In early 2023, Atom Egoyan remounted his production of Salome for the Canadian Opera Company (COC), and then immediately began filming Seven Veils, a new movie starring Amanda Seyfried as theatre director Jeanine who is remounting her former mentor’s most famous work: Salome. I spoke with Egoyan at his studio in Toronto, surrounded by a lifetime of movie ephemera and sharing handfuls of peanut-butter candy.
LB: What is your ambition with Seven Veils?
AE: My production of Salome was first presented in 1996, so this is the seventh presentation. And when the COC said that they were remounting it, that raised a lot of issues for me, because this isn’t 1996 anymore. At the time it was considered kind of a protofeminist approach, and I believe it is probably the first production that used the dance of the seven veils to tell another story.
Now other productions have taken this
