The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘Period drama? I ran in the opposite direction’
How director Joanna Hogg went from ‘Casualty’ to making modern British classics – by fictionalising her affair with a heroin addict
When Joanna Hogg graduated from film school in the mid1980s, it was a good time to be an ambitious young director in Britain. Our national cinema may have been in the doldrums, but a bold new generation of talent was being incubated by the booming advertising and music video scenes, while the socalled heritage films of Merchant Ivory and others were nurturing a global audience for distinctively British pictures. The Cool Britannia era was ripening. Though when the time came to pluck the fruit – as film-makers such as Danny Boyle, Richard Curtis and Guy Ritchie very successfully did – Hogg found herself directing episodes of EastEnders, Casualty and London’s Burning to earn a crust.
Now 61, she is the definition of a late bloomer. Her fifth and latest feature, The Souvenir: Part II, completes a miraculously moving and beautiful semi-autobiographical diptych, which, taken as a whole, is – in this critic’s view, at least – one of modern British cinema’s signature achievements. Not that loving Hogg’s work is an especially niche view these days. She has been boosted and mentored by Martin Scorsese, and her films – thrillingly precise, sometimes drily comic portraits of the British upper-middle class – have been feted at Cannes and Berlin. Her eye for actors is flinty-sharp: her 1986 graduation film starred a then-unknown Tilda Swinton, and she cast Tom Hiddleston in his first big-screen role. Yet she didn’t complete her first feature, 2007’s Unrelated, until her mid-40s, after almost two decades of anonymous television work. So – given others were making hay – why the hold-up?
“My plans for first films just weren’t first films,” Hogg recalls over a mid-morning coffee in Soho. “They were big and unfashionable and sort of impossible.” Dressed in a dark bomber jacket with a stylish zigzag pattern, she’s a thoughtful, sometimes hesitant speaker: after we meet, she’s taping a director’s commentary, the prospect of which she doesn’t much relish. “My commentaries tend to be very…” she begins, and a few seconds pass in silence. “Sparse.”
In her 20s, heritage cinema was something she “absolutely hated”. “There was this cartoonising of a certain way of life, and I just didn’t buy it. I wanted to run as far as possible in the opposite direction, artistically. While everyone else was making period dramas, I was set on making [my own] One from the Heart.”
Francis Ford Coppola’s neondrenched, avant-garde musical – a box-office disaster in 1981 – didn’t serve as a particularly wise model for an aspiring director. None of Hogg’s ideas for features took off, and in the post-graduation lull, she remembers “consciously deciding to get more experience working with actors, and that TV would be a sort of secondary film school”.
In fact, it soon became a full-time gig. “I would have been horrified at the time to think that it was going to take that chunk out of my working life,” Hogg says. “But I’ve always found it very hard to refuse well-paid work.” She also enjoyed the “macho” competitive element: “Working alongside other people who are making other episodes, there’s a thrill in finding out just how fast you can go. I’m very competitive like that. The only problem is, it doesn’t leave you with anything.”
Conversely, both parts of The Souvenir – the first of which came out in 2019 – have been fashioned to last. They were inspired by a relationship Hogg had in the 1980s with an older, louche, enigmatic arthistory student who led a strange and eventually unsustainable double life. Part of the mystery revolved around suspicions in his friendship group that he was a spy: some thought he worked for MI6, others that his loyalties lay with Russia. But his other secret was fatal. He was a heroin addict, and died of an overdose, aged 33, in the lavatories at the Wallace Collection – the London gallery that houses a romantic JeanHonoré Fragonard painting he had loved, and from which The Souvenir films would later draw their title. Hogg, who was in her mid-20s at the time, was shaken to the core. But she was also inspired.
“I just thought, ‘There’s a story there,’” she says. “It all felt very Hitchcockian – this mystery man who says he does one thing, but we can’t know for sure.” It also immediately struck her as a two-part
Hogg ‘absolutely hated’ Merchant Ivory for ‘cartoonising a way of life. I didn’t buy it’
project: the first would cover the relationship itself, and the second her decision to process it, and its tragic end, through her art. Both parts centre on a young student film-maker called Julie, played by Honor Swinton Byrne – the daughter of Hogg’s old collaborator Tilda, who also appears as Julie’s mother in the two films, while her formative lover is played by Tom Burke.
