He’s one of Canada’s most acclaimed directors of screen and stage, but Atom Egoyan admits that opera initially seemed daunting. “I wasn’t someone who was coming from opera. I was actually a bit intimidated by it,” says the Seven Veils director on his first opera gig, a fantastically dark reimagining of Salome for the Canadian Opera Company in 1996. Fortunately, though, the thrill of being in the audience for a live show sparks the same inspiration as seeing a great film in the cinema.
“I had seen a production of the play [Salome] in London, England when I was there in the late Eighties. It was such a great piece of drama and then hearing it set to music, I got as excited about that as I remember as a kid because I loved Jesus Christ Superstar. When I saw Norman Jewison’s film, it was so thrilling to me that, a camera can enhance this musical experience that was in my head.”
Seven Veils arguably marks the film to which Egoyan has been building throughout his career. This audacious adaptation combines both poles of Egoyan’s oeuvre as he centres a backstage drama on his 2023 remounting of Salome for the COC. Egoyan reunites with Chloe star Amanda Seyfried, who plays a theatre director tasked with remounting the staging of Salome by her late mentor, Charles. Memories of past abuse and trauma, filtered through family secrets and old VHS tapes, make Seven Veils unmistakably an Egoyan work as Jeanine’s creative ambitions clash with the opera company’s expectation that she’ll defer to Charles’ vision.
“This offer came because someone saw Exotica,” Egoyan notes, mildly prompted by the DVDs of Exotica and Chloe positioned in this writer’s Zoom background, on his 1996 production. “The artistic director of the Canadian Opera Company thought there were themes in that film that were really linked to the story of the Salome and the opera of Salome. Some people had really violent responses because they were so upset about it. Oher people just loved it.” The gamble, which came between Exotica and Egoyan’s Oscar-nominated The Sweet Hereafter (1997) marks one of the greatest successes of his career having been revived several times. Revisiting Salome, particularly through the dual lens of cinema, opens new elements of the production this time around.
In 2023, and now 2025, the question of the lone male genius is passé. Jeanine fights against that, while some blows with an intimacy coordinator and a #MeToo scandal add turbulence to her production along with contemporary resonance to the enduring work by Richard Strauss, itself an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play.
“I was aware of the privilege of being able to revisit the material, but in this expanded form and keep the opera unaltered,” says Egoyan on navigating the two elements. “The world around it [the stage] refracts in many different characters that are not in the opera, and circumstances and plot points that are completely outside of the opera, but everything has to do with the staging of the opera and the mechanics of what happens in an opera house. It uses the opera as a location, as a world I know really well. I was able to reformat the story.”
Seven Veils features Egoyan’s staging as Jeanine’s play is, of course, his own. But one hallmark of Egoyan’s Salome is the presence of video screens that grotesquely frame the lips of Johann (Michael Kupfer-Radecky) as he speaks from backstage. The image evokes Charles mansplaining the production to Jeanine. The mediated drama challenges the director to assert her authority over the remounting.
As Jeanine travels the cavernous backstage universe of COC’s rehearsal space and explores how different corners of the company can realise or, controversially, “improve” Charles’s interpretation, the ghost of her mentor weighs heavily. No flashbacks display Charles, but he hangs throughout the film like an implied presence. Particularly as Jeanine uses Salome to confront abuse she experienced in her past, the film explores questions of artistic license and appropriation. Flashback scenes, signalled through VHS tapes, depict Jeanine walking blindfolded through the woods, guided by her father and some oranges, which have obvious echoes in Charles’ staging.
“In an original draft, we saw the scenes in a café with Charles where she’s telling him the story [about her father] that he then takes,” says Egoyan. “As we got closer, it felt reductive. I think it’s better that he exists in your imagination than to have a physical presence. He becomes a mystery and you can project whatever you want onto him as opposed to it being this charismatic, handsome guy looking at her. You can almost anticipate that version of it. I don’t think you miss not seeing him, but he’s very clearly a very strong presence.”
Charles also exists in the presence of his wife, Beatrice (Lanette Ware), who runs the company in his absence. She wields a dutiful publicist (Tara Nicodemo) to protect his vision at the expense of Jeanine’s voice. “Her motivations are also very complex,” says Egoyan. “We see she’s a pretty flawed character as well in terms of behaving properly.” Audiences can interpret the overtones of Salome offstage, while the drama in the theatre sees King Herod grant his wife’s wish for the head of John the Baptiste. Salome serves it to her mother after caressing it in gruesome detail—an act that Jeanine foreshadowing while getting a bit too hands-on with the hair of an understudy (Douglas Smith) during rehearsals.
“Is it a gift that Charles is giving her or is it a curse?” Egoyan asks when speaking of Jeanine’s inheritance. That question explodes when it comes time for Jeanine to enact Salome’s centrepiece, the Dance of the Seven Veils. The sequence sees Salome thrust herself into a shadow dance behind a sheet. Jeanine interprets it shrewdly as the leering men of the court initially inch closer to Salome as if her number offers an invitation. But Jeanine resists tradition, weaving between human performers and shadow puppets, and Salome raises her arms in a battle cry that defies her male aggressors. It’s a strikingly cinematic moment intercut with haunting images from Jeanine’s childhood.
