The Great White (North) Hope

The taxi pulls into a narrow lane in downtown Toronto’s western fringes, where artists’ lofts share the neighborhood with storefront restaurants and converted warehouses.

On the north side of the street, a red-brick, Victorian-era duplex unmarked by any sign houses the headquarters of Atom Egoyan, at 37 an icon of the Canadian cinema and a writer-director edging toward the center of the Hollywood radar screen.

The interior gives off a dormitory feel, with film posters covering the walls, cardboard file boxes stacked on the floor, old props leaning against walls, and doors flapping with the passage of young and youngish employees. The atmosphere had been described perfectly a few weeks earlier by New York author Russell Banks, whose novel “The Sweet Hereafter,” as filmed by Egoyan, is gaining critical acclaim. Entering Egoyan’s office, Banks said in an interview during the New York Film Festival, “I felt like I was visiting a bunch of funky, brilliant graduate students, all deeply serious and very funny at the same time.”

This is a long, long way from Hollywood--and we’re not just talking about miles and the need for snow tires. But the scene is characteristic of Canada’s small but hardy movie industry, dominated as it is by low-budget independents such as Egoyan.

Wiry and owlish, with a penetrating intelligence and a restless artistic drive, Egoyan has a small but loyal following in the United States among critics and film buffs fond of his cool, elliptical stories of men and women skating along the brink of anomie.

That circle of admirers figures to widen with the commercial release of “The Sweet Hereafter,” which opened Friday trailing awards and critical huzzahs from the Cannes, Toronto and New York film festivals. It is the most mainstream and commercial of Egoyan’s movies, and Fine Line Features is marketing it with an emphasis on the critical buzz and hope that there may be Oscar nominations in its future.

The film explores the effect of a fatal school bus crash on the residents of a small border community in British Columbia, and on the predatory attorney who arrives from out of town promising justice and restitution. The lawyer is performed with nuance by British actor Ian Holm, who at 66 has his first film starring role. Holm is surrounded by an Egoyan repertory company of Canadian actors, including Bruce Greenwood, 18-year-old Sarah Polley, Alberta Watson and Arsinee Khanjian, Egoyan’s wife.

But to say that “The Sweet Hereafter” is about a bus crash is a bit like saying “Citizen Kane” is about a sled. The movie, which shifts about in time and place, gradually peels away layers of mystery in its characters and setting.

“It’s about our relationship with fate, really,” says Egoyan, perched on a chair in his sunlit office in the back of the Victorian. “To what extent do we want to control our lives, and to what extent do we let things just happen to us?”

“People will hopefully come out of this movie talking and debating,” says Holm, who leaped at the role of the lawyer when Donald Sutherland had to bow out at the last minute. “It’s asking questions that maybe nobody knows the answer to.”

Even before its opening, “The Sweet Hereafter” has lifted Egoyan closer to the Hollywood jet stream. Egoyan jerks a thumb at a foot-high stack of screenplays, novels and manuscripts resting on a chair. They have been sent from Los Angeles by his agent, and “I’m supposed to read them by the weekend,” he explains.

And every morning, after dropping off his and Khanjian’s 4-year-old son, Arshile, at kindergarten, Egoyan spends three or four hours in front of a computer, tapping out a film script of Irish author William Trevor’s psychological thriller “Felicia’s Journey.” He is signed to write and direct the movie version for Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions.

He also is preparing to direct two new operas, one in London for the English National Opera and one in Toronto that he coauthored. Egoyan is executive producer of two films being developed by his assistants, recently completed a 55-minute short with cellist Yo-Yo Ma for PBS and supervises distribution and television sales of his early features. In January, he is scheduled to become the backup director to Michelangelo Antonioni on a new movie shooting in Los Angeles. The bonding company requires that Egoyan be ready to step in if Antonioni suffers a relapse in his recovery from a stroke.

To hear Egoyan tell it, this upward curve in his career has followed an almost geometric logic.

“I’ve been working through these skills, starting with micro, micro budgets and increasing from project to project,” he says. “It has made me very aware of what the market for my movies is, how it’s grown, how it continues to grow, what I can do and still maintain the freedom I need to make the films the way I want.”

Nor is he daunted by the prospect that Hollywood has come calling, for he has been down that road before. He spent much of 1995 in a long, ultimately frustrating relationship with Warner Bros. over a script that never was produced. Egoyan walked away when he and the studio could not agree on casting, but today he classifies it as educational exercise.

“Looking back, in a way I would have paid to have had that experience,” says Egoyan, who as a college student considered a career in diplomacy. “It allowed me to have a front-row seat in seeing how films were made there without actually going through the process of making what probably would have ended up being a compromised work.”

If “The Sweet Hereafter” does score a breakthrough at the U.S. box office or in awards nominations, there will be cheers throughout the Canadian film industry, for it would be seen not just as recognition of the popular Egoyan but as a longed-for American acknowledgment of a neighboring artistic community that often seems like an interesting little boutique operating in the shadow of a giant supermall.

The list of Canadians who have had successful careers in Hollywood is long and impressive; it begins with silent-movie director Mack Sennett, the inventor of screen comedy, and Mary Pickford, the first star, and extends to director James Cameron (“Terminator 2,” the upcoming “Titanic”) and comic Jim Carrey. But those Canadian movie-makers who stay home labor in relative obscurity.

Even Canadians shun most domestically produced movies in favor of American films. Egoyan’s biggest gross to date is 1994’s “Exotica,” which earned $5 million in the U.S., $1 million in Canada, another $5 million overseas and is classified as a major hit by Canadian standards.

“We want our ‘Piano’ or ‘Crocodile Dundee’ or ‘Full Monty,’ a film that will break out of our domestic market and do a lot of business across North America,” acknowledges Wayne Clarkson, executive director of the Canadian Film Center in Toronto, an academy modeled on the American Film Institute.

