Atom Egoyan on set with challenging British tale

LONDON- Freak storms in England disrupted the filming of Atom Egoyan's lastest movie, Felicia's Journey, but he is not letting that bother him.

"It's hard work shooting in this weather because it's so volatile," Egoyan says. "The change of cloud, rain, sun, cloud reain, makes it very stressful."

Still, the Toronto director, who grew up in Victoria, B.C., finds working in England comfortable.

"You realize how much English Canadians have taken from this culture when you work here," he says.

"We've inherited so much from this system since a lot of the technicians have worked with the BBC, and of course the CBC was structured on the BBC. I think I'd feel more of a cultural shock if I was working in the States."

Felicia's Journey stars 18-year-old Elaine Cassidy in the title role of an innocent Irish girl who encounters Hildich, an English serial killer played by Bob Hoskins.

The actor says he read William Trevor's bok of the same name years ago and jumped at the chance of doing the film when he found out Egoyan was directing.

Playing gin rummy in his trailor between takes, Hoskins is exhuberant about working with the Canadian director.

"He's quite wicked. Sends me up something rotten. But he's got the imagination and is performance obsessed, which is great for an actor.

"He'll go for the absolute minutiae, the tinylittle details which show the character.

"We're like two old watchmakers working on a very delicate watch. The trouble is, though, if you show him anything that he likes he'll want more. He's very greedy. Very greedy," Hoskins says with a chuckle.

Egoyan, director of such enigmatic films such as The Sweet Hereafter (which earned him two Oscar nominations) and Exotica adapted the screenplay from Trevor's novel.

Producer Bruce Davey, who with partner Mel Gibson produced the Academy Award-winning film Braveheart, thought of Egoyan when he acquired the rights to the book. "I've been a fan for years and the story was so dark: perfect for Atom," he says.

"When I was sent the book I thought it was just a remarkable bit of fiction," Egoyan says. "I couldn't get it out of my head. It seemed urgent and it seemed that I could re-invent it."

It's an extraordinary story about a young woman from a small Irish community who sets out on a very simple journey to England to find this young man she has fallen in love with who has made her pregnant.

"She then meets this older man who seems to be so compassionate and understanding and wants to help her but is a monster. These two people confront each other and we see how they change."

Audiences, Egoyan hopes, will come away feeling for the young girl "and strangely and most disturbingly, the audience will feel very much for Hildich."

The filmmaker was fascinated by the subtext of cultural migration and wanted to relocate the story to Canada.

"I thought you could make the definitive Canadian road movie by having a young Catholic girl from a small town in Quebec travelling across Canada to Victoria."

Hildich, he says, "is suspended in time and could easily have come from Victoria, the last bastion of the British Empire."

But Trevor told Egoyan he didn't think the history of Quebec and English Canada exactly paralleled the history between Ireland and England, and vetoed the idea.

If all goes well, Egoyan says, the film will be out next fall. He and his family have spent most of this year in London, staying at an apartment near the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square. He directed an English Nation Opera production, Dr. Ox, in the spring before taking on Felicia's Journey.

"I miss the direct contact with a normal family life," Egoyan says about choosing to edit the film in Toronto rather than London. "I really do miss my life there. I love being in Toronto. And I really am looking forward to going back."