Director Atom Egoyan isn’t afraid of challenging material. Sometimes his films draw controversy, and often, for rather silly reasons. His newest film, Devil’s Knot, hasn’t drawn any heated debates, but it’s a movie some people have been questioning since it was first announced. Do we really need another film about the West Memphis Three? It’s been heavily covered, but Egoyan feels it’s a story that’ll find itself told again and again.
There’s so much drama and different perspectives in this case to explore, so Egoyan has a point. He covers a few of those point-of-views in Devil’s Knot, co-written by Scott Derrickson (Sinister) and starring Colin Firth, Reese Witherspoon, and Dane DeHaan. It reunites Egoyan with Firth, who both worked together on 2005’s Where the Truth Lies.
That film, amongst other topics, came up in our 10-minute discussion with Egoyan, which can be read below.
How much time do you usually need after a film is made to get a fresh perspective on it, to really know what the movie is?
I had that experience last night because we had the U.S. premiere in Little Rock in Arkansas. I hadn’t seen it for a while and I really felt that I had some distance from it, because I had finished a new film in the meantime and I’ve been developing other projects. So it was a real fresh approach. I felt that I did have some distance.
Have you ever revisited one of your films and found it wildly different from what you initially envisioned?
Well, I realized what a different type of film it is from anything I’ve ever done. It’s my 14th feature, I guess, and it’s really different because it’s the first thing I’ve done that’s really based upon facts. I was drawn to it because of the crazily complicated nature of the story and what happens, and what didn’t happen, and what should have happened, what could have happened. I wanted to get all of those different ideas in an hour and a half. I felt that was going to be a challenge. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the structure should be in the editing. It took a long time to put this piece together.
I’ve never worked as long on a film in post-production. But I felt really good last night watching it. For all of the issues that we were dealing with and frustrated by, continuing to kind of hang together last night, that was great. It was also being played to various people who intimately involved in the film. Jason Baldwin was there, and Pam Hobbs, the real Pam Hobbs, and Damien Echols family was there. So it felt like a real conclusion to this process.
When you are telling a true story where the facts matter, is there much room for dramatizing?
We are sticking to the actual text, but these are actors. So the actors are bringing in a dramatic interpretation, sometimes of evidence that is actually online. You can actually go and you can see the actual interview or the actual interrogation on the West Memphis Three website because of Freedom of Information; it’s all available.
But the moment an actor interprets that, it obviously becomes subjective. There’s no way around that. The film is really posing that question, I think, for the viewer and trying to maintain a coherence in terms of the sequence of events, but understanding it at all times, of course, that it is a re-creation.
What’s exciting about this is there are a number of different paths that have never been explored before. There are a number of pieces of evidence that were never entered officially into the court that we had access to. So, you are seeing the full complexity of the event. That’s, at the end of the day, what I think I was most excited about, because of the nature of this amazing cast we had, the nature of the performances, you are understanding how every decision was made at a very human level. Nothing is sort of left to caricature or to cliché. Even when you are seeing mistakes made, when you are seeing the police make mistakes, at all times, each of those performances is invested with a degree of sincerity and you understand why those people made those decisions at that moment.
No one is demonic. It would be foolish in a film that’s about a witch hunt to create another witch hunt in the process.
Since it’s a well-known story, does that give you an advantage as a storyteller where maybe you don’t have to include every detail, where you can make implications rather than stating?
That’s a great question, because I thought I would have more of a leeway, and that’s one of the reasons why the editing took so long. We shot a lot of material. In the first version, I left a lot of things out because I thought they didn’t need to be explained. But when we started showing it to people, you realize you actually have to explain a lot for the story to make sense. Everything that you are now seeing in this final version has a place in the overall story. So that’s what took a long time to figure out. Things which, dramatically, felt inconsequential were actually hugely important to the telling of the overall story.
I imagine telling a story like this, it’s very delicate, each decision. When you are on a movie like, say, Chloe, is there less pressure versus telling the story of the West Memphis Three?
Oh, yeah, like way less pressure. I think it’s a question, with a film like Chloe, or just things like in terms of convention, or like in that film, how do you show someone low-angle on screen? Does an audience feel tricked? That’s what it comes down to, really; you want an audience to feel that they are respected and that you have the highest expectations of their intelligence and curiosity and reward them for that. But there are certain things you can do as a filmmaker which are in defiance and kind of perversely disrespectful of a viewer. So I am very careful of that because in my own films, the ones I write and direct, not either Chloe or Devil’s Knot, but I take such liberties with timeline and structure that I am painfully aware of the emotional logic and pact that’s signed between and viewer a filmmaker. Every film must have its own intentional rules, and they have to be consistent..
What kind of rules did you have for Devil’s Knot?
That everything is actually based on something that was said or something that actually transpired, even the stuff where like Pam goes to the classroom with the homework that she wants the teacher to grade. Pam Hobbs actually did that. That’s something that Pam Hobbs did. Or the stories that you are hearing that are more anecdotal are actually based on stories that the characters told us. And then you have all the stuff that’s actually based on transcripts. That was one of the rules.
I also wanted to be very careful about the stuff that I was recreating that was from the imagination of one of them characters themselves. That gets very complicated in the film. Every image that is presented is presented from the point of view of one of the characters who might have either experienced the scene or imagined the scene. But nothing is applied out of my own conjecture.
As you mentioned, you’ve now made 14 films.
Now 15. I guess I can count this as 15.
That’s right, the 15th. Is there maybe a film or two of yours that don’t get mentioned often, but you’re proud of and would recommend to our readers?
Yeah. My second feature, Family Viewing, I am very fond of. It’s an early film that I made in the ‘80s. I’m not saying the obvious films like Exotica, because everyone knows or might have heard of them. Where the Truth Lies is another one I’d mention.
Devil’s Knot is now on VOD and in limited release.