Joanna Hogg in Conversation with Christine Smallwood
Joanna Hogg in Conversation with Christine Smallwood
Tilda Swinton in The Eternal Daughter (2022)
BY
Christine Smallwood
A conversation with Joanna Hogg about her new film The Eternal Daughter.
The Eternal Daughter plays 7 Ludlow from December 2. Hogg’s first three features—Unrelated, Archipelago, and Exhibition—are streaming now on Metrograph At Home.
Joanna Hogg released her first film at the age of 47. Unlike some artists, who begin with autobiography and branch out to other subjects, her work has become increasingly introspective, circling ever closer to the pressures of family life, the texture of memory, and the rhythms of creative work. She begins each production with a script of sorts—a document filled with pictures and text—then asks her actors to improvise. (She shoots scenes chronologically, so she can change direction as needed.) She isolates her cast on set, asking them, when possible, to live in the rooms that their characters do. In The Souvenir (2019) and The Souvenir: Part II (2021), Hogg went further to imbue life into art. She used props and costumes that had belonged to her, and recreated the apartment she had lived in, to tell a story about a relationship she had in film school with a charismatic, charming, older man who was, she discovered, a heroin addict. The “Joanna character,” Julie, was played by Honor Swinton Byrne, the daughter of Tilda Swinton, who played Julie’s mother, Rosalind. Hogg’s newest film, The Eternal Daughter (2022)—arriving fresh from the New York Film Festival—picks up the story decades later, as Julie is trying to make a film about her mother. It’s set at a spooky old hotel, the kind where the trees are shrouded in mist and strange noises bang in the night. To make matters more haunting yet, the parts of Julie and her mother are both played by Swinton.
Hogg does not like doing interviews. As she once said in a conversation with Martin Scorsese, “So much is instinctive, and I suppose that’s the worry I have about when you talk to a journalist and they’re asking you questions—that somehow the instinct is going to get rubbed away, because you’re thinking too much about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. I don’t think it’s good to talk about the creative process too much.” We talked about it, anyway.—Christine Smallwood
CHRISTINE SMALLWOOD: I understand from listening to some other interviews that you don’t love talking about your creative process.
JOANNA HOGG: It’s more—I have talked about it a lot, yeah, and I just worry that it’s going to change it or make me too self-conscious.
CS: Has it?
JH: There’s something about finding it a little bit more difficult to get into... I find that going from this—well, not this, I’m sure this conversation is going to be very nice—sort of “promoting a movie” mode to being very quiet and still and, yeah, needing some space around me to find ideas and feelings to come to me... I can’t do that when there’s a lot of noise, and the promotional world is very noisy. I dream of not having to do it at all.
CS: Just putting the film into the world and going away.
JH: Going away and letting the film completely speak for itself.
CS: Is that not an option?
JH: I mean, it probably is, and it would be up to me to say, “No, I’m not doing anything,” but then there’s a little bit of me that thinks that’s a slightly ungenerous act. I get the most pleasure when I’m meeting the audience after films. That’s where I get engaged.
Joanna Hogg at 7 Ludlow, photograph by Wes Knoll
CS: The Eternal Daughter is so different than your earlier films, because, for one, it uses the shot/reverse shot technique. I was used to seeing you use wider shots with lots of bodies moving around in the same frame.
JH: It’s interesting to hear you say that it’s a different style, because with each film, I feel like I’m pushing myself in new directions. It’s not like I see [this film] as apart from the other films in that way. But when I was initially talking to my cinematographer about how to work with Tilda playing two characters, yes, it was a challenge to find a way that I didn’t have to let go of the process that I often use, which is open-ended.
CS: The Eternal Daughter wasn’t scripted ahead of time?
JH: No. I worked in the same way [as usual]. I mean, I have to really think back in order to describe it to you, because I—it’s such an intense process to make a film, and when I’m mining a lot of my personal material it’s particularly intense, so I can’t keep carrying that around with me after I finish the film. So, it’s in the past now, and I’m also not interested anymore. I’ve moved on.
CS: But pretend it just happened.
JH: We were improvising together, to get the form, to get the content…
CS: With the camera rolling?
JH: With the camera rolling. I’m not an actor, but it was a way to construct the scenes. I felt like I was becoming one of the characters, because, you know, of my own relationship with my mother, and how I feel as a daughter—we’d have to switch roles, obviously. We would film Julie’s side, and then there would be a gap before being able to shoot Rosalind’s side, but she was able to hold the conversation in her head, and then when we came to Rosalind, sometimes new material would come into the conversation. Then it was a question of editing, because Helle [le Fevre], the editor I’ve worked with on all the films, was incredible in piecing it together but also keeping the natural rhythms…. What we tried at one point—it didn’t work for Tilda and I completely understand why—is we thought, “Okay, well, maybe she hears the other character in her ear,” as she’s Julie she’s hearing Rosalind. But of course, that was terrible for the natural rhythm of speech that I wanted. In the end, it was very simple and really down to Tilda’s skill of switching from one character to another, and holding these conversations but also developing them. We did some takes where she doesn’t speak at all, she’s just hearing the dialogue in her head. It was very powerful doing that, actually. Seeing her as Rosalind not say the words, but feel them.
