Director Atom Egoyan is best known for artistic film endeavors like The Sweet Hereafter and Exotica that delve into complicated emotions and human frailties. While his latest feature, Chloe, deals with those issues as well, it is perhaps one of his most commercial films yet. Starring Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson, and Amanda Seyfried, Chloe lurks into the hidden worlds of a strange love triangle where infidelity, eroticism, fantasy, and attraction collide with tragic results. The film, based on the 2003 French drama Nathalie, was written by Erin Cressida Wilson, the playwright and screenwriter behind the 2002 independent hit, Secretary. The film's producer is Ivan Reitman, a director known more for such crowd pleasing pictures as Ghostbusters and Dave (and this year's Oscar nominated Up in the Air) rather than intimate and sexy studies of human nature. Egoyan said he was intrigued by the story and the challenges of re-igniting passion in a long time relationship.

By Lorenza Muñoz

This was based on the French film Nathalie. What was the impetus for re-making it?

I saw Nathalie when it came out six years ago, but it would have never occurred to me to do a remake. Ivan Reitman [producer] bought the rights and approached me. He loved Exotica. I read the script by Erin Cressida Wilson and really loved it. It is the study of a marriage. There are a lot of challenges in terms of being able to keep things alive and there is a point when that initial sense of what attracted you to a person dissipates and you begin to take them for granted. What Julie's character does is reactivate an erotic connection to her husband through a surrogate. What she doesn't expect is that Chloe has her own narrative, and these two women kind of clash.

This seems like a novel film for Ivan Reitman's production company...

He was drawn to this and he wanted to direct it, but realized he was not the right person to direct it. It is odd to think of Ivan as being the glue to making this film, but if you look at the film Dave, it is also a study of a marriage. He is a very complex person and while his movies tell a certain type of comedy, his interests are wide ranging.

Where was the movie set?

The huge stumbling block was that the film was set in San Francisco, but to make it real for me I had to set it in Toronto. In San Francisco I was overwhelmed with the fact that I was a tourist. I had never lived inside the social milieu of David and Catherine in San Francisco, but I knew that milieu in Toronto. There are two huge decisions that a director makes: how you cast and where you locate it. Is the film based on familiarity or from an outsider's point of view? I didn't think the outsider's point of view would work in this. I wanted to make use of the city and the streetcar lines and the ravines that flow through Toronto. They are a real part of the topography of the place, and they served as a metaphor for the film with final and natural forces intruding in David and Catherine's ordered life.

How big of a stumbling block was it to re-locate it?

I had to sell that idea. They wanted the feeling of the city to be seductive and I don't think Ivan saw Toronto in that way. This is a Toronto that did not exist when he was growing up there. So as I showed him around he began to see that.

Did you know each other through your Toronto connection? 

In 1984 I was being nominated for Next of Kin and he was honored for Ghostbusters (at a Canadian ceremony). I went up to him and congratulated him and he was very attentive. Now 25 years later, he says has no recollection of the meeting.

So he left Canada and you stayed... 

If you want to make films that are commercial you leave. If you want to make something more quirky then there is a place here that will support that. Yet, for all of Tom Pollock and Ivan Reitman's connections in L.A., most of the money for Chloe came from France. It really was funded mostly by Studio Canal.

The whole family seems totally detached from each other, as cold as their house. Is that the feeling you meant to invoke?

Yes and to evoke Catherine's need for control. It is about order and control and glass, and living in a house as we look through it, like an aquarium.

When you were filming this, Natasha Richardson died. How was it working through the tragedy with Liam Neeson?

When he came back we were so grateful. The crew was so attentive to him and gave him the protective place he needed to be. Everyone was very sensitive about not telling anyone in the press that he was back in Toronto. That circus was kept away from him. I suppose it all worked out as well as it could given the horrific circumstances. He is an extraordinary man able to make the best out of the most inexplicable tragedy. It just seemed like she just slipped, like she just fell. We don't understand sometimes that it might be more dramatic...

Amanda Seyfried really captured this rather sad but manipulative call girl. She really seems to have grown as an actor...

I saw her during an open audition before she became a star, before Mamma Mia. She came in and she was amazing. I never do this but I told her right there that she had the part. At the time she wasn't a big enough name to finance the film, but this is probably the last film where she will get cast just because she is a great actor and not because she is a big name. She was nervous about working with Julie, but Julie was great with her. The two of them really connected. We didn't want to turn Chloe into a psycho. When you fall for someone and you need to be with this person and you fall into this craziness, it seems so real.

In your personal life, you and your wife Arsinee Khanjian broke up. It was strange not seeing her in an Atom Egoyan film...

She was so much in my mind as we were making it. We had this incredible relationship. I realized that in my own writing I make an actors' job really tough. With a movie like Chloe, you identify with the characters in a real way. I have put Arsinee through some incredible hoops.

Will you keep working together? 

Oh yeah. She could have played Catherine but she can't finance a film. That is the brutal reality of the business we are in.

What are you working on now?

I am writing and reading a ton. Nothing definite. I will do opera and an installation for the new home of the Toronto Film Festival. What was very eye opening was seeing how hard it is to get a film like Chloe made. Those adult dramas are now being made for TV...I am reading three thick Swedish crime novels that are in vogue. They are up my alley, the really dark psychologically motivated thrillers. But it is a bit overwhelming.

Be sure to join us at the FIND Film Series screening of Chloe on Wednesday, March 17.

Before joining Film Independent, Lorenza Muñoz was a staff writer with the Los Angeles Times. For 14 years at the paper she covered news, politics, business, and entertainment. She recently completed her first novel, The Weight of Flight.