“That moment where she’s back behind the screen was very spontaneous,” observes Egoyan. “We had the camera, we had Amanda, and I suddenly thought it’d be very cool to see her moving in between the dancers. I owe that to Amanda. It wasn’t in the script, but suddenly she was able to inhabit that space. That’s an amazing performance moment for her because we know that the trauma is not something that she’s suppressed—we understand everyone around her seems to understand it’s happened, but what she’s able to do is to show what it means to re-traumatize herself by this decision to accept the responsibility of remounting the show.”
As Jeanine moves between the dancers and stagehands, she also wields her smartphone. It records the rehearsal and fulfils Jeanine’s publicist’s directive to capture backstage action for the company’s social channels. But the technology in Jeanine’s hands ultimately becomes an empowering counterpoint to the VHS images that have haunted her throughout her life. These images find a foil in her ongoing Zoom calls with her peculiar mother (Lynne Griffin), who always sits before a family portrait. Jeanine’s frustration with the painting escalates with each call.
“There’s this ability for technology to fix something very clearly in time. When you access an old tape, you’re seeing exactly what that experience was like at that moment or like in my last film [Guest of Honour] where a father discovered something on his daughter’s old cell phone before stuff was downloaded. At that point, these things existed on this piece of technology, which then you might tuck away,” Egoyan says. Seven Veils sits in conversation with the layers of images—film, video, DV, webcams—that offer a thematic and aesthetic interplay throughout his body work. He also nods to Family Viewing (1987) in which a father tapes home movies over while making porn videos with his mistress, or to the Skype calls of Adoration (2008) that create a sort of Greek chorus for the tragedy.
“What technology allows you to do is to make a sacrament of your own feelings by the way you actually deal with that technology, if you so choose,” he continues. “In this film, she’s using her computer as a way of accessing her past through these archival videos, but she’s also using it as a way of constructing her future in terms of this relationship with her mother who’s denied the abuse. She’s doing something which she sees through the same computer screen that she used to access her past.”
Egoyan says the play with texts and screens remains ambiguous for the audience. He says that avoids moral judgments with characters and technology alike. “I’m not saying that technology distorts emotion, but it certainly has the ability to either enhance or trivialize our experience depending on how we choose to use it,” he says.
“They’re technologies I live with and I’ve seen these shifts and they’ve been interesting to me, not intellectually as much as how it relates to my bread and butter, which is exploring relationships. I do think there are things that you do through technology, either consciously or not, that you may not allow yourself to do in real life. I got very excited in the Eighties when I started making films because I could actually have characters that were making decisions not so different from what I felt as a filmmaker. They were domestic situations like home videos that suddenly characters decided to do or not. When they did that, and what they did with those tapes, were not that different from what I was experiencing as a filmmaker at the time.”
With so many elements here that cater to his body of work, Egoyan admits that combining these two facets of his career has long been on his mind. Moreover, with the popularity of cinematic operas like Emilia Pérez or the influence of Jesus Christ Superstar, Egoyan says it’s been a long time coming.
“I did have this project that I was kicking around for a while many years ago. It was a remake of Carousel with Hugh Jackman and I actually got into a conversation with him,” says Egoyan. “I had this crazy idea of setting it around the projection of Carousel, the movie, in a cinema in the Deep South where it was segregated between the Black audience on top in the balcony and the whites downstairs, which is how it was back then. The whole story of Billy and Julie was kind of happening in the theater itself. You’d be able to have the film projection happening while the story was being retold.”
That premise is, in some ways, a template for Seven Veils as the film culminates with the première of Salome while all sorts of drama happens in the wings. Egoyan says that things didn’t work out with Carousel, but that the idea is still kicking around in his head.
At this moment in the conversation, Egoyan dives into cinephile mode and lets the synapses fire as he connects some layers of film history and adaptation to his own work. “When I was doing the research about Carousel, I found Liliom (1934), which is the Fritz Lang film that no one’s seen, which is actually based on the play that was at the root of Carousel by Ferenc Molnár, a Hungarian playwright,” says Egoyan.
“That film has the first sequence of video ever in film. There’s a scene where Charles Boyer attacks his wife in the film. We see it early on: he slaps his wife and it’s kind of a terrible scene. Later on, he dies and he’s sent to heaven. It’s purgatory and they’re making the judgment and they say, ‘You attacked your wife.’ And he says, ‘No, that never happened.’ They actually take him to a screening room and, brilliantly, Fritz Lang shows us the very scene that we’ve watched before in the movie where he hits his wife. Now there’s a time code on it. It says the day, the hour, the minute that this was happening,” Egoyan explains.
The scene continues with Boyer’s character watching the action rewind and repeat on playback. Reality hits him with these images from his past. “It anticipates surveillance technology in an early sound film,” Egoyan observes. “If you want to see how brilliant Fritz Lang was, and how visionary he was, and going into this idea of technology, that to me is in cinema.”
Maybe Seven Veils isn’t the film to which Egoyan’s been building, but instead another step towards the next big thing.
