Interpreting Egoyan's erotica

For a guy reputed to be a "cerebral" filmmaker, Atom Egoyan has a sense of humour some might find surprising.

It erupts over coffee in Victoria, where the director is taking a breather before resuming a gruelling press tour for Chloe, his new erotic drama that opens nationwide March 26.

Victoria-raised Egoyan, who turns 50 in July, laughs as he recalls a surreal experience at the Guadalajara Film Festival. A screening of Next of Kin, his 1984 drama about a troubled young man who impersonates an Armenian couple's long-lost son, was planned as part of a retrospective, but the 1989 vigilante action flick of the same name was featured by mistake.

"It seemed so incongruous. It said my first film was Next of Kin with Patrick Swayze," he recalled, laughing. "They programmed that movie, so anyone who saw it would have thought the rest of my career went downhill from there."

Egoyan has grown accustomed to being misperceived, as when many assumed his mournful 1993 drama Exotica was an exploitative sex flick because much of its action was set in a Toronto strip club.

No wonder Egoyan is feeling some deja vu as Sony Pictures Classics rolls out Chloe. His sleek, sexy and well-acted reinvention of Anne Fontaine's 2003 French film Nathalie focuses on the unsettling relationship between Catherine (Julianne Moore), a wealthy middle-aged gynecologist, and Chloe (Amanda Seyfried), the sexy young escort she hires to seduce her husband (Liam Neeson) and test his fidelity.

Although Egoyan describes it as a drama about the erotic lives of its needy protagonists, albeit with thriller ingredients, Chloe - termed "a Sapphic Fatal Attraction" by London's Daily Telegraph, likely because of a sex scene between Catherine and Chloe - is being marketed as an erotic thriller.

"It's very difficult these days to market something as a drama," says Egoyan, who was hired by Canadian producer Ivan Reitman. "There's the film and there's the marketing of it, and what within the film is a concession to how you have to sell it?"

Egoyan, who directed from a screenplay by Erin Cressida Wilson, says Chloe is chiefly a study of a marriage.

"It's about what happens in relationships after a long period of time. How do you keep an erotic fantasy with someone you know so well? How do you reinvent that?" says Egoyan, noting it isn't a script he could have written himself.

"I cannot write a story that goes from point A to point B," he says matter-of-factly. "It's just not in me."

Still, he managed to incorporate his own style and persuaded Reitman to let him shoot in Toronto instead of San Francisco.

"One of the arguments I made to Ivan was Toronto, in fact, kind of whores itself," he says. "It plays a prostitute to all these different cities it pretends to be but is not, like Chicago or New York. So it's interesting that it's set in a place that, in most people's imaginations, is not even on the map."

It was the dynamics of the women's relationship that sold him, he says.

"It's this clash of two women with competing structures and ways of creating a fantasy about each other," he explains.

"For Chloe, she sleeps with these men in these rooms and feels somewhat diminished by that, and suddenly she gets to tell what happens in these rooms to a respectable, gorgeous older woman who listens to these stories and endows them with a certain power. And for Catherine, this person is a surrogate youthful object she obviously can't be anymore."

While Egoyan is aware some might view the woman-on-woman sex scene as gratuitous, he insists it isn't.

"It's not just about sexual pleasure. There are a lot of other things they're trying to traverse," he says. "What I'm interested in is what's going on in these women's minds as they're colliding into each other."

He says it helped that he got to work with a top-shelf cast.

"Working with Amanda was great," recalls Egoyan, who cast Seyfried before Mamma Mia made her a star. "There was absolute trust and she was great with Julie. They were very compatible."

After shooting Adoration and Chloe back to back, he admits he's ready for a break.

"I know from experience after Exotica this could be a year of just meeting people, spending time in L.A. and treading water," says Egoyan, who is once again inundated with offers to direct Hollywood screenplays and adapt novels.

Chloe opens March 26