From the beginning of his career, even as far back as his 1981 short film Peep Show, Atom Egoyan has been interested in the act of watching. What observation of others tells us about them, but just as much so what it says about ourselves. Rarely has that theme been more potent than in Exotica, released 30 years ago and standing strong as the director’s highest-rated film on Letterboxd. Described by Joe as “One of those dreams where you wake up crying,” Exotica is an emotionally potent and structurally amorphous tale of a collection of characters maneuvering around the space of the titular strip club.

There’s Francis Brown (Bruce Greenwood), a tax auditor investigating pet shop owner Thomas (Don McKellar), who is illegally smuggling rare bird eggs into the country. Francis frequents the club to watch Christina (Mia Kirshner) perform, a relationship that upsets her former boyfriend Eric (Elias Koteas), who by the way has impregnated the club’s owner Zoe (Arsinée Khanjian). Francis also has a mysterious dynamic with Tracey (Sarah Polley, in one of her first roles), who babysits for him despite him not having a child.

The thing linking all of these characters, even beyond the club, is pain. “Each character in the film has to deal with their own emotional baggage stemming from either an isolated incident or a collectively traumatic occurrence,” writes Jerry, who lists Exotica as his number one film of all-time, “and we see how they respond either internally or externally, by themselves or as a group. Egoyan masterfully withholds from us, allowing us to come to initial conclusions as to what may be going on between these people for a majority of the runtime… As the story unfolds, we see how wrong we have been, and how there’s no way to imagine what is really going on here, because the only way one would know for sure is to have experienced these exact same events themselves. To be shown this cinematically is nothing short of earth-shattering, and a damn fine example of transgression with a purpose.”

Egoyan remains a deeply emotional filmmaker, leading with how his work will make audiences feel, and meeting us at the crossroads between aching and healing. For the 30th anniversary of Exotica, I spoke with the director about his film listed as one of the all-time greats by the BFI, AV Club, the CBC and more.

An element that comes through in many of your films is this idea of people who behave in normal ways, but are teetering on the edge of oblivion. They get to imagine, often through their profession, that they’re putting things together, but what they’re really doing is lessening the pain just enough to keep feeling it without ever healing it.
It’s this feeling of being sad, in this case, listening to Leonard Cohen music with a stripper who is in this environment—there’s something about that melancholic circumstance which is quite addictive, I would imagine. It’s like you’re wallowing in pain, but in such a beautiful eroticized environment. A lot of erotic energy comes from this feeling of a vacuum. There’s something that’s emptying you and you feel something else is going to fill that. So it could be a piece of music, it could be an opera, it could be whatever it is, but I think that’s where erotic tension emanates from.

To go back to Tracey briefly as well, on my last revisit of the film it stood out to me that of all the characters in Exotica who are stuck in these cycles of rituals, she’s the one who really makes an active decision to break from this ritual she’s conducting with Francis. What does that idea of rituals mean to you as a storyteller? What do they tell us about these characters—why they’re involved in them, and why they might attempt to break free?
I think they’re drawn to it because it seems to satisfy something. There’s something that they’re lacking or missing, and that ritual gives them meaning. The question is: is it the right meaning? Is it the right thing they should be doing to make them feel better? Well, it feels like it is, but it becomes addictive. And there are jobs, be it the tax auditor or a film censor, or there’s a food inspector. Jobs that give you access to other people’s lives, and losing yourself in someone else’s life is very compelling. I mean, it’s why we watch movies.

By the way, there’s a really great book about this called Brian. It’s about someone who just goes to the National Film Theater all the time—this person who is addicted to watching movies, but in this collective sort of space. You’re a cinephile, you will love Brian, because it’s this person who understands that there’s a community of people who want to watch, and they ritualize the activity of watching films together, and discussing these films. It’s a wonderful way to see this entire life unfold.

There are places, and the French have a term for it called professional deprivation, where the job allows you to bend yourself into the tasks associated with that job, and you mark your life by that. The problem with a lot of these circumstances is that there’s no one monitoring it. There’s no one actually saying that this is the right or wrong thing to be doing. It just feels right at the time.

But maybe it’s part of the creative process as well. Like I had a vision that I’m putting on a remount of Salome, and I’m actually impatient with the idea of just putting on the same show I put on in 1996, but I can’t change that. Instead, I can write a film around it [Seven Veils], and I can make the film happen at the same time as the opera. Well, that’s outlandish, and it was incredibly stressful. And two years ago, it looked like it was all going to fall apart. This is a very personal issue for me, the ritual of making things, and I’ve been writing plays since I was a kid. There’s definitely dysfunction in my family, but I found early on that by writing plays, I could make people do things that they wouldn’t do otherwise. Then it sort of felt like, “Oh, this actually seems to make me feel better.” But there are issues that raises, I guess. [Laughs]

Your latest feature, Seven Veils, feels like something distinct with a clear vision. How are you able to keep finding that creativity within a system that is radically different from what it was 30 years ago?
Well, it’s just tough. I mean, honestly, it is really tough, and you end up making huge sacrifices. You defer, you invest in your own projects, and you hopefully find some people who are believing in that. But there has to be some sort of an upside as well. You just hope that you are finding that sweet spot. The issue that I have to deal with, personally, is that because I’m drawn to this notion of eroticism, then the genre I come closest to is erotic mystery or erotic thriller. So the films are then marketed that way.

