Atom Egoyan's newest film, Chloe, which premiered at the festival last night as a gala presentation, is a sexy psychological thriller about a woman, Catherine, who begins to suspect her husband of infidelity. In order to prove her suspicions correct she hires the young Chloe, an escort, to seduce him, orchestrating their encounters and insisting that Chloe spare no detail in her reports on them. But slowly things begin to spin out of Catherine's control, as Chloe moves away from her scripts and as their own relationship takes a transgressive turn. Soon obsession and jealousy threaten to consume everyone involved in Chloe's game of passion.

The film is a remake (or rather, as Egoyan defines it, a reinvention) of French film Nathalie... (2003).

"I love the basic principle of the story," producer Ivan Reitman said of his decision to reinvent the film, although it was released less than a decade ago.

"The underlying idea of what happens when suspicion takes over a long-term relationship."

Reitman approached writer Erin Cressida Wilson to write a screenplay based on Nathalie.... They worked closely together, bouncing ideas back and forth, drawing on their individual strengths and weaknesses.

"I tend toward being a little bit more like Adam," Wilson said of the process.

"Being more of a veiled, mysterious writer who doesn't want to say what this is about. So it was very exciting to work with Ivan, who knows the commercial world and who knows how to make something accessible. So we could combine and make it serious, erotic and hopefully subtle, and commercial, or at least readable to a general public."

Egoyan's body of work can be seen as enigmatic, but he has always worked with similar themes: obsession, the mysteries of storytelling and the blur between fiction and reality. When the script emerged from their collaboration, they said, it was clear that Egoyan would be the perfect director to tackle it.

Once Egoyan became involved and the film was cast (no easy task; while Wilson wrote the script with Julianne Moore as Catherine in mind, and while Liam Neeson happened to be working with Egoyan on a stage show while the film was in pre-production and would eventually read for the part of Catherine's husband, David, Reitman said that they had to audition "everyone who spoke modern English" until they lucked upon a pre-Mamma Mia! Amanda Seyfried for the part of Chloe), everyone involved began to work on character development. Something that, according to Egoyan, was not a quick process. He said that the inter-relations of the film's characters is incredibly complex.

"It was very important that these two women be attracted to one another for inexplicable reasons that they don't even understand completely," he explained.

"That Chloe, from the moment she sees Catherine, is reminded of someone who might protect her, who might be able to understand her, might be able to watch her and attend to her. And all sorts of histories that we can't even imagine. I wanted it to be something very powerful for her that she did not understand, and in the same way, with Catherine, she is at a point in her life where she feels that she is losing her attraction, and that her husband is surrounded by young women. And so this idea of hiring a young woman to flirt with her husband... There's a panic that both women are experiencing and they are both soothing each other in ways they don't understand, but also torturing each other for reasons they don't understand. And that was very exciting to me in terms of casting and developing the screenplay and the rich possibility that this had as a psychological genre."

"Chloe is in a bad place in her life, she doesn't like what she's doing, and she gets to then create a story around it for this woman who is listening to her, and it endows her experiences with a certain dignity and an artfulness that she doesn't really feel, and it makes her feel more special than she is at that moment," he continued.

"That's a very complex motivation. I'm not someone who likes to go off and try different things. I'm quite specific."

Moore, who first met Egoyan at the festival in the '90s, said that she believes he was the perfect director to handle this sort of "loaded material." She said that it was the idea of working with him that initially drew her to the film, but that she was also excited to play such an emotionally complex character, "a woman in crisis."

"The interesting thing about this character's exploration, to me, was that she was using this girl as a conduit to her husband," she said.

"There was something kind of fascinating in that. Instead of turning to him she thought she was going to take this girl and ask this girl to show her what her husband was feeling. It started to be a way for her to feel what he wanted and what he liked. And it was fascinating and deliberately cruel and there was a power thing that was happening and also a real sense of access and intimacy that was thrilling, and it allowed the relationship between the two women to grow. So in her efforts to find out what her husband liked, she found out what she liked."

One of the most striking things about the film to a Canadian is that it is unabashedly set in Toronto. Whereas most films filming in the city will avoid backdrops that refer explicitly to this city's landmarks, Chloe embraces the AGO and Yorkville. Wilson is from San Francisco and had initially set her script there, but Egoyan quickly found that he felt like a tourist there and could not achieve the intimacy with the city that filming there would require.

"There was a very specific social milieu that the film was examining and there was also a class structure that it was looking at and I understood that in this city very well," he said.

"The challenge was trying to convince Ivan that Toronto could be as alluring, as sexy and romantic as San Francisco. Even Torontonians... Like that archway. We pass it every day, but we don't see it with a long lens, and with the lights and the camera, suddenly it becomes something else. It's kind of interesting to reinvent."

Wilson had no problem with the change. She said that a script is meant to pass from the writer's hands to the producer's to the director's to the actors', and get reinvented and personalized according to each piece of the movie puzzle along the way.

"It becomes a person's and then you hand it over and it becomes someone else's and hopefully that collaboration can really shine," she said.

Egoyan, who usually scripts his own films, said that even so, he never strayed too far from Wilson's text, and that working with it was a relief.

"When I'm working with my scripts, because no one understands what they're about, when you read them at script-level, including myself, often, I find that people assign to me a certain responsibility because I must know how it's all going to come together," he said.

"And it's a bit lonely, actually. This was wonderful, because it's all on the page, and we all knew what the blueprint was, and I felt that we were working together."

Press conference photos by Michelle O. Chloe will screen again for the public tomorrow at the Visa Screening Room at 11:00 am.