Amanda Seyfriend stars in Atom Egoyan’s Seven Veils.Elevation Pictures
It took 14 years for Amanda Seyfried and Atom Egoyan to reunite for their second movie, but they already have plans for a third: Plow, a taut psychological thriller about Toronto’s inability to clear its snow-covered roads.
In the city last week for the premiere of Seven Veils, an intense drama set in the opera world that marks a reunion for the star and director of the 2009 love-triangle film Chloe, the pair were disappointed that the downtown streets weren’t overrun by municipal workers clearing the city’s mountains of white and grey slush. Seyfried was especially down in the dumps, having promised her young son back home in upstate New York that she would take a photograph of a genuine Canadian snowplow.
“I’m up in arms!” the actress says in mock outrage, next to similarly bemused Egoyan, who suggests the material is ripe for dramatization.
“Toronto should really be grateful for you,” the actress continues, after the pair toss potential film titles, eventually settling on a simple Plow. “They should name something in your honour.”
“Oh please,” Egoyan says in mock deference. “We’ll end up calling it the Atom Egoyan Snow Plow System and everyone will hate me.”
The pair continue in this back-and-forth manner for the entirety of their Toronto media tour, barely allowing even the most persistent journalist an opportunity to wedge a question into the conversation. Normally, this would be cause for grumbling among the always finicky local press corps, but it is clear that Seyfried and Egoyan enjoy a genuine, inspired rapport – a dynamic that they haven’t been able to engage in for far too long. Not only was there the decade-plus distance between Chloe and Seven Veils, but also sizable industry speed bumps that kept the actress and her director separated for much of the new film’s release cycle.
Although Egoyan was on hand for Seven Veils’ world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, 2023, Seyfried bowed out of attending, saying at the time that it didn’t feel right to participate in light of the actors’ and writers’ strikes. (The film did receive a waiver from the SAG-AFTRA union that allowed performers to promote eligible projects, but the somewhat confusing concession didn’t alleviate concerns for the many stars who decided to skip TIFF that year.) While Seyfried and Egoyan both attended the film’s Berlinale premiere a few months later in early 2024, the pair’s on-the-ground reunion in Toronto – where Seven Veils is set, and was shot – feels like a proper homecoming.
“It is weird to have this distance from finishing a project – it’s an unusual new perspective, and we’re both talking about it differently,” Egoyan says. “Even from a year ago in Berlin, it’s a different tone.”
“It’s always exciting just being in a room with you and rediscovering something together,” Seyfried responds. “All these new ideas pop up. I feel bad for the journalists because we’ll go into a room and tumble into it.”
The pair’s banter – which feels more genuine than so much of the neat, prerehearsed talking points that get repeated ad nauseam during the typical film junket – is coated with an added layer (or two) of meta-contextuality given the subject matter and themes of Seven Veils.
Seyfried stars in the movie as Jeanine, a relatively inexperienced Canadian director who is asked to stage her late mentor’s production of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome – the same production that Egoyan himself remounted in 1996 for the Canadian Opera Company. When the filmmaker was asked by the COC to revisit Salome in 2023, he decided to give himself an added challenge: Why not shoot a movie about that very same task at the exact same time? And so he threw real COC performers (Ambur Braid, Michael Schade, Michael Kupfer-Radecky) into the mix alongside Seyfried, whose character begins to explore Strauss’s opera – which retells the Biblical beheading of John the Baptist – in her own a hall-of-mirrors fashion.
The result is both a typically juicy Egoyan concoction – filled with buried memories of childhood trauma and flicks of voyeurism – and a heady dissection of the artistic process. Seyfried is essentially playing a version of Egoyan, who himself is balancing two competing visions that must also inform one another.
“At the time, it felt like a completely obvious and easy thing to do – piggyback a film onto this play. But it is an insane concept,” Egoyan says of the intense 19-day shoot, which was largely filmed inside Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, where the real COC productions are staged. “During the process, you’re somewhat delusional, thinking it will all fit together.”
“But it all felt natural,” Seyfried interjects. “We found a moment and we captured it. And there’s also us shooting here in your hometown. You have a whole company of people who drop everything for you, and that’s the magic of working in Toronto – the level of trust and familiarity.”
The experience was far different from Seyfried and Egoyan’s previous Toronto-set collaboration, Chloe, in which the actress starred as an obsessive escort who inserts herself into the life of an upper-class couple played by Liam Neeson and Julianne Moore.
“That was a major studio film, so we had a luxurious shooting schedule – 45 days, more than double this,” Egoyan recalls. “This was very different. I hadn’t shot a film this fast since my first feature.”
“But you had all your ducks in a row,” Seyfried says.
“I don’t know, the first day was the craziest I’ve ever had,” Egoyan responds. “We had a live orchestra, four cameras.”
“But there was still space for us to explore,” Seyfried adds. “I felt like a princess just being plopped down into a throne on the director’s chair, watching these unbelievably skilled opera performers. I was sitting in their world, but they were also coming into our world. I’ll never get that experience again. I know that for a fact.”
Since the Chloe era, Seyfried has become uniquely adept at balancing both films and prestige television. After her Emmy-winning performance in the 2022 series The Dropout, Seyfried is set to premiere her opioid-crisis miniseries Long Bright River, which will premiere on Crave this month. Yet echoes of her initial collaboration with Egoyan still linger this deep into her career, sometimes in the strangest of ways.
“I was just thinking about how, at the end of Chloe, your character is about to behead Julianne Moore – you feel you want someone so badly, and they’re not giving you attention, so you resort to something extremely violent, just like in Salome,” Egoyan says. “I would have never made that connection a year ago.”
“I feel that desperation only in my dreams,” Seyfried replies. “That’s the whole point of it. We’re bringing all our energy here. I only feel that impassioned when I’m acting, or in my dreams. If I felt that way in real life …”
“Oh, I feel that way every day,” Egoyan says.
For the sake of Toronto’s snowplow drivers, let’s hope that he’s joking.
Seven Veils opens in select theatres March 7.