If Egoyan leads the way, Clarkson adds, it would be especially fitting. Along with David Cronenberg (“The Fly,” “Crash”), Egoyan is Canada’s best-known director, and “he makes his films entirely on his own terms and at his own pace; it’s almost the perfect career path for someone in the Canadian cinema,” Clarkson says.

“Atom Egoyan is the filmmaker that every film student in Canada wants to become,” summarizes Mina Shum, 31, a Vancouver writer-director whose debut feature, “Double Happiness,” a comedy about growing up Chinese Canadian on the West Coast, won plaudits two years ago.

Egoyan was born in Cairo to Armenian parents and raised in Victoria, British Columbia. His parents were trained as artists in Egypt and owned a successful gallery in Cairo. When they tried to transfer that business to Victoria, however, there was no real market for fine art in what was then a provincial and insular town. Instead, Egoyan’s father found success running a furniture store.

“I was very aware of the frustration in their lives between this desire to make art and the practical reality of what they needed to do to make a living,” says Egoyan, who adds that the experience accounts for his fixation on holding down his film budgets and for his reputation as an astute negotiator with producers and distributors.

As a struggling playwright and aspiring director in Toronto in the early 1980s, Egoyan faced the decision every would-be filmmaker in Canada must make: whether to go south. He enlisted an unusual family connection to get some inside counsel. One of his mother’s close friends knew Danny Arnold, the Los Angeles producer of “Barney Miller” and other television series, and she got the young Egoyan an appointment.

“Danny Arnold gave me this amazing bit of information,” Egoyan recalls. “He said: ‘Nobody comes to L.A. to become a better writer. They come to make a lot of money. So you have to decide what your priority is.’ . . . That word of advice has stayed with me.”

Back in Toronto, Egoyan’s emerging career coincided with one of the periodic bursts of spending on the arts that Canadian governments embark on when they get fretful of American cultural dominance. He quickly mastered the system, forming his own production company, Ego Film Arts, and cobbling together movie funding from a spectrum of government and private sources. Television work paid the bills while he poured his creativity into feature films, in which he served as producer, director, screenwriter and, in one case, co-star.

His early movies got limited distribution, played the film festival circuit and made little or no money, but critics in Canada and Europe took notice.

In 1991, Egoyan formed a crucial partnership with Robert Lantos, the chairman of Alliance Communications, Canada’s largest producer of film and television. The deal they struck was this: If Egoyan could stay within a limited budget--usually less than $2 million--Alliance would raise the financing, from government and private sources and by selling the film in advance in Europe. In return, Egoyan could make whatever movie he wanted. Lantos just insisted on veto rights over the title.

The bargain has paid off for both parties.

“He’s amazingly fiscally responsible; none of his films for us has ever lost money,” says Lantos. “For someone who makes eccentric movies so far away from formula-driven popcorn movies, for someone who lives in that world, that’s very unusual.”

Unpredictable and often bizarre, Egoyan’s films up to “The Sweet Hereafter” usually feature outsiders seeking an identity, often in unconventional ways. Despite elements of voyeurism and what Egoyan calls “the energy of aggressive perversion,” the films are surprisingly cool in tone.

Geoff Pevere, a leading Canadian film critic, compares their chilly ambience and searching characters to the work of Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman, although he also contends there is something “hopelessly Canadian” about their restraint.

“His films are almost as interested in the intervals between the dramatic high points as in the dramatic high points,” Pevere says. “It’s a cultural trait we’ve got. Canadians have grown up incredibly influenced by the United States, but not part of the United States. . . . It’s made us . . . accustomed to standing apart, taking it all in and analyzing it.”

Indeed the most frequent rap on Egoyan’s films is that they are too distant from the audience’s experience. That echoes a criticism of Canada’s movies generally, in part stemming from film financing, which is heavily dependent on government subsidies and thus is driven more by the concerns of filmmakers and bureaucrats than commercial considerations.

It has made for what Clarkson calls “a cinema of auteurs,” but it also helps account for the inability of most English-language Canadian movies to draw big audiences. (Canada’s French-language films play mainly in the province of Quebec and are more popular, something usually attributed to the language barrier separating them from most things American.)

Egoyan argues--and critics agree--that he has crossed into much more mainstream territory with “The Sweet Hereafter.”

“It’s only gradually that I’ve been able to reconcile my artistic tendencies and formalist impulses with character-driven stories that people can relate to,” he says.

“The other films were not about characters that people could identify with. . . . This film is really asking you as a viewer: What would you do in this situation?”

Still, there is that sense of restraint. In a pivotal sequence in “The Sweet Hereafter,” a school bus filled with children plunges off a road, skids across a frozen lake, comes to a halt and then, after an agonizing pause, crashes through the ice. The scene is shot with one camera from the viewpoint of the father of two of the children, who has been following the bus in his pickup truck.

It’s hard to picture a Hollywood director passing on the opportunity to raise the emotional pitch with close-ups of terrified children.

“There is something perverse about holding back that far away from the action, but I think it ultimately makes it more powerful,” Egoyan contends. “It’s horrifying because you have to imagine what’s going on as opposed to seeing it.”

Because “The Sweet Hereafter” does not lend itself to a one-paragraph summary, even those close to the film are uncertain of its commercial potential, although they certainly are hopeful.

“I think it’s going to be a hard picture to sell. . . . It will be very much by word of mouth,” says Holm. “This is a modest little film, but modest little films are in now, and I think it’s important that Hollywood people see this kind of film. . . . The loose ends are not all tied up, and it’s not a package where you come out and say, ‘Oh, that’s great,’ and forget it. It provokes discussion.”