More personally, he says he had a "strange experience" where the "young woman I was completely obsessed with for, like, five years, during my teen years, was being abused by her father at the same time. I understood that there was something creepy and unusual about it but she was in denial and, certainly at that time, no one was talking about those issues.
"I think the combination of those two things in my life have had a very strong effect on me."
At the root of it, he says, "is this question of how vulnerable history is. Like if you don't defend history, if you're not on guard".
For Zev, a recently widowed, would-be Jewish hit-man, played by Christopher Plummer, history is being erased by Alzheimer's. To remind him of his mission, he carries a letter from a wheelchair-bound friend, Max (Martin Landau), who also guides Zev by phone as he travels across North America to discover which of four men named Rudy Kurlander is the former Nazi.
This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. In 2002, the Simon Wiesenthal Center launched Operation Last Chance to track down Second World War criminals still at large. During filming, news broke that an 89-year-old Nazi war crimes suspect called Johann Breyer had died in the custody of the US Marshals Service. And, later, Egoyan discovered a new book by Eric Lichtblau called The Nazis Next Door, which documented how thousands of Hitler's minions were secretly able to settle in America.
"Basically, while people were still being processed in the camps, and suffering in the camps, Nazis were flowing into the US," he says. "All the V rocket scientists were allowed free entry. All the people who were creating these advanced technologies were given shocking access. They were processed as war refugees, given new identities, and not tried. . . I just don't know what those lives would have been like in America in the '50s."
Today, most Holocaust survivors and perpetrators are either dead or nearing the end of their lives. Lantos and Egoyan therefore felt that they had to move quickly to make Remember. Ten years down the line, it would have to be a period piece. However, they wanted to make it about people living with rage today. "We all would love to live with the cliché that time heals wounds," Egoyan has said, "and that there is the possibility of rapprochement, but there are a lot of people who are still as angry as if it was yesterday."
Ironically, Zev's fading recall means that his rage has to keep being refuelled by Max, raising questions about memory and its connection to identity, history and notions of personal responsibility. For Zev, the past and his place in it isn't merely forgotten, it is completely gone; he is a stranger to himself.
"He is unlike any character I have ever encountered," says Egoyan, calling Plummer's performance "radical… It's someone who's in the present all the way through. There's no subtext as such. Zev can't remember anything other than where and how he is in that very moment. I knew that if I could get Chris on board, his performance would be a tour de force."
Egoyan relates a complicated back-story that he and the actor created so that Zev ("an assimilated, secular Jew, coming from Germany") made sense to them. He warns me that it is "off the record" to protect the more surprising elements of the story.
The film is a kind of road movie, he says, "but it's a very unusual road movie because the characters aren't escaping from somewhere but going towards something which is unexpected. It's like a torture machine that Max has created for him."
I suggest to Egoyan that a shock twist at the end comes close to reinforcing the antisemitic trope of the manipulative, controlling Jew. Apparently, this wasn't unexpected. "I thought this might be brought up," he candidly admits, although I'm apparently the first journalist to mention it. "It's something I felt when I read the script." Even so, he believes that the context offers a subtler reading while he also appears to have taken some comfort from the fact that the film's producers and writers were all Jewish.