The result has a beguiling hall-ofmirrors quality. The Souvenir: Part II follows Julie’s attempts to make a film based on the events of Part I, which in turn was based on events from Hogg’s own life. A painstaking replica set of Hogg’s old student flat in Knightsbridge is used to depict Julie’s place on screen, as well as the full-size copy of it the character builds for her own film. (“We had to think of ways of lighting and furnishing it to make our set look more like a set,” Hogg explains.) Even the external views from the flat were assembled from blown-up photographs Hogg had taken from her own windows in the 1980s. She rarely writes dialogue word-forword: her scripts are less like instruction manuals than guidebooks, with illustrative photographs and descriptions of her characters’ innermost thoughts.
Just before the release of the first part, it was announced that Robert Pattinson – the London-born Twilight heart-throb turned darling of independent cinema – would appear in the second in a major role. But his hefty commitments to Tenet and the new Batman film eventually forced him to jump ship.
Hogg met Pattinson “quite a few times, and I think the prospect of playing something closer to his own life, especially an actor, was something that attracted him, and slightly scared him, too”.
But his departure – and Hogg’s subsequent decision to split his character into two separate, smaller roles – was, she now thinks, in service of the greater good.
“It meant there would be no male lead, which suddenly seemed important. Because the whole point to me was to reach an ending where Julie was OK on her own, and not needing to be defined by her relationship with a man. As a film-maker, you also have to be adaptive and move on. I’ve found I’m very good at not getting too attached.” That soap-opera ruthlessness has gone nowhere.
Nor has the work ethic. When life ground to a halt in early 2020, Hogg was finishing the sound mix on The Souvenir: Part II, and was able to continue solo during lockdown, commuting to Pinewood Studios from her home in east London, where she lives with her husband, the artist Nick Turvey.
“And then I was thinking, ‘OK, what am I going to do now?’” The answer was to write her first “outand-out ghost story” – a script titled The Eternal Daughter, which she shot with Swinton and a handful of others when restrictions eased later in the year. Like her two most recent films, it was co-produced by Scorsese, who became a staunch Hoggite after seeing her 2010 breakthrough Archipelago, about a well-off family’s holiday on Tresco that goes skin-crawlingly awry.
Her five features to date have all contained elements of selfportraiture, and don’t try to mask their creator’s own class background. Hogg’s upbringing in Tunbridge Wells was unambiguously posh: her mother’s family is listed in Burke’s Peerage – and before her time at the National Film and Television School, Hogg attended West Heath Girls’ School; in the year below her was one Lady Diana Spencer.
This, of course, makes Hogg officially privileged, although she’s clearly uneasy about the term as a catch-all, and its wider implications in today’s diversity-conscious filmmaking business.
“I suppose I am viewed as someone from a certain background who depicts certain kinds of lives on screen,” she ventures. “But I don’t think it’s been easy for me. I don’t think I come from a background that’s helped me. I didn’t go to university. I still don’t feel educated in many ways.”
And her career speaks for itself. No doors were held open for her by friends of friends; no free rides proffered on the road to success.
“Even though I might not look on those early years too brightly now, I can only work the way I do because of them,” she says. “If you understand conventions, you know what you are rejecting. It’s only because I had been filming the right way for years that I was able to turn it upside down.”
The Souvenir: Part II is in cinemas from February 4
Charles Baudelaire “imbued sordid scenes with religious grace”, says Dana Gioia, in his excellent introduction to The Flowers of Evil, Aaron Poochigian’s new translation of Baudelaire’s masterpiece Les fleurs du mal. That blend of beauty and squalor shines through in Poochigian’s lilting version of this uncharacteristically quiet poem, one of a series reflecting on death. Baudelaire wrote of his “savage hatred of all mankind”, but here he treats the lives of the poor with delicacy and fellow feeling. No dreams of a gilded heaven here; for the poor and hungry, death offers only the hope of “a place where we can eat, sleep and be warm”.
The poet was no stranger to money troubles himself: he came into a good inheritance at 21, but had blown half of it within two years – absinthe and laudanum don’t pay for themselves – and spent much of his life in debt. From his birth in 1821 to his death from syphilis at 46, he embodied the idea of the “poète maudit” (“cursed poet”), becoming an idol to the rebellious younger generation of French writers that included Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine. To the equally “cursed” Arthur Rimbaud, Baudelaire was “the first seer, the king of poets, a true God”.
Tristram Fane Saunders