Fatherhood Quote by Atom Egoyan

Egoyan’s line reads like a director’s note slipped into a family drama: the father’s “folly” isn’t bad parenting in the obvious sense, it’s self-editing. He thinks adulthood and authority require a clean, legible identity, so he tries to play himself as a simpler character than the one actually living inside his skin. That’s the trap Egoyan keeps returning to in his films: people don’t just lie to others; they stage-manage themselves, then act shocked when the set collapses.

The wording is doing quiet work. “Believes he can be” frames simplicity as an aspiration, almost a moral pose, not a fact. “Much more simple” implies he’s aiming for reduction, compression, a version of masculinity where complexity equals weakness, contradiction, or failure. Egoyan doesn’t accuse him of being complex; he says the father can’t “deal with” it. The conflict is less about what the father is than about his capacity for self-contact.

Subtext: a refusal of inner life becomes a family inheritance. If a father can’t tolerate his own contradictions, he won’t tolerate them in his children. He’ll demand coherence, obedience, a tidy narrative - and that’s where control replaces intimacy. Coming from a director, the quote also nods to performance: the father is casting himself in the role of “simple man,” mistaking a persona for a self. Egoyan’s intent feels diagnostic and unsparing: the real danger isn’t complexity; it’s the denial of it, because denial always leaks out sideways - as anger, distance, or the need to dominate the story.