Politics & Power Quote by Atom Egoyan

Egoyan’s “totally schizophrenic” career isn’t a cute anecdote about juggling gigs; it’s a snapshot of how the industry trains artists to compartmentalize themselves. The bluntness is the point. He’s admitting, almost with embarrassment, that prestige in one arena can read like liability in another. When a mainstream American production asks to see his work, his instinct is not to lead with the films that are most personally authored, but to hide them like contraband.

The subtext is a brutal bit of marketplace literacy: “independent” doesn’t just mean low-budget, it signals risk, weirdness, formal ambition, and a refusal to smooth out the corners for mass consumption. Egoyan knows that a gatekeeper at something like Hitchcock Presents isn’t evaluating him as a filmmaker in the abstract; they’re assessing whether he can be trusted to deliver a product that hits marks, schedules, and familiar tones. His indie films might prove talent, but they also prove temperament.

Context matters, too. Egoyan emerges from a late-80s/90s wave where indie cinema became both a brand and a quarantine: celebrated at festivals, politely sidelined in television rooms. The phrase “I would never dream” captures the internalization of that divide. It’s not censorship imposed from above so much as self-censorship performed in advance.

What makes the line work is its candor about artistic double consciousness. Egoyan isn’t glamorizing the hustle; he’s exposing the quiet negotiations that shape careers long before a script gets greenlit.