The whole film is about people being convinced that they can reduce themselves to their archetypes.
You can talk about Holocaust denial, but it's really marginal for the most part. What is compelling about the Armenian genocide, is how it has been forgotten.
My parents taught me to believe that through the creative act, we're able to transcend and give a response to desecration.
It is about this very abstract sense of displacement that he feels the moment he turns off the television.
As a producer, I think one of the most important decisions you make is not necessarily the material you are working on but the production apparatus that you choose to develop the project with, and that determines what funding you go to, it determines many factors.
There is a certain moment in the film when the son is in the nursing home and he goes to the television and turns it off because he sees himself in the image.
When I was planning Family Viewing, the Ontario Film Development Corporation came into existence.
It is not as though the process of production holds any mystery for me, I know exactly what it involves and I know the predominant concern in shooting one of those things is production values - or as they would say, seeing it all up there on screen.
I mean, if you are directing actors to do one thing and then directing them to do something else entirely because the one thing you wanted them to do may not work, then you are just shattering their confidence in the project.
The father's greatest folly is that he believes he can be a much more simple person than he is; he is not really able to deal with his own complexity as a human being.
