“I tried to remember as much as possible,” says Joanna Hogg, the English writer and director, about her new autobiographical film, The Souvenir – her fourth feature. “I found it hard to give up on the illusion that I could remember everything.” She regrets the gaps, and yet the truth of her story may go beyond faithful record. It is about a relationship she had in the 80s, when she was in her 20s and at film school (she is 59 now), with a Cambridge-educated man (outstandingly played by Tom Burke) who claimed to work for the Foreign Office. He was arrogant, amusing, laconic. And – although not immediately apparent – vulnerable.
The film, with Martin Scorsese as one of its executive producers, has already won the grand jury prize at Sundance and had rave reviews. The New York Times’ critic described it as a movie he feels possessive about, confessing that he wanted to “keep it a secret because it feels like a private discovery”. He concluded that it is: “One of the saddest movies you can imagine and an absolute joy to watch.” I felt similarly, emerging from the cinema dazed, heartbroken and wanting to see the film again to reconsider what I’d just witnessed.
Hogg comes from a privileged, upper-middle-class background – privately educated at West Heath boarding school in Kent (Princess Diana’s alma mater). And – should one be seeking further aristocratic flourishes, it might be noted that the associate producer on The Souvenir is her cousin the Baronet of Belfield. Yet the interest of this artistically is that Hogg is correctly seen as a social realist – not least as someone who knows how mercilessly and accurately to scrutinise her own class.
Sitting next to Hogg today – we’re meeting in Soho – is Honor Swinton Byrne, the 21-year-old who plays Joanna (“Julie”) in the film. She last appeared in a documentary in homage to the late John Berger, The Seasons in Quincy. We see her in that film as a free-spirited teenager, with her twin brother, Xavier, picking raspberries in Haute-Savoie. She is the daughter of Tilda Swinton (who was a friend of Berger’s) and the playwright and artist John Byrne and is immediately winning and effusively intelligent. Her flawless performance in The Souvenir does not seem like a performance and – this is the extraordinary thing – she had not been planning to act at all. I suppose you could say, with Swinton as a mother and Hogg as a godmother, she was an actor waiting to happen.
Swinton and Hogg met when they were 11 (their parents were friends). The women drifted apart when Swinton went to Cambridge and Hogg was working as a photographer’s assistant (Derek Jarman was one of Hogg’s early mentors). The friendship was rekindled when Hogg was at the National Film School and cast Swinton in her student movie The Rehearsal. They have been close friends ever since, and it was no surprise Hogg should ask Swinton to suggest a suitable lead for The Souvenir. The only problem was that all the actors she saw were, inevitably, actors. Hogg was looking for someone more like herself, with an incipient shyness, who would be happier behind the camera than in front of it. She and Swinton continued to rack their brains until the moment – the 11th hour – when they saw that the person they were looking for had been there all along.
“This was two years ago,” Byrne explains. “I was 19 and about to come back to London after a visit to my grandfather. I got a text from Mum saying Joanna [who had been staying with Swinton in Scotland] would like to see me.” Ostensibly, this was just for a godmother-goddaughter catchup, but actually it was a chance for Hogg to think about Byrne in the film. “We met in a cafe in Berwick-upon-Tweed for about an hour and Joanna did not discuss the film. We left without paying and someone ran after us – that was really bad.”
“I don’t remember that,” Hogg says. “What I remember is our conversation on the station platform in which you were talking about what it was to be 19 and about relationships. It was in the space of 10 minutes – something clicked in me and I started to think, could she possibly be right for this part?” Hogg has form casting non-actors (painter Christopher Baker in Archipelago; musician Viv Albertine and conceptual artist Liam Gillick in Exhibition). What’s more, she valued Honor’s creativity (“Honor writes,” she adds, approvingly). “But I needed time. I wasn’t ready to jump in. I wasn’t sure it was something she’d be interested in, and didn’t ask.”
Three weeks later, when she did, Byrne remembers: “It was an immediate ‘yes’; there was not a doubt in my mind.” She had just left school. “I’d absolutely no idea what I’d do, except I knew I was going to Namibia for eight months.” As a way of filling the remaining time in a gap year, starring in Hogg’s film was irresistible. Byrne had a fortnight between agreeing to take the part and the start of filming. The Souvenir was shot in seven weeks.
