimate those things where they live. To me, I understand the impulses that someone like Gerard's character has, but that they would result in expelling a daughter who needs you, that your own pride would overcome your feelings to that extent."
Ultimately, the film is a search for feeling, he believes. "All the male characters around this young woman are trying to manipulate her and impose structures on her which don't recognise her own dignity. She's able to weather that and finally emerge with a sense of herself.
"My favourite shot in the movie, I think, is when they're walking away from the town and the father builds up this rant, telling her she's a whore, and expels her. He leaves the frame and she's left in the frame with this long lens pressing her against the town and the town is out of focus. Her body language in that scene is so completely deflated by him, but yet you can see her building up strength as she realises she has to leave this place."
Atom Egoyan will participate in an Irish Times/Film Institute of Ireland public interview with Michael Dwyer in the IFC, Dublin, next Wednesday evening, after a screening of Felicia's Journey. All tickets have been allocated. Felicia's Journey will be released in Ireland on October 8th