Finding a film inside a film
Director JOANNA HOGG on how the student movie within The Souvenir Part II emerged almost by itself
IN 1986, Then-film student Joanna Hogg made
Caprice, her graduation film with then-unknown actor Tilda Swinton. In 2021, Hogg’s semiautobiographical sequel, The Souvenir Part II, sees Swinton’s daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne, play Julie, a proxy for Hogg, as she directs her own graduation piece. It’s funny how things turn out, Hogg says. “This hall of mirrors in this connection of Tilda as my friend, the person in my graduation film now in my films currently — it wasn’t designed like that,” she says.
There are many meta-layers to the project:
The Souvenir Part II is largely about the making of a film entitled ‘The Souvenir’. But while it participates in the classic tradition of filmswithin-films, it’s the personal, autobiographical quality that’s key. “The film that Julie makes is part of her story,” Hogg says. “Part of my story.”
As in the first part of The Souvenir, Julie is Joanna by another name, now trying to process her grief and confusion over Anthony, her heroinaddicted lover who died in part one, by making a thesis film about him, casting Pete (Harris Dickinson) as ‘Anthony’ and Garance (Ariane Labed) as ‘Julie’. Much of the narrative involves Julie wrangling a cast and crew to deliver a personal vision about a man she never really knew.
“I still don’t understand the person that I lived with on whom Anthony, the character, is based,” says Hogg. “But then I decided, ‘Well, I’ll make that mystery, or that lack of knowing, part of the story.’”
The film-within-a-film soon took on a life of its own. Hogg handed over some of Part II’S real crew to Swinton Byrne, and filmed the results.
“She’d had the experience of shooting part one and some of Part II,” Hogg explains. “She’d been observing our working methods, and learning what it means to be a director.”
But in a final flourish, the film-within-a-film plays to us, the viewer, as a surreally beautiful, dreamlike fantasy, à la The Red Shoes — not at all the one we watched her shoot. This final touch came organically, too. “We’re sort of living the story with Julie as we’re shooting it,” Hogg explains. “I didn’t want to decide all the detail in advance, and then find Julie has arrived at a different point in her life.” It’s a cinematic hall of mirrors that, to the very end, reflected on itself.