Seven Veils (Atom Egoyan, 2023).
Following the critical and commercial success of Exotica (1994)—Atom Egoyan’s erotic thriller about a tax auditor who frequents a Toronto strip club for a particular dancer—the Canadian Opera Company approached the director to adapt Richard Strauss’s Salome, first performed in 1905,for their upcoming season. There were notable similarities between the structures of sexual pleasure in John the Baptist’s decapitation and the nocturnal sleaze of nightclub culture: intemperate gawking by paternal figures, the aesthetics of high-risk environments, and a figurative and literal unclothing. The production emerged at an especially vulnerable time for Toronto sex workers, who were experiencing high rates of violence and targeted homicide.
Egoyan’s production was a suitably macabre, postmodern spin on both the Bible story and Oscar Wilde’s one-act tragedy, which inspired Strauss’s opera. The Judean palace was swapped for a viridescent sanatorium on a steeply angled stage, with additional signifiers of modernity like bald men in white coats and home-movie projections. This version extended the unrequited gazes present in the source material into surveillance tropes: the beheading of Jochanaan (John the Baptist) is teased through disembodied projections of his body parts; camera-wielding guards recall Foucault’s panopticon and the modern surveillance state; the incestuous desires of King Herod toward his daughter are made plain through scopophilic film interludes. In Egoyan’s Salome, there is no lust without ferocious visibility.
The production was celebrated for its sinuosity, reimaginations, and stagecraft, and Egoyan remounted the opera in 2002, 2013, and 2023. This most recent iteration was accompanied by a feature film titled Seven Veils (2023), after the infamous dance Salome performed for King Herod, which many have interpreted as the original stage striptease. The film follows Jeanine (Amanda Seyfried, who previously collaborated with Egoyan on Chloe [2009]), a theater director tasked with remounting Strauss’s opera, which was previously staged by her late mentor. As she shapes the production, the buried particulars of her past begin to materialize—her relationship to her mentor, and her father, and the threads of sexual abuse present in both.
Jeanine’s past and her home life—a dementia-stricken mother in denial of her husband’s misconduct, a young child, and an adulterous husband who is sleeping with her mother’s caretaker—begin to melt into the production, and the gulf between dramaturgy and reality dries up. Amid the complexities of Jeanine assuming a significant position in a production designed to commemorate her problematic mentor, a second plot of sexual impropriety arises; the prop artist creating the model head of Jochanaan is violated by an understudy, captured in full on her phone camera.
Seven Veils features footage of Egoyan’s Salome from its month-long run in February 2023, and many of the opera’s star players and personnel appear in the film. This metatextual layering of Egoyan’s status as theater and screen director on top of Jeanine’s institutional panic invites constant appraisal of both figures. Jeanine slips into the inappropriate behaviors we imagine her mentor may have deployed during his own production, and Egoyan keeps himself at arm’s length from a project in which he is incontrovertibly immersed; Egoyan’s decisions become Jeanine’s and, in return, her vulnerabilities are projected onto him.
I spoke to Egoyan about Salome and Seven Veils, his relationship to their source texts, self-ciphering versus characterizing, and his working history with onscreen intimacy.
Salome (Canadian Opera Company, directed by Atom Egoyan, 2023). Photography by Michael Cooper.
NOTEBOOK: You’ve mounted Salome with the COC four times now. How did you shape the 2023 version, which we see onscreen?
ATOM EGOYAN: In 1996, I was aware that my interpretation was sandwiched between two films: Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter [1997]. The opera gave me the opportunity to explore something far more blunt and direct than what I had intended to do with those films, where the subject was treated quite discreetly. I then had several remounts of Salome in different cities and then went back to Toronto in 2023. I began to think about what it meant to be presenting this version after both my attitude toward it and the culture I was bringing it into had changed. I had this fantasy that someone else could actually take this position, that I wouldn’t be remounting it myself and it would be somebody with a different point of view. I began to think of this character, Jeanine, and how she might shift it.
NOTEBOOK: Some have seen Jeanine as a cipher for you.
