After the astonishing, Booker Prize-fuelled success of Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient (1992), the first Canadian novel ever to win the prestigious award, filmmakers sought to adapt this ‘unfilmable’ novel. The resulting film (1996), written and directed by the British Anthony Minghella, produced by Hollywood legend Saul Zaentz, met with its own prize-laden destiny, including nine Academy Awards and five BAFTAs. A lesser-known adaptation story of The English Patient is that a Canadian consortium, led by Toronto-based Rhombus Media's Niv Fichman, sought the adaptation rights, with Armenian-Canadian director Atom Egoyan at the helm. Certainly, there was no way their bid could compete financially with Minghella and Zaentz, and the rest, as they say, is history.

When I taught The English Patient and its film adaptation, just after the American Russell Banks's novel The Sweet Hereafter (adapted by Egoyan), I have often asked my students what they would imagine The English Patient directed by Egoyan (at that earlier point in his career in the 1990s) would look like. Generalised declarations that have accompanied discussions of Minghella's adaptation in terms of ‘what film can do’ or ‘what we can expect from a film’ fall by the wayside at this point: expectations about chronology and mainstream audience sensibilities evaporate. Suggestions arise about greater fragmentation (closer to Ondaatje's novel and – indeed – to Egoyan's earlier filmmaking aesthetics), and greater attention to the character of Kip – Kirpal Singh – the Sikh sapper whose narrative is minimised in Minghella's film, yet around whom the climax of Ondaatje's novel revolves with a resounding rejection of the West and its imperialist legacies. Other possibilities in this imagined adaptation that was never made include Canadian actors playing the Canadian roles of Hana and Caravaggio (Juliette Binoche and Willem Dafoe, respectively, in Minghella's version). There is also, usually, an acknowledgement that, notwithstanding Egoyan's two Oscar nominations for The Sweet Hereafter, this imagined version would never have achieved the same meteoric success as Minghella’s.