The casting was a gamble, not least because of Hogg’s way of working. Her films – Unrelated (2007), Archipelago (2010) and Exhibition (2013) – evolve partly through improvisation; there is no conventional script. Hogg knows the power of the unsaid (and unsayable) and of the process of trying to find the words you need. Unrelated begins in sociable aimlessness on an Italian holiday that becomes subtly desolating. Archipelago, about a family reunion on Tresco in the Isles of Scilly, involves much revealing family small talk and a particularly squally undertow between siblings, and Exhibition, set in London, is almost scriptless, more about space than words, about how a struggling couple occupy an architecturally designed house they plan to sell.
The challenge (and joy) of Hogg’s films is that she is as interested in what does not happen as what does. Artfully unposed moments are her forte. Her indifference to incident-rich narratives means that her films tend to divide critical opinion. If The Souvenir has a powerful narrative – and it does – it is because life supplied it. She is like a dreamier, melancholy, middle-class version of Mike Leigh, improvising her way to the heart of things. But she is her own woman, too.
In The Souvenir, Hogg wanted some phrases included, but otherwise, as Swinton recently observed: “Joanna makes authors of all of us.” Tom Burke knew something of what to expect – he had months to think about his role. But before filming, Byrne did not know what the outcome of any scene would be. She made it up as she went along, which explains the hesitancy that is the film’s hallmark, along with its wonderful, offbeat and realistic dialogue, filled with what would have been casualties in an ordinary screenplay.
“There is so much adrenaline,” Byrne explains. “You’re thinking: I don’t know what’s going to unfold, I don’t know how to digest information and react as Julie. And by now, I don’t know where Julie begins and Honor ends – she’s become my alter ego and I love that.” All Byrne had to go on were Hogg’s 1980s journals, and she identified with their uncertainties: “Every single person,” she says, “in their early 20s, does not know what is going on in their life. You’re trying to find out what you’re good at, who you are, what you want, what your boundaries are. And you make mistakes and have self-confidence issues. Doing this film comforted me because I didn’t feel so alone. It reassured me it is OK to feel a little bit lost and not know what is going on, and stick with your truth.”
Hogg first thought of making a film about the relationship three years after it ended and envisaged it in two parts: “A relationship and a reaction to its ending.” But it took 30 years before she found the confidence, in 2015, to pursue the project. Today (they have just finished filming the second part, which should be released early next year), Hogg sits listening to Byrne with an encouraging smile. She is elegant, gentle and wears clothes that give nothing away – a white T-shirt, simple jewellery. Getting a sense of her is not straightforward. As a young woman, she was “hesitant but also very confident – you can be both”. And if she had to pick three adjectives to sum herself up? “Brave, insecure, optimistic.” She explores the paradoxical feeling that she is no longer the same person she once was, while, at the same time, acknowledging that her “investigation into my former self” made her realise “people do not change much”.
Byrne now pitches into the three-adjectives-to-describe-yourself game: “Enthusiastic, impatient (she drums playfully painted fingernails – red, yellow and blue – on the table), self-doubting.” She stalls before landing on a rule-breaking fourth: “Empathetic – I hope.” We talk about the tension between revelation and concealment in the film and she pounces on the subject, insisting “privacy” is key and that “we all have separate selves”. “Different selves for different people,” Hogg chimes in. To help with revelation, Hogg built a reconstruction of her former flat in Knightsbridge as a set, based on a photograph. It became her “talisman” and worked like “magic”: “Building that space built memories – so much came back, standing in that newly reconstructed flat.”
Remembering sometimes leads to reassessment: why did she stay in the relationship with “Anthony” for so long? She raises her hands in surrender: “It’s not possible to answer that. Why are we who we are? Some of what you’re touching on is tricky territory that we have been trying to explore in part two.” And did Anthony actually work for the Foreign Office? Her answer startles: “I do not know.” And what of the Fragonard painting The Souvenir (1775-78) that hangs in the Wallace Collection and is the film’s symbolic heart – was that an artistic afterthought? “No, it was a key part of the relationship.” In the film, Anthony and Julie visit the gallery and talk about the small painting of a woman dressed in rhubarb-coloured silk, with an about-to-be stormy sky behind her. She carves her lover’s initials into a tree. She leans into the tree to prop herself, a stance that might bode badly. A faithful spaniel looks on intently. And Anthony tells Julie his view of her: “You’re lost and you will always be lost.”
