"I think ultimately if you have a very high expectation of your audience and you know exactly what it is you're trying to express through the medium of film, there will always be an audience for you"
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Egoyan is quietly rejecting the most exhausting superstition in cinema: that “audience” is a single, fickle beast you either please or you don’t. His wager is narrower and, in practice, more radical. If you set the bar high for viewers and you’re ruthlessly clear about what you’re making, you don’t chase the crowd; you assemble one.
The phrase “very high expectation” isn’t about elitism so much as respect. Egoyan’s films often demand work: fractured timelines, moral discomfort, emotional information withheld until it hurts. He’s pointing to a contract where the director trusts the viewer to connect dots, tolerate ambiguity, and sit with the aftertaste. That trust becomes an aesthetic: less spoon-feeding, more implication; less plot as conveyor belt, more film as memory.
The subtext is also defensive, and understandable. Egoyan came up in an era when “independent” could still mean formally adventurous, before streaming-era metrics and franchise logic tightened the leash. His insistence on knowing “exactly” what you’re trying to express reads like a rebuke to content-by-committee and the market-tested mush of “relatable” storytelling. Clarity of intent, here, is the antidote to dilution.
“There will always be an audience for you” sounds comforting, but it’s conditional: the audience is not owed to you by the culture. You earn it by making something specific enough to be unmistakably yours. In a landscape that rewards noise, Egoyan argues for signal.
The phrase “very high expectation” isn’t about elitism so much as respect. Egoyan’s films often demand work: fractured timelines, moral discomfort, emotional information withheld until it hurts. He’s pointing to a contract where the director trusts the viewer to connect dots, tolerate ambiguity, and sit with the aftertaste. That trust becomes an aesthetic: less spoon-feeding, more implication; less plot as conveyor belt, more film as memory.
The subtext is also defensive, and understandable. Egoyan came up in an era when “independent” could still mean formally adventurous, before streaming-era metrics and franchise logic tightened the leash. His insistence on knowing “exactly” what you’re trying to express reads like a rebuke to content-by-committee and the market-tested mush of “relatable” storytelling. Clarity of intent, here, is the antidote to dilution.
“There will always be an audience for you” sounds comforting, but it’s conditional: the audience is not owed to you by the culture. You earn it by making something specific enough to be unmistakably yours. In a landscape that rewards noise, Egoyan argues for signal.
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