EGOYAN: I don’t see her as a cipher for me. Certainly, some of what she’s doing physically, and her approach to directing, is drawn from me, but her strategy and rationale are wildly different from my own personality. That being said, the actual changes that she’s making are changes to the production which we’ve made over the last 30 years since its premiere—like having the mother go underneath the stage and help behead John the Baptist, or the scene where the oranges spill downstage.
Salome (Canadian Opera Company, directed by Atom Egoyan, 2023). Photograph by Michael Cooper.
NOTEBOOK: Did you take this as an opportunity to justify or explain some of your own postmodernist twists on the opera?
EGOYAN: Salome needs some sort of stylistic intervention to make it work at all, and Richard Strauss, the opera composer, found that. It works brilliantly as a libretto, but the core and the language is from Oscar Wilde. There were a number of transitions to the text itself—it was originally a Bible story, then there were 19th-century writers who became fascinated with the figure of Salome, then Oscar Wilde takes it up for his own specific reasons of his sexuality and theatrical success. Wilde wrote it in French and had his lover, Douglas, translate it into English, so these texts all find different levels of interpretation. There’s the interpretation that the director has, and then the interpretation which the imaginary remount director has.
NOTEBOOK: So much of the film also surveys process, rehearsal, and reenactment. How did you integrate procedure into the film’s action?
EGOYAN: It was a rare situation in that I literally put this opera back on its feet right before the shoot. In this particular moment of reviving and remounting, I had the film in mind, and was thinking about Amanda coming in and doing what I was doing at the time. It was a direct transference from me to her. She couldn’t be in town for the opera’s rehearsals, but my assistant director shot footage of me directing, which I then showed to Amanda.
NOTEBOOK: Was Amanda always your Jeanine?
EGOYAN: She was, though I did have another actress, Sarah Polley, in mind at one point. But at that exact time, she became busy with her award run [for Women Talking, 2022]—a very good reason.
Salome (Canadian Opera Company, directed by Atom Egoyan, 2023). Photograph by Michael Cooper.
NOTEBOOK: When directing Seven Veils, did you look to other film adaptations of the text?
EGOYAN: The 1922 version [by Charles Bryant and Alla Nazimova] is brilliant, but also Salome’s Last Dance [1988] from Ken Russell is so true to the spirit of Oscar Wilde’s play. The lasciviousness of Herodias, how sexualized that production is, and how it borders on a certain kitsch is fascinating.
NOTEBOOK: In the film, Jeanine is reluctant to collaborate with an intimacy coordinator, which seems to reflect a desire to maintain control and brings to mind her early exposure to unmonitored, sexualized creative environments.
EGOYAN: More than anything, what Jeanine is bothered by is the term “intimacy coordinator.” She’s doing the production for very intimate reasons. There’s nothing politically problematic for her about what the job [of intimacy coordinator] entails, as it’s thankfully a standard position we have now in the industry. But it’s interesting that Jeanine then crosses a line—you don’t touch an actor’s hair, which she does! But she’s not doing that to subvert the role as much as she’s trying to claim her own intimacies with this story. She’s peeved that someone else gets to have that title.
NOTEBOOK: The way she pets the actor’s head in that moment is chilling.
EGOYAN: So many films are dealing with people reconciling their trauma, and part of that is coming to terms with what the trauma is. Jeanine isn’t secretive about her past, and her traumas aren’t inaccessible to her, but when writing this character, we see an unexpected trauma unfold in front of her eyes. That is what happens when she’s in the physical process of adapting, and where these two stories of Charles and her father create this weird, alchemical skew.
NOTEBOOK: How have intimacy coordinators affected your own work, and how has translating erotic scenarios changed throughout your career?
EGOYAN: It’s only in the last few years that intimacy coordinators have come into play, and I’m thankful for it. I’ve been careful about staging sexual and physical scenes in my previous films, and keeping the actors involved. With Seven Veils, the intimacy coordinator present in the film was our intimacy coordinator on Salome. The position makes my job as director much easier. That being said, there’s a scene where Jeanine is looking at the archival tape and is concerned she won’t get the same energy that Charles had gotten out of the actors. But Charles’s means to get that reaction might not have worked today. You can’t be nostalgic about letting someone perform that sort of work without any supervision or authority from the actors.