THE SOUVENIR
in fact, he liked them so much, he’s execproduced her latest one, the souvenir. empire went on set of the sequel to find out more
We go the whole Hogg with Joanna, director of some of the best British movies of the past decade. Including this one.
OOn a decommissioned air force base in norfolk, under
a vast blue dome of a sky, are dotted a number of ageing military structures. Here’s an enormous empty hangar, once used for aircraft storage, as big as a football pitch. Over there is a small Nissan hut, corrugated, rotting. In the distance is a Martello tower, refurbished in Grand Designs style, overlooking the airfield like a lighthouse surveying the sea. They, and other buildings, are plonked randomly on the flat grass, as though God’s been playing Lego.
And over here, by a clump of trees, is a small caravan. Nothing special, just one you might clip to the back of your car for a quick weekend break to Cromer. Inside, sitting at the table, writing in her notebook, is director Joanna Hogg.
It’s lunchtime, and the cast and crew of Hogg’s fifth film,
The Souvenir: Part II, are in the food tent, scoffing shepherd’s pie. Hogg is making notes before this afternoon’s filming. The shoot is nine weeks long and this is week five, so she’s in the thick of it. She seems calm, but she’s always thinking. Her hair is tied back, she taps the table, she takes her glasses on and off. She has the air of an academic; though really, she’s an artist, albeit one who only began making her art when she hit middle age.
Hogg, 59, has completed four feature films: Unrelated, Archipelago, Exhibition and The Souvenir. Unrelated came out in 2007, when she was 47, and caused a small sensation: critics called it “exhilarating”, “fascinating”, and welcomed its distinctly non-british, European style. Set in Italy, amongst the holidaying English posh, the film featured a young Tom Hiddleston, as a distracting, arrogant teenager. Kathryn Worth played 40-something friend-of-the-family Anna, hanging out with the young people of the group, rather than the adults; she ends up isolated from both. There’s a father-son argument that takes place off-screen, but is heard by the rest of the group sunbathing at the pool, which is hard to forget. Archipelago (2010), set on the Scilly Isles, also features Hiddleston, this time as a well-meaning 25-year-old saying goodbye to his family (and his job in the City) before he leaves to volunteer in Africa. The family meals are so realistic as to be excruciating, and the film attracted the attention of Martin Scorsese, who has executive-produced both parts of The Souvenir. Exhibition (2013) starred Slits-guitarist-turned-writer Viv Albertine and conceptional artist Liam Gillick as a childless middle-aged couple preparing to move out of their madly cool 1960s house. Albertine’s character, a performance artist, appears sometimes to actually be in love with the house, draping herself around its corners, lying on its surfaces as though she’s absorbing its essence through her skin.
In all of Hogg’s films, there’s a strong sense of enclosed space, and how people act within that space; there’s a plot but it doesn’t drive the action, which is leisurely; the characters are complicated and the audience isn’t given the usual clues as to whose side we should be on. Hogg uses both professional actors and those who have never acted before; the acting is completely believable and naturalistic, and the camera, held steady, seems just to be showing us what is going on. You feel as though her characters continue with their lives, whether you watch them or not. Though her milieu is the upper-middle-classes, there are no Downton Abbey clichés, no Richard Curtis comedy. Hogg’s films can seem quiet, but they stay in the head for a long time.
ilm number four is The Souvenir.
fSet in the early-to-mid 1980s, it tells the story of a love affair between Julie, a young woman just starting out at film school, and Anthony, a charismatic older man whose life is not what it seems. In other director’s hands, this might be a quirky romcom, or the tale of an innocent girl blossoming into womanhood. Not Hogg’s.
“I’m interested in work and relationships,” she says. “Whether they can exist together. How relationships work and how you do your work in a relationship. If you’re a creative person, then a lot of your life revolves around that, but then you’re also dealing with someone in your life. In Souvenir, Anthony is very necessary to Julie, she relies on him so much.”
