A nerd trapped in a filmmaker

Atom Egoyan squints into the early-evening haze and adjusts his glasses. “Interlopers have always fascinated me,'' he says.

“Maybe because my own life has been transposed. If you enter a culture when you're young, you're always aware of being outside.

"That's what makes me so envious about these people's effortless sense of nation.''

We are sitting on a terrace in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. It is common for film folk to travel to far-flung places in the course of their everyday business.

But this journey, for this director, is different. It is a sort of spiritual homecoming.

Egoyan was born in 1960 to Armenian parents in Cairo (his name celebrates Egypt's first nuclear reactor) and moved to Canada when he was 3.

The only Armenian family in town, they were eager to blend in and Atom soon stopped speaking the language. He now recalls little of his early life.

“There are images of me on the shoulders of a chimpanzee in Cairo zoo. I could say I remember that but all I probably remember is seeing the home movie of it.''

The loss of identity, the tricks of memory, the gulf between representation and reality, the search for tradition: such are the obsessions that drive Egoyan's films, 11 elegant, complex, enigmatic features which have established him as one of the most thought-provoking directors in the world.

The Sweet Hereafter (1997), starring Ian Holm as a hearse-chasing lawyer, earned the director two Oscar nominations.

Adoration, which premiered in Cannes and features in the London Film Festival later this month, is about (among other things) a teenager who creates an imaginary alter ego as the son of an Arab terrorist in an online chat room.

“We are living in a moment when we are almost expected to be schizophrenic,'' Egoyan says. “Anyone with more than 500 friends on Facebook is clearly living a double life.''

Part soft-spoken nerd, part terrifyingly clever polymath, Egoyan seems to lead a dozen lives himself.

He is a distinguished practitioner of opera, theatre and art installations and plays classical guitar.

Though his company is called Ego Film Arts, he seems wholly devoid of that quality.

In Yerevan, as patron of the city's film festival, he is also — incredibly for a busy artiste of his stature — running a week-long film workshop for local students.

The class begins shooting its first scene, in which Egoyan is posing as a journalist.

He leans forward earnestly and asks Aaron Poole, an affable Canadian actor, about playing a drug addict in a recent film.

The improvised question is long and contorted, insulting the performance while professing to praise it: “It was so made up of things I already knew. It was amazing because it was fake. It seemed,'' he concludes on a smug note, “like a meta-contemplation of addiction.''

Poole laughs incredulously. “Who do you write for?''
“I blog. A lot of people read my blog!'' whines Egoyan (he later admits to basing the character on hacks he has known).

The big surprise is that the self-mocking scene is extremely funny. Later he says ruefully that he finds it hard to pin down comedy in his scripts. Yet one detects a shift in his work.

Egoyan first visited Armenia in the early Nineties. “My Aeroflot flight from Moscow crash-landed, so I had a very dramatic entry into the country,'' he says.

“I wasn't able to sleep at all. I just wandered the streets imagining things, making plans. Armenia was impoverished — all the beautiful trees were shorn for firewood.

"Today it's much more prosperous.'' He waves at the city skyline bristling with cranes and construction sites.

At the time, he was preparing Calendar (1993), in which he and his wife, the actress Arsinee Khanjian, played a troubled couple visiting Armenia.

It signalled a turning point, an abdication of the icy emotional remove of his early films. He started to re-learn Armenian, which he now speaks, he says, “like a child'' (though he sounded impressive to me).

And he began to use top actors: Holm, Bob Hoskins (in Felicia's Journey), Charles Aznavour (Ararat) and Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon (Where the Truth Lies).

His 2006 Dublin stage production of Beckett's Eh Joe bagged rave reviews for its star, Michael Gambon.

Egoyan has just jetted into Yerevan direct from the show's Manhattan premiere — starring Liam Neeson — which the New York Times's critic deemed “one of the most wholly satisfying nights I've spent at the theatre this year''.

So there is plenty to celebrate. Egoyan talks about his interest in astrology, his hopes for the Yerevan film festival — now in its fifth year — his regret that audiences are willing to put ever less effort into watching films and his plans for the footage he has just shot.

He would like to use streaming technology so that the students can edit it online and — who knows? — it might be built into his next feature.

The possibilities, as Egoyan would say, are myriad. “I don't know how this is going to evolve,'' he says, smiling. “But I'm having fun.''

Adoration screens at the London Film Festival on October 20. It will go on general release next year.