Press Conference Diaries: Chloe

The topic everyone was waiting for at the press conference for Atom Egoyan’s Chloe was the grief of Liam Neeson, the man missing from the room.

The first time most people heard of the erotically charged thriller was last March, when it appeared in the news as the movie Neeson was two days away from completing when his wife, Natasha Richardson, died in a freak skiing accident.

At the press conference for the film in Toronto Monday afternoon, producer Ivan Reitman said the accident brought with it the “realization that life can change in an instant. The people that we love, or ourselves, are here one moment and then are not … I thought it for myself, just a self-reflective moment. And certainly [there was] sadness which I felt for Liam and the tragedy he was going through.

“It didn’t change the film,” the Toronto-raised Reitman continued, “but it changed all of us as human beings.”

A lot of changes did take place on the film’s journey to the screen, however.

First, the plot. Though Chloe does broadly take cues from the 2003 French film Nathalie… in that it concerns a woman (Julianne Moore) who hires a prostitute (Amanda Seyfried) to test whether her husband (Neeson) will cheat on her, the result at the hands of Egoyan and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson is “very different” according to the director. “The tone is different.”

Second, the locale changed from Cressida Wilson’s desk to Egoyan’s vision. The screenwriter — a redhead who looks just a little like Moore, oddly enough — is based in San Francisco, and originally set the picture there.

But between all the architectural changes and increased energy in Toronto over the past few years, the locally based director Egoyan and fellow Hogtowner Reitman felt the city was ready for its close-up. In Chloe, for once Toronto is not disguised or veiled in any way, and locations including the Royal Conservatory’s Telus Centre, the Allan Gardens greenhouses, the Hazelton Hotel and the beloved Café Diplomatico on College Street all play strong supporting roles in the film.

“The city has transformed itself in the past few years, majorly, through architecture,” Egoyan said.

“It’s always standing in for New York or Chicago or God knows what,” said Reitman. “I remember the conversation as we were walking around the city, through midtown, and saying, ‘You know, we never see these streets. They’re always hidden because they don’t look enough like those stand-in cities and we really should do it here.’ It’s a really romantic city and a very beautiful city and a city that’s been architecturally reborn, particularly in the last 10 years.”

“When we had these test screenings in L.A., people really responded to the city,” Egoyan said.

There was doubt about filming in the Toronto winter, however. “At first we were going to shoot in the spring, and it’s easy to think of Toronto as beautiful in the spring, but it it turned out we were shooting in February, and that’s when it got scary, because February in Toronto is brutal and drab. But there is something interesting about the theme of this film — people escaping a hostile exterior and coming someplace that’s warm and protective.”

The third major thing to change about Chloe along the way was the status of its young femme fatale. Somwhere between casting and shooting, Seyfried, who got the role over “hundreds of women” got big, thanks to her being cast in a certain musical.

Moderator Henri Behar imagined the conversation between Reitman and Egoyan: “Oh my God. We’ve got the Mamma Mia girl now.”

Seyfried has been around Toronto for TIFF 2009 but did not appear at the press conference.