The Souvenir is based on Hogg’s own life. She, too, went to film school in the early ’80s, and had a similar affair to Julie’s; although, she says, she was less naive than Julie about what her boyfriend might be up to. “It wasn’t like I didn’t spot the danger signs, I did, but I still went ahead.” She used clips from her own student films in The Souvenir — “It was nice to find something to do with them, they’d been gathering dust for so long” — and, despite how the relationship dominates the story, there’s an underlying feeling that Julie is a young woman trying to move into her métier.
The Souvenir: Part II, says Hogg, develops this.
“I’m still figuring it out,” she says, “but it’s a reaction to what happens in part one. I always felt there couldn’t only be a part one, because it was only half the story. I wanted to show not just Julie being swallowed up by a relationship, but how life marks you, and how things that happen to you in your life, if you’re a creative person, get processed in the work that you do. The process of grieving someone, how that goes through Julie and her creativity, her filmmaking.”
In the first Souvenir, set in the right-on early ’80s, the thoroughly Southern, upper-middle-class Julie proposes to make a film about a working-class boy in Sunderland, set as the city’s ship-building industry collapses. In real life, Hogg herself wanted to make that very film, and did lots of research around it. Her film school tutors were supportive, but when she decided to move away from this semi-documentary approach, they became less encouraging: “Maybe I would have been better at art school, where you could experiment.” She felt as though her ideas weren’t valid. So it was a strange relief for the grown-up Hogg to find that, when she was making The Souvenir, her notebooks from that time were a source of inspiration. “I’d had the idea that my younger self was more ignorant,” she says. “It was a shock to discover that 20-year-old me had a brain and had ideas and was not so different to how I am now.”
She used her old notebooks and films as a roadmap for her actors, as well as tapes of therapy sessions that both she and her boyfriend took (separately). When writing, she doesn’t come up with a conventional line-by-line script: instead she crafts a story of what she wants to explore, the setting, the arc, the characters. As well as the research, she sometimes gives the actors a summary of a scene, written like a novel. Often she sets up the cameras and then tells the actors how their characters are feeling, and a couple of
lines of dialogue she’d like them to say. If the scene drags, she tells them, “Okay, just do it again, but cut that bit out, get to this part more quickly.”
Julie, in both parts of The Souvenir, is played by Honor Swinton Byrne, daughter of Tilda Swinton (who also plays Julie’s mother in the films). Hogg went to school with Swinton, and she is Swinton Byrne’s godmother. But, says Hogg, her goddaughter wasn’t someone who popped into her head as a potential main actor. In fact, she spent quite some time trying to find the right person: she wanted an artist, as opposed to an actor, someone who was young and beginning to explore their own practice. Having not seen Swinton Byrne for many years, she was visiting the Swinton family home in Scotland and “re-met” her, “and just had a feeling”. Hogg’s instinct was correct: though Swinton Byrne was just 19 and had never acted before, she gives a vulnerable, real performance. Weirdly, she looks rather like Hogg; they both have the same long face. “Yes, I was looking at her today on the monitor, and I thought, ‘Wow, she really does look like me at that age.’”
hough The Souvenir
tand The Souvenir: Part II are both set in London, they were filmed here in Norfolk. An earlier trip round the Part II set, in one of the enormous air hangars, reveals the lobby is dressed as the foyer of Julie’s film school. In the vast space beyond there are two plasterboard sets of Julie’s small maisonette flat — two separate floors — based exactly on Hogg’s own first flat in London, a Kensington pied-à-terre owned by her parents. The top floor is surrounded by photographs of a London skyline, pasted onto board, to give the outside view. The original photographs were taken by Hogg when she was living in London in the mid ’80s; the set contains much of the furniture she had then.
It must be a strange feeling, to make a version of your own history. But Hogg has always explored, albeit obliquely, what is going on in her life, past and present. Her films are distinctly authored, though there’s not always such an obvious alter ego as in The Souvenir. She can’t predict when a film idea will take hold; she just finishes one project and then thinks for a while.
