Joanna Hogg has long been a critical favorite, but with her fourth film, “The Souvenir,” which was picked up by A24 after impressing audiences at Sundance, she seems poised to pick up legions of new fans (our Sundance review). “The Souvenir” stars Honor Swinton Byrne (daughter of Tilda Swinton, who plays her mother in this film) as Julie, a young film student in the 1980s who falls into a tempestuous romance with Anthony (Tom Burke), a darkly charismatic young man whose quick wit and aristocratic bearing hide a serious drug addiction.
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It’s an extremely personal film for Hogg, based on an episode in her own life and portraying her artistic development. It was a pleasure to sit down with her and discuss finding a visual aesthetic, the film’s mix of creation and recreation, and her unique manner of working with actors that eschews a traditional script in favor of emotional maps and on-screen discoveries.
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I thought I’d start by asking about “The Souvenir,” the painting. What significance does that painting have for you that you decided to give it such a prominent place in the film?
Well, it was part of the original story on which the film is based. It was a painting that I first got to know at the beginning of a relationship, the one on which Julie’s is based on in “The Souvenir.” I’m still unpacking the significance of the painting in a way [laughs], but it was somewhere I was taken to, the Wallace collection at Manchester Square in London, I was taken there to look at this painting. It wasn’t just going to the gallery to look at other paintings, it was specifically that painting, and now, I still question what it was that man, that boyfriend that I had at the time, what he was trying to tell me I suppose.
I loved the way you incorporated other materials like the Super 8 films and I heard some of those were your own work from the 1980s. Is that true?
All the material that’s from the early 80s is material that I shot at that time. I must say there was great pleasure in using that material and looking at it again.
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What effect do you think it gave to the new material?
I wanted to see Julie’s eye, I wanted to see how she saw things and I guess I wanted to make a direct connection between myself and the fictional Julie and of course they lend a certain sense of that period of time because it’s real detail, it’s not made up. I wasn’t interested in a nostalgic view of that time, but it was a way of marking Julie’s progress as a filmmaker.
I believe you worked with a new DP on this, could you talk about how you found the look of the film?
Yes, I was planning to work with the DP of my previous two films, but his schedule didn’t allow for the film, so I was devastated for a short amount of time. I like having collaborators who are part of a family really. But this time I had to look around and I have to say it was a wonderful experience working with a new DP, David Raedeker, and he didn’t have a lot of time to get his head around this film, just three weeks before the shoot.
This was shot on film, correct?
Some of it is digital, some of it is film. But the digital we shot, we shot with an Alexa mini, using the 16mm sensor so it mimics 16mm. It was interesting to explore that idea and we looked at “Detroit,” the Kathryn Bigelow film, where she used that same method. The idea was to mix textures but I didn’t want it to be a clear thing when we go from film to digital and vice versa.
I found your method of shooting interiors very interesting, could you explain your process for setting up shots in a particular space?
David and I didn’t have that much time to prepare for the film, and in a way I quite liked that, because I like to work things out as we go along. I’m not a great planner of scenes and shots, I want to find them as I go along. It’s the same with the story and with how I work with the actors. So David and I very quickly got into a very good rhythm of making decisions, we’d have some ideas before we shot a scene, but then we’d always have the license of the space to change our minds and we were very much dictated to by the [specific locations].
For example with the layout of the apartment, one thing that was very interesting to use was the wall of mirror tiles, despite being in a small space, it expanded the space that we could work in. The other crucial thing, what David and I did have time to discuss and look at were my photographs from that period. I had some 35mm slides of the interior of that apartment and that was useful for both the color palette and the texture and also very useful for the production designer, because we didn’t have a location – there wasn’t a location, we built the set. So we used these stills of mine to recreate this time.
The flat really feels like a third character. Anthony comes in and takes over and then when Tilda comes in, it’s totally different. I liked the way it changed throughout the film.
Yeah. That was something I didn’t know, if it was going to become a character in that way, because in my other films, the starting point has always been a particular place that exists, and in this case the place didn’t exist, so we had to reinvent it and that was a real discovery and very exciting – to be able to create that sense of place.
I’m struck by the paradox of how you recreated this with such an eye for detail but it all adds up to such a dreamlike tone. Would you agree with that?
I like that you say that and in thinking about the film and how I came to make the film at that point at the time was very much connected to my film “Exhibition,” which was very much about the character of a place, the character of a house. In that film I was exploring for the first time memory and dream and a nonlinear structure, so I felt that “The Souvenir” was taking that dreamspace and exploring memory, going into my past, so if there is a dreamlike feeling maybe it’s connected to that it comes out of my dreams of that time, because I don’t feel my memory is particularly good. I’m engaging different senses when I think about it and when I’m dreaming it up.
Do you think the film is better or different because you made it at this point in time instead of ten or twenty years ago?
Yes, I think so. I thought about it ten years ago, but I was always worried about how I would get behind the Anthony character, because he was always, in real life as well, such a mystery to me. I always thought that the failing of trying to make a film about this story would be that I would not get inside his character, or that I didn’t have enough knowledge of him somehow and it was only when I let go of that idea of needing to have that knowledge that I could create my impression of him from that time and free me up to make the film.
I thought Anthony’s dialogue was so wonderful, in how he might slip a barb into a compliment, or speak on multiple levels at once. Was that challenging to write, or fun, or painful?
Well, I didn’t even write it actually [laughs]. In the process of making the film, what I write is not dialogue, I write examples of dialogue in my story document, I don’t really know what to call it but it outlines each scene and it outlines each story and it goes into a lot of detail. A lot of detail about what they’re thinking and then a little detail about what they’re saying. The idea is that I want to create a sort of emotional map for the characters so then the actors who are privy to that document can digest it and so when they speak, their voice is coming from that character but I’m not telling them what to say.
Tom is a very intelligent, intuitive actor and he spent quite a few months getting inside that character, thanks to diaries and letters written by that original person. He was able to get very deep into this character and I would guide him, but the words that would come out of Anthony were from Tom.
I’m shocked, that’s very impressive. The lines seem so polished.
Yeah, yeah. Of course, there’s the editing process, we don’t just do one take and it can be a matter of finding it, but essentially it’s Tom. It’s a kind of method I suppose, I don’t know if he’d describe himself as a method actor, but he has his own method and it’s incredibly powerful.
It’s a little hard to tell if his comments on art are sincere, but I wonder if you agree with any of them?
Well, I certainly thought they were sincere at the time, because they what he says is based on what happened to me and what I was told. Particularly in those early scenes where Julie is enthusiastic about her project set in Sunderland and how he sees another side of it, which she doesn’t particularly want to hear at first. So I think in his arguments, he’s behind what he’s saying, it’s not just for effect. Actually, I feel that he’s really engaged in what she wants to do and takes it really seriously, which is why he’s able to criticize it.
