Legendary Canadian producer Robert Lantos says that Atom Egoyan’s newest film, Remember, is the strongest movie the director has ever made.
That is a bold statement to say about a filmmaker whose credits include gems like Exotica, Felicia’s Journey and the Oscar-nominated The Sweet Hereafter – all titles Lantos has produced. However, he is adamant that Egoyan is now working at the top of his game.
“I think the sign of a truly great director is someone who can really put himself in the service of the story,” Lantos tells The CJN.
The film is an original work from first-time scribe Benjamin August. Egoyan frequently directs his own screenplays.
Remember, premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 12, focuses on Zev, played by Christopher Plummer. After his wife’s death, Zev goes on a hunt to find the Auschwitz guard who murdered his family and has never been brought to justice.
Zev knows the war criminal’s name is Rudy Kurlander, and that four German men of that name immigrated to North America after the war. Martin Landau, Günter Lamprecht and Bruno Ganz co-star.
When Lantos got a draft of August’s screenplay, he says he instantly knew he wanted to make the thriller.
“It’s the last moment in time that you can tell this story in the present tense,” Lantos says. “Five years from now, this would have to be a period piece.”
That urgency helped to make Remember a project Lantos wanted to produce immediately. He ended up co-producing the film with his son, Ari.
Lantos says he knew he couldn’t work on the film unless there was an actor who could believably play a 90-year-old man who can be both an action hero and routinely suffer from a failing memory.
“Of all the actors who I thought who could do this, the only one that’s actually alive is [Christopher] Plummer,” he says.
The scene that convinced the Canadian producer that Remember was worth pursuing was a tense confrontation between Zev and a man with vicious anti-Semitic views and a home full of Nazi memorabilia.
In that scene, Breaking Bad’s Dean Norris plays the bigoted U.S. marshal. The scene becomes even more intense when the character suspects that Zev is Jewish.
The anti-Semitism from that scene shook Lantos, the producer says.
“The issues that the film deals with are very much alive,” he says. “They just take a different shape. Anti-Semitism is thriving today all over Europe. It’s certainly much more underground in North America but it’s certainly present.”
Egoyan may seem like an unorthodox choice to direct a straightforward thriller. The director’s recent thrillers, The Captive and Chloe, were both critical and box office disappointments.
Remember could help the director rebound, when the film is released in Canada on Oct. 23. A tense theatrical trailer and awards buzz surrounding Plummer’s performance should help to sell the dark subject matter to a wider audience.
Lantos adds that Remember will also screen for Jewish groups after the Toronto film festival.
The thriller is also the eighth collaboration between Lantos and Egoyan, a creative partnership that goes back to 1993, when they worked on the unconventional drama Calendar.
Lantos says he thought the weight and moral complexity in the film would intrigue Egoyan. However, he also admits that the filmmaker would benefit from working with another writer’s story.
“When he writes a script, it’s never linear,” Lantos says of Egoyan. “[Remember] is not like that. This is like a locomotive. It starts from point A and keeps going in a straight line.”
However, the thriller also features a whopper of an ending, one that likely resonated with a filmmaker known for taking his dramas to unpredictable conclusions.
“Don’t give away the ending,” Lantos warns.
Suitably, Remember’s conclusion is one that will be hard for audiences to forget.
For more info on the movie, visit TIFF here.
