Top 30 Atom Egoyan Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I make my living doing freelance directing for North American television shot in Toronto, series like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Twilight Zone, and so forth.”

— Atom Egoyan

2. “You are traveling and see these people shooting the entire experience of going through a city, and maybe in the back of their minds they sustain the illusion that they will edit it all, but I don’t think that’s it.”

— Atom Egoyan

3. “The film camera’s ability to physically move through space, not zoom through space – every time we have a video camera the movement is through zoom; every time we have a film camera it is a physical movement.”

— Atom Egoyan

4. “You can talk about Holocaust denial, but it’s really marginal for the most part. What is compelling about the Armenian genocide, is how it has been forgotten.”

— Atom Egoyan

5. “My parents taught me to believe that through the creative act, we’re able to transcend and give a response to desecration.”

— Atom Egoyan

6. “I mean, if you are directing actors to do one thing and then directing them to do something else entirely because the one thing you wanted them to do may not work, then you are just shattering their confidence in the project.”

— Atom Egoyan

7. “I find it deeply upsetting when I see justice not being served. How do we as human beings deal with the unknown? The West Memphis Three trial is a joke on so many different levels.”

— Atom Egoyan

8. “We’re lucky to be making films. My crew and I have been working together for a long time. I think that that’s what emanates.”

— Atom Egoyan

9. “April 24th was another commemoration of the genocide of Armenia people by Turkey. The perpetrator never admitted the crime. I was raised with that, this question: how do you actually find the truth of such a traumatic event? I’m obsessed with that issue.”

— Atom Egoyan

10. “When you’re working with a smaller budget I suppose one of the things that has to be in your mind when you are writing is that you have to keep the characters down to a minimum.”

— Atom Egoyan

11. “As a producer, I think one of the most important decisions you make is not necessarily the material you are working on but the production apparatus that you choose to develop the project with, and that determines what funding you go to, it determines many factors.”

— Atom Egoyan

12. “There is a certain moment in the film when the son is in the nursing home and he goes to the television and turns it off because he sees himself in the image.”

— Atom Egoyan

13. “When I was planning Family Viewing, the Ontario Film Development Corporation came into existence.”

— Atom Egoyan

14. “Though I am still very vulnerable to audiences – and it happens all the time – where for some reason the energy doesn’t connect and, since the film is very personal, obviously I am made to feel very vulnerable by that.”

— Atom Egoyan

15. “Don’t get depressed about not being where you want to be. This nagging feeling of anxiety is actually called ambition. Ambition is your friend.”

— Atom Egoyan

16. “Every actor has a different temperament. Part of my job is to know what those boundaries are. The actor has to know you’ll be there at the other end, that you’re trying to represent them in the best light, who they are as they’re harnessing these roles. The methods vary from actor to actor.”

— Atom Egoyan

17. “It is about this very abstract sense of displacement that he feels the moment he turns off the television.”

— Atom Egoyan

18. “I think if you look at the themes that are presented in the film, some are inherently social, and I think that any film which deals with the family is dealing with the smallest social unit in our society – and in a sense it is a question of scope.”

— Atom Egoyan

19. “That’s a very odd notion because it involves seeing money up there on the screen – if something cost $5 million to make, they want to see that $5 million up there.”

— Atom Egoyan

20. “The fathers greatest folly is that he believes he can be a much more simple person than he is; he is not really able to deal with his own complexity as a human being.”

— Atom Egoyan

21. “I love when people are resilient and when they form ways of dealing with grief or dealing with some traumatic episode, and sometimes those are the wrong choices.”

— Atom Egoyan

22. “I started in theater and I wanted to write plays, but I never really found an original voice as a playwright.”

— Atom Egoyan

23. “I wanted to make sure that the environment of the shooting itself was not that controlled, and the way to go about that course was to work with as small a crew as possible.”

— Atom Egoyan

24. “Right now my career is totally schizophrenic, because when an American production like Hitchcock Presents asks to see my work I would never dream of showing them my independent films.”

— Atom Egoyan

25. “The biggest problem with the independent film sector in Toronto is that they find themselves having to make that budget show on screen.”

— Atom Egoyan

26. “Try to produce your own films, avoid directing for hire.”

— Atom Egoyan

27. “I believe my signal of maturity as a filmmaker iswhen I’ll actually acknowledge the fact that the first take is usuallythe best.”

— Atom Egoyan

28. “I just think I love the process of making films. It’s not tortuous for me at all. I love being with my crew. I love actors. There’s a joy to the process.”

— Atom Egoyan

29. “I think the situation in Toronto is such that there are funding organizations which make it easy for a film to raise more money than it needs and very often that works against a film.”

— Atom Egoyan

30. “It is not as though the process of production holds any mystery for me, I know exactly what it involves and I know the predominant concern in shooting one of those things is production values – or as they would say, seeing it all up there on screen.”

— Atom Egoyan

31. “I think ultimately if you have a very high expectation of your audience and you know exactly what it is you’re trying to express through the medium of film, there will always be an audience for you.”

— Atom Egoyan

32. “It was very important that it be done in such a way that it be executed with complete conviction. If I had done it both ways, if I was trying to cover myself in case it didn’t work, then it would have been to no purpose.”

— Atom Egoyan

33. “People make decisions that may have one intent and yet are somehow perverted into something else. And sometimes it’s because of design. Sometimes it’s because of happenstance. But very often, it’s mysterious to them.”

— Atom Egoyan

34. “Working on the themes I was interested in, through the context of a particular family, was a very economical way of dealing with a lot of the issues I was concerned with.”

— Atom Egoyan