At film school, Julie is advised by a tutor to find links with her own experience to underpin her films. It is a version of “write what you know”. Yet Hogg is interested in “having an idea and not knowing how to realise it”. She films what she knows – and does not know, because she is trying to find out. “That relationship was surrounded by doubt and mystery and not knowing; in some senses, I’m none the wiser now.” And explanation has never been her thing? She does not deny it, and laughs.
The film raises questions about narrative ownership. It asks us to consider whether it is acceptable for an upper-middle-class young woman, living in Knightsbridge, to want to make (as Hogg did) a film about a Sunderland mining community. And is it any more acceptable for her to tell the true story of a complex man from her past? Hogg’s sense of social irony is hyperdeveloped. Yet the film’s power is in reaching beyond such considerations. “My conclusion, unlike the one Julie reaches,” Hogg says, “is that we should be able to tell whatever stories we like and be free to talk about anything.”
Swinton plays Julie’s mother, Rosalind, in the film. “It was the happiest thing to work with my mum,” Byrne says. “It came naturally. But it was hilarious, because our relationship on screen was so different to our real relationship.” She and her mother have “always been physically affectionate and close”, so playing the daughter of a standoffish, upper-crust mother with a silk headscarf, who wonders, in an early encounter, where to place a new lamp and nurses a “shopping headache” was drastically different. “We’d cuddle between takes, it was so much fun.” And it was easy to work with Hogg “because we’re so similar”. Hogg pitches in to say she loves to work in what feels like a family: “Tilda and I couldn’t believe we hadn’t worked together for 30 years. It was so easy and delightful.”
Byrne was brought up in the Highlands. She attended Drumduan, a test-free school her mother co-founded in 2013. Her childhood was “the happiest”, she says. It sounds idyllic. Two frolicking dogs in the film are recruits from the Swinton household. And as memory has been the undertow to our conversation, I ask Byrne what her inner snapshots of childhood are. She immediately singles out the Easter egg hunts. “Mum gets those tiny Lindt coloured eggs, about 300 of them – more every year – and hides them in tree branches, in the dogs’ ears, drops them on the ground… we never find them all.” She relates her earliest memory: “I was in an old-fashioned pram with my brother, and Mum was pushing us. Because the sun was behind our heads, it cast a shadow. I thought: there’s another one of us. Like our doppelganger. I watched until I realised that, as the sun went down, the shadow was becoming fainter.”
And has her brother Xavier so far managed to avoid being cast in anything? Byrne explains that he works in the art department on films (he worked on Star Wars). “He is also a pilot and I love him so much, we’re best friends. But I remember that – he will kill me when he reads this – when I came back from shooting the first film, he said: ‘Where have you been for two months?’ And I said: ‘I told you I’ve shot this amazing film.’ And he went: ‘Oh, were you a runner?’”
The Souvenir was shot chronologically on Super16 and it is interesting to see how it liberates Hogg to talk about the filming process. She is animatedly at home: “The creative pleasures of Super16 are to do with limitation. Each reel is 11 minutes long. Digital can go on ad infinitum and there is something uninteresting about that. I absolutely love that, with Super16, you can’t waste time.” She loves the “texture and grain” filming this way. She relishes the “economy” and “discipline”. Her work in television (she did not make her first feature film until she was 47) must have been a schooling in concision. When they shot The Souvenir digitally, she says, the effects were “much cooler”.
Until now, Hogg has protected herself from reactions to part one because: “I wanted to start filming part two unencumbered – it starts a couple of days after part one ends and continues into the future, from 1985 until the end of the decade. It will be the continuation – the beginning in some ways – of a young artist’s journey to express herself.” The filming was “an intense six and a half weeks” and she now has a handful of months to edit. The Souvenir might sound like an ending, but to Hogg there is, I suspect, no such thing. For Byrne, this is a beginning. She is off to Edinburgh Napier to study forensic psychology, and while it seems unlikely that after her uncommon debut she will continue as an ordinary student, she is, without even a hint of disingenuousness, not taking anything for granted. “I’m not ruling anything out,” she says. “I’m excited to try everything.”
The Souvenir is in cinemas 30 August