The characters in Joanna Hogg’s films remind me an uncomfortable amount of my parents’ friends, especially those who are getting divorced. Known for the ultra-natural performances given by her actors, often non-professional, and for her acute observation of the minutiae and subtleties of middle-class life, Hogg has a reputation as one of the finest independent directors around. Yesterday, the she spoke at Oriel in a question-and-answer session hosted by OBA. I turned up at the Harris Lecture Theatre wondering what light would be shed on her methods, inspiration, ambitions and mindset. Here’s what I observed.
Hogg begins on the subject of the naturalistic acting that characterises her films. Some of her dialogue is written, with the extent changing from scene to scene. The nuances come through naturally, she says. Whilst the idea of a writer writing the dialogue and the actors expressing it sounds completely natural and perhaps obvious, there’s undeniably something about the unnervingly realistic performances offered in her films that sets them apart from the norm. She puts the haphazard nature of sticking to a script (or not) down to the fact that she uses a lot of non-professional actors in her films. Working with them, she says, can make it hard to follow a script in the traditional sense. Either way, “certain lines filter through”. The most important points of a scene remain with or without a script.
The very process of casting these non-actors is both painstaking and also instinctive. Hogg believes, though, that it’s necessary to “de-performance” professional actors, and that in some cases non-actors give something extra, or perhaps avoid something unwanted – the recognisable qualities of a famous face on-screen. That, she says, was a motivation in casting two unknowns in Exhibition, her most recent film.
She speaks with the same accent as her characters, and one wonders quite how much they might be based on people she knows, especially when she has cast friends in the past, such as Viv Albertine in Archipelago, a decision she says “changed things” between them somewhat, without elaborating.
Despite a penchant for non-professionals, she has collaborated frequently with Tom Hiddleston. When asked what this consistency brings, her response is immediate. “He’s the exception to the rule. I haven’t run out of characters for him to play.” She refers to his other, more mainstream roles as “industrial” but expresses admiration for his ability to combine with non-actors, saying that rather than performing his role, he reacts to others.
Hogg began as a photographer. How might this affect her working dynamic with a director of photography? She laughs, and reveals that despite offering the DP with whom she worked on 2008’s Unrelated the same position on her follow-up feature, Archipelago, he turned her down. The camera is incredibly still in much of Hogg’s work, lingering and observing in silence (none of her films contain any non-diegetic music); the DP was often at a loose end, wanting against the director’s will to move things round. “He had nothing to do,” explains Hogg.
Why employ such a consciously still camera, then? It is suggested that it makes the film less judgmental of its subject. Hogg offers a more practical explanation: the Sony Z1 she used to shoot Unrelated was of too poor quality to move around for scenes. “It’s just very ugly!” she jokes.
Low-budget production has become a hallmark of Hogg’s work. She explains that it allows for experimentation, as does a small crew. A crew of 30-plus on a major feature makes it difficult for a director to change her mind. When one can reshoot, change the dialogue or re-frame a shot at will, “it becomes this more-alive thing”. When asked whether she prefers to allow the action of her films to take place in the mind of the viewers, Hogg’s response is “I’m not unique in that way”, though she agrees it’s probably true. Mainstream cinema, she notes, is predictable in terms of its narrative. “As a viewer, I like it when I’m given space to use my imagination.” After working on TV dramas for years (an experience she refers to again as “industrial” in the most negative sense of the word), she is wary of how it patronises the audience. Large amounts of money and funding, like crew size, worry her because of the potential