CS: It sounds like the process layered in something that happens in life, when a conversation is really two different conversations. You know what I mean? People aren’t always completely attuned to the moment—and that’s actually built into the history of the production in a way.
JH: Yeah, it’s true, someone doesn’t necessarily listen to what the other person is saying. I suppose that’s very characteristic of Julie and Rosalind. Rosalind especially is very much inside her own mind, and then there’s a sort of guesswork that happens between mother and daughter, and yeah, where the edges get blurred between the two.
CS: I started by asking you about the characters not sharing the frame because as I was watching the film, I had this overwhelming desire for them to be in the same shot. Another filmmaker would have made that happen with some kind of editing trick.
JH: Or have a double sitting there. I had watched, for example, Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988). This isn’t at all a criticism because Dead Ringers is an incredible film, obviously, but watching that and other films that use that technique of having somebody else there in the frame—I didn’t want anything “other” in there. And there was also a practical thing. I didn’t want Tilda to be sitting opposite a stranger. We’re such old friends, it was okay with me, even maybe quite a good thing, but when it wasn’t me, it was nobody, and that was the best thing. I just didn’t want any trickery! I just didn’t see that it was necessary.
Joanna Hogg at 7 Ludlow, photograph by Wes Knoll
CS: Well, it doesn’t seem part of the way you do things.
JH: Yeah. And actually, it was Tilda who came up with the idea of her playing both parts. We were both still very attached to Rosalind from The Souvenir’s, and then even earlier than that, in 2008, before I made Archipelago, I had wanted to make a film about a mother and daughter going to stay in a hotel. So the idea had been floating around for some time. We assumed she would play Julie and an elderly actor or non-actor would play Rosalind—we sometimes had fantasy casting about who that might be—and then when she suggested herself, it just made so much sense on so many levels.
CS: It works psychologically, too, because of the doubling and projection within a mother-daughter relationship.
JH: It thematically completely makes sense, but actually came out of very practical needs. And then, because I was often thinking about [the classic ghost story writer] M.R. James and Victorian ghost stories and the qualities they have, and obviously they didn’t have CGI then, I wanted it to feel like an old—not faded, I don’t think the film is faded in that look—but I wanted it to feel like an old ghost story.
CS: The Hitchcock typography for the end credits is really nice.
JH: I watched Rebecca (1940) shortly before I made the film. Actually not because of making the film, I just happened to watch it. During that first lockdown, I watched a lot of quite dark films.
CS: Rebecca is so good.
JH: So good. It’s so good. Any remakes, I don’t know why anyone bothers to do a remake of Rebecca, as tempting as it might be. Although I’m not remotely tempted. I’m just happy to keep watching the Hitchcock version. It’s really incredible.
CS: How much do you think it matters for someone to go into your films knowing about their production history? For example, knowing the bed in The Souvenir was really your bed. Is it important to you that a viewer has that information?
JH: No, no, no. I think it’s only important for myself because it imbues it with something extra. I don’t know quite how my films in the future are going to work out because I can’t take my own props for everything, and I’m not that much of a hoarder, but there’s something powerful for me about using those objects, or referring to those objects in relation to the stories that I tell… I think what’s important is what they get from the film. Because of my investment in it and my use of, not just physical paraphernalia but the kind of paraphernalia of my life, something then comes off from that in terms of a more intense experience, maybe.
CS: Can we talk about how you use artists in your films? There’s the real-life painter in Archipelago (2010), Christopher Baker; the couple in Exhibition (2013), who are played by the musician Viv Albertine and the artist Liam Gillick; and the film students in The Souvenir movies. Is there something about telling stories about artists that you find interesting? Are you conscious of wanting to tell stories about artists?
JH: No, not really. I mean, I’m married to an artist, and I’m interested in art and I’ve got quite a few friends who are artists, but there’s no kind of plan, really. The casting of Christopher in Archipelago came about because I was being taught by him. I was taking painting lessons, and while I was having lessons—a group of us, actually, not just me on my own—I was developing Archipelago. It didn’t, as far as I remember, have the artist character in from the beginning; Christopher inspired that aspect of the film. I’d be sitting there trying to learn to paint, but I’d be thinking about my next film, and listening to him, thinking, “Oh, what he’s saying is really interesting and it connects with my view of my own filmmaking.” I thought, “Well, he might be a really great performer.”