I’ve told this story before, so forgive me if you’ve heard it. I’m sure you have, but for those who might not have, when we had the marketing screening for Miramax in New York, it was really eye-opening. Because after the screening, I actually had this meeting with Miramax, and you know who, basically saying, “Okay, look, everyone feels that they don’t know what’s going on, and so we want to have a voiceover where, at that shot where Christina’s walking into the club, she tells us how she ended up working at the club, and we understand where we are.” I said, “Well, yeah, that would totally eviscerate the movie, and I will not do that.” It was a marketing screening. It wasn’t like a test screening. And I was told, “If you don’t change it, we’re just going to put it straight to video. It’s not going to have a theater release.”

At that time, there were certain critics that if they took to something and wrote the right review, it could really shift the whole life of a movie, which happened in that case, so we were able to get away without adding in the voiceover, which I refused to do. But, wow, that was an eye-opener. Then the marketing, the way they were marketing it, I just hated it. It was exactly what I don’t want this film to be perceived as. And then the argument was like, “Well, look, the people who would see one of your movies are going to see it anyway,” which I’m not sure I even agree with, if it doesn’t have the right marketing.

Then maybe there are people who are going to see it, who wouldn’t see one of your types of movies, and maybe some of those people are going to like it, and you are going to grow your audience that way. Again, I just find that you have to maybe believe that, but it really means that even if you’re not making a film in a genre, it’s going to be marketed as a genre piece, and that almost creates a weird expectation. It is not the feeling I want people to have, which is discovery and mystery, and not that something is conforming to any sort of expectation.

That’s the crazy thing about the camera. You can’t just stage it and have people do things if they’re not feeling it, because it actually conveys that they’re not feeling it, and that’s not good. If you’re not believing it as you’re watching it, you’re not going to hide that. No matter what score you put over it, no matter what you do. That’s embedded in the shot. It’s a mysterious thing that happens, but it was so worthwhile fighting to reshoot that moment, and just give it more emotional context. That’s the thing about this all is that it’s based on really particular decisions that you make, sometimes even based on small little things like micro-cut, like frames, and also sounds that are happening—I’ve added people repeating someone’s name in a sentence, because it makes it feel more organic.

Sometimes, like in The Sweet Hereafter, you’re able to recalibrate a major restructuring. We got it quite quickly done in that film, which I still find… I don’t know how I shot that. I shot that film in December, and we had it ready for Cannes in April, and we totally restructured it. And I was remounting this opera in Houston at the time. There was an ice storm. I getting FedEx packages of VHS tapes showing me how this new cut was working, and it was crazy. But somehow, again, another kind of miracle.

That’s a cool process because we’re all dealing with information we’re either given or not. I find it fascinating, with The Sweet Hereafter, the number of people who love that movie—and I’ve come to understand that many of them think that, in that film, Sarah’s character is dismantling the whole legal process of the lawsuit, because she wants to keep the community together. And why do they think that? Well, because of that scene where Bruce Greenwood comes in and tries to dissuade her parents, and there’s a moment where you see Sarah crying and Bruce looking at her. I was going, “Oh, my God. You can read that.”

But what about the scene in the barn? What about what’s happening with her father? “Yeah, I was wondering.” How do they not get that scene? It’s interesting that they’ve submerged this visual information that they’ve seen, they’ve just parked it somewhere, and they’ve gone with this other interpretation, which is more obvious, but they still have absorbed the energy of that scene. They still watched it. Even if they haven’t understood it completely, it’s still there. That’s interesting to me because I was trying to deal, in that film, with how it means to be the victim of that sort of violence, of sexual abuse, and not understand it, because you haven’t seen that as damaging to you yet.

Because I’ve seen that happen, and so I wanted to express that. But in so doing, I’ve sublimated something which most people would expect to see a different way. I think it’s similar in Seven Veils. Most of the time you see trauma as something which is suppressed, and that it just bubbles up, because there’s a moment you have where you pick something up. “Oh, I , and it connects me to that thing,” and it’s kind of a formula. But I thought, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if you have a character who actually is able to talk about her traumas?” Everyone knows what happened with her father, and her husband seems to know, and she seems to be quite lucid about it, but there’s something about the structure she goes into which rekindles feelings associated with that which she has not resolved. So that’s just an interesting space, dramatically.

The way that comes out, even that sounds like a formula. It’s not. It’s sort of like… all of this is emotional. At all times, my journey through these stories is an emotional one. It’s not like I’m deg it this way. And, actually, the times it doesn’t work is when it feels formulaic. Even this becomes a formula. How to keep that alive, that idea of that ending of Exotica. You can’t plan for that. You just hope that, creatively, it happens at the right time when you’re able to preserve the feeling of that, and communicate it to the people you’re working with, and there’s a fluidity to it.