“I’m very fond of writing in notebooks,” she says, tapping the one in front of her on the table. “And gradually one of the things I’m writing about gets a momentum… Some filmmakers start with an image, but I can never pinpoint one thing. It’s always about the coinciding of a number of things at the same time, and I become inspired. And with The Souvenir, though this was something that happened to me, I saw it very much as a narrative, a contained tale.”
It’s interesting, the interplay of Hogg’s middle age with her earlier years. Often the midpoint of your life sees a reckoning that can involve you returning to the interests of your early years. Hogg didn’t begin making films until her late forties. Why was that?
“Well,” she says, “I was diverted because of my experience at film school, really. I suffered a loss of confidence, because
I didn’t find my allies. And though I stubbornly pursued my ideas, despite all this negative feeling, it finally got to me. I had my tutors’ voices in my head and they told me I should get nuts-andbolts experience working in television, so I did.”
Janet Street-porter, then working for Channel 4, saw Hogg’s 1985 graduation film and asked her to make a mini-soap opera for
the new, groundbreaking youth show, Network 7. From there, Hogg was offered other work and gradually moved into TV directing. She was a director for Casualty, London’s Burning, Staying Alive (about student nurses) and Eastenders — all the while dreaming of making her own films.
“I would think, ‘Yeah, I’ll take that job — it will take me four months and I’ll write while I’m working,’” she says. “But there would never be time. So then I would say, ‘Right, I’m going off to write,’ and then I’d get a phone call for another job. You say yes, because it’s easier. It’s easier than sitting down and writing something you don’t know that anyone will be interested in. You get swept up in the momentum of a series that’s already got financing, it’s already written, it’s even got a cast and you get some kind of pat on the back. And there’s the money, of course... “
After a few false starts, it was filming ‘Dot’s Story’, a one-hour Eastenders special that came out in 2003, that finally tipped Hogg out of TV. “It was a frustrating experience,” she says, diplomatically. There were two other factors: her coming to terms with the fact that she and her husband, architect-turned-artist Nick Turvey, weren’t going to have children; and the death of her dad. Hogg’s father, an insurance broker, died unexpectedly, aged 78, when the aircraft he was flying as a hobby crashed in the Chiltern Hills. His death, in particular, shifted something in Hogg; she was no longer willing to compromise her artistic ambitions. And so she re-started her filmmaking, looked at her old ideas once more. She went back to her beginnings. And she realised what she could do.
“I read novels and I like the way you can show characters in a much more complex way in a novel,” she says. “It’s a challenge, in cinema, to do that, because you haven’t got that internal dialogue, but I like that challenge and I want to meet it, even if it’s nigh-on impossible. I want to feel that character, feel their different dimensions, for there to be nothing contrived.
I find with a story with a lot of plot, the characters are serving the plot, but I’m not interested in reducing a character to a few traits; I don’t want to tell that kind of story.” Before starting The Souvenir, Hogg re-read The Portrait Of A Lady, and thought, “Yes!”
hen hogg was young, she loved
wmusicals — the final shot of The Souvenir is inspired, she has said, by Singin’ In The Rain — and she has her favourites that she returns to. Bob Fosse, Lady In The Dark, Cover Girl. “Connecting back, influencing myself and re-influencing myself. Rewatching those films they’re like old friends, I know all the dialogue, though I haven’t seen them in years.”
And actually, she would like to make something on a bigger scale: not a Hollywood film, but something with a bigger crew, inside a studio. “Maybe a full-on musical?” she wonders, and laughs at the idea. But why not? Within Hogg’s short career, each time, the film has got a little bigger. The time frame has expanded, there are more characters, the crew is more numerous, the sets more complicated. Late in the day, Joanna Hogg is exploring her ambition, which stretches out all around her, forward and back, like those big Norfolk skies.