Archipelago (2010)
CS: Why were you taking painting classes?
JH: Because I really love to paint. I love particularly to draw, actually—not in any kind of professional way, a total amateur way. In fact, right now, I’m getting a little bit back into drawing again, and I find it incredibly therapeutic, I love the fact that I’m in complete control of what I draw or paint. I don’t have to promote it. I don’t even have to show it to anybody.
CS: Do you like to draw people, or…?
JH: I’d like to be better at drawing people. I like to paint people. I don’t even know if I can articulate exactly what I do because I’m exploring, but I suppose when I started drawing and painting again, just before I made Unrelated, it sort of inspired me to make Unrelated, even though that’s not about an artist. I hadn’t painted or drawn for many years. I was very interested in trees, actually, I was doing a lot of studies of trees in the place where I shot Unrelated. I was obsessed with one particular avenue of trees that was behind the house I was renting.
CS: Do you find that drawing makes you approach framing a film shot differently?
JH: I don’t think it makes me see it differently, but it’s a similar urge. Framing a picture or a still photograph—I still like to take still photographs—or framing an image in a film, I have the same sensibility.
CS: What made you want to make films? Was there a particular film you saw that made you want to try?
JH: I [wanted to be a filmmaker] from the age of about 19. So it’s quite a long time to go back and remember exactly what I thought, and of course, what I realized making the last three films is just how unreliable our memories are. So, I don’t know if this is true or not, but I do remember a particular point in time when I was taking still photographs where I felt that there was a limitation to that, because I was really interested in people, and [with photography] I could only capture a moment in time, and I wanted to do something—in other words, make a film, where I could expand those observations.
CS: To see the people move?
JH: Not just see them move, but tell stories about them. I was really inspired when I was 19 or 20 by a photographer called Duane Michals. This was the late ’70s and I was becoming aware of Derek Jarman’s work, Ron Peck, Chris Petit, I don’t know, Fassbinder. There were a lot of really interesting filmmakers at that time. Ulrike Ottinger. I really loved her films. Ticket of No Return (1979), when I saw that in the Edinburgh Festival, it just completely struck me. That story of the alcoholic woman and the way that it was very theatrical; I really responded to quite theatrical work at that time.
I love the fact that I’m in complete control of what I draw or paint. I don’t have to promote it. I don’t even have to show it to anybody.
CS: I’ve been thinking about your love of movie musicals and wondering what it is about them that appeals to you, and maybe it’s just that—they’re theatrical, but also pure cinema.
JH: Yeah, exactly. It’s not that it’s something that can be seen on a stage. It’s beyond that. It’s not about staginess. It’s about imagination and something a bit larger than life.
CS: It really forces that collision between what is fantasy and what is real.
JH: Which I’m so interested in, or I’ve become interested in again, having had the confidence knocked out of me at film school when I made work [including the student film Caprice] that was very theatrical in that way you’re describing…
CS: It was not greeted with applause.
JH: No, it was not welcome. I was made to feel like I’d done something—that I failed, that I hadn’t made a proper film.
CS: Can you say anything about how you edit?
JH: I go through different… feelings when I’m editing. Helle is a really good friend now, of course, we’ve known each other for many years, and she’s got an incredible sensibility, and why I loved working with her from the beginning is that she’s very unjudgmental. We both are able to explore ideas. There’s no sense of, “Well, that’s a silly idea” or “We mustn’t do that.” We’re very open and sort of quite vulnerable in the way that we’re discovering what a film is. I just love her sensitivity. We both have a similar sensibility—not that we’re always bringing the same things to it. She’ll suggest something and I’ll suggest something else. It’s an incredibly satisfying collaboration. There’s a lot of exploring of ideas. The thing isn’t fixed, you know? We’ll throw the structure around. It’s a really very alive, mobile process.
CS: You’ve often worked with the same actors across projects. Do you consider that part of your practice, to work with the same people, or has it just happened because of the particular needs of the films?
JH: It’s really about getting fascinated in the people that someone is playing. So, with Rosalind, it was wanting to know more about her. Often a character will sort of leap from one film to another, not even necessarily with the same name, but there’s something I’m left still interested in that I want to carry forward.
CS: One of the things you film really well is naïveté. In your early films, the characters that Tom Hiddleston plays have this open, vulnerable innocence. And then The Souvenir—it’s a story about what it means to think you know a situation and then discover that everything about it was not what you thought it was.
JH: That’s not something I’ve thought about in that way, but it rings true. That’s something to do with maybe feeling a bit naïve myself, in a way, or needing to be naïve in creating a world, creating a story. Knowingness is not very interesting.
Christine Smallwood is the author of the novel The Life of the Mind.
Joanna Hogg at 7 Ludlow, photograph by Wes Knoll
