I have always felt that this story is universal. When I began to understand the details of the history, I felt that the most compelling aspect was not what happened, but what continues to happen...

It is not as though the process of production holds any mystery for me, I know exactly what it involves and I know the predominant concern in shooting one of those things is production values...

I guess I’m naive. I really had no idea it would be a problem. I just heard the deciding factor could be thrusting. Apparently, anything over three thrusts and you’re in trouble. Well, nobody told...

My exposure to mainstream forms of production has taught me what I am up against and actually clarified for me where I’d like to go.

There are different undertones [to each decade],

There is a certain moment in the film when the son is in the nursing home and he goes to the television and turns it off because he sees himself in the image.

I mean, if you are directing actors to do one thing and then directing them to do something else entirely because the one thing you wanted them to do may not work, then you are...

unwarranted response given the story it’s telling and the way it needed to be told.

My parents taught me to believe that through the creative act, we’re able to transcend and give a response to desecration.

[Because of the ruling, ThinkFilm has decided to release Egoyan’s original version of the film, which premiered in May at Cannes, before he made any cuts. The company, which isn’t an MPAA signatory and isn’t...

These are very subtle things, of course, and I don’t expect everyone to pick them up consciously, but I think that there is something there that you must be able to feel, there is an...

I suppose I had these concerns but I really felt that I had to keep my scope very, very concentrated.

It’s crazy, it’s totally outrageous, it’s very upsetting, and I can’t understand it,

Once we were in the studio, we realized we were getting certain effects through the shooting of the dramatic scenes on video, shooting off a screen and then getting wave patterns and stuff like that.

There are no guidelines. You sign this quite confidently, but you don’t really know until you show it to the MPAA.

These sorts of things can happen, identities can be switched, the emotional implications are something that he has not been trained to feel. His whole life has been about separating himself from these sorts of...

I think that’s one of the real joys of working with a small budget – that you have to determine exactly what it is that you need and want to say.

As a parent, I would feel comfortable taking a mature or 17-year-old to this movie. I feel dismayed that they wouldn’t now be able to see it in a theater. Yet there is a double standard,...

Right now my career is totally schizophrenic, because when an American production like Hitchcock Presents asks to see my work I would never dream of showing them my independent films.

If I knew how restrictive (the MPAA was), I would have had an entirely different conversation with the actors.

Though I am still very vulnerable to audiences – and it happens all the time – where for some reason the energy doesn’t connect and, since the film is very personal, obviously I am made...

I think the situation in Toronto is such that there are funding organizations which make it easy for a film to raise more money than it needs and very often that works against a film.

And then of course there is a whole dialogue between the spirit of the film camera, which is something I was focusing on very strongly in the film.

That is where the irony of the film comes off, in terms of the language it employs – where he tries desperately to be a ‘TV Dad,’ to give advice and it’s so pat it...

[As for the] blur … I can’t allow one of my films to go out that way; it would be foolish. And given what the scene is about, it would be very distracting.

When we first shot it, something very, very weird happened, and it’s a good example of how things work intuitively or are improvised.

I think ultimately if you have a very high expectation of your audience and you know exactly what it is you’re trying to express through the medium of film, there will always be an audience...

As a producer, I think one of the most important decisions you make is not necessarily the material you are working on but the production apparatus that you choose to develop the project with, and...

That’s a very odd notion because it involves seeing money up there on the screen – if something cost $5 million to make, they want to see that $5 million up there.

enjoyable and fun

When you make a film like this, you must have the highest expectations of your audience. Having worked in situations where we have the lowest expectations of our audience.

I wanted to make sure that the environment of the shooting itself was not that controlled, and the way to go about that course was to work with as small a crew as possible.

We couldn’t trim any more without destroying the heart of the movie.

The biggest problem with the independent film sector in Toronto is that they find themselves having to make that budget show on screen.

If that’s the case,

When you’re working with a smaller budget I suppose one of the things that has to be in your mind when you are writing is that you have to keep the characters down to a...

I’ve just been very, very lucky with the film having been introduced in the right way.

I wasn’t happy with the version I showed this morning. The good news is the film will go out as it was originally intended.

The father’s greatest folly is that he believes he can be a much more simple person than he is; he is not really able to deal with his own complexity as a human being.

We hear about the experiment that is Canada but we are now entering the most interesting phase of that, where people are interacting with their own culture and understanding the degree of tolerance we have...

You are traveling and see these people shooting the entire experience of going through a city, and maybe in the back of their minds they sustain the illusion that they will edit it all, but...

It is about this very abstract sense of displacement that he feels the moment he turns off the television.

It was so close,

The film camera’s ability to physically move through space, not zoom through space – every time we have a video camera the movement is through zoom; every time we have a film camera it is...

He’s my hero, so any time I get to wade into his world is pretty satisfying.

You can talk about Holocaust denial, but it’s really marginal for the most part. What is compelling about the Armenian genocide, is how it has been forgotten.

It was very important that it be done in such a way that it be executed with complete conviction. If I had done it both ways, if I was trying to cover myself in case...

The good news is the film will go out as it was originally intended,

The programme has ended, something has finished, and he has a sense of something having finished its course, and then all of a sudden he turns away and this other thing has just finished its...

I could have made it better this is the proof. If it was good enough to win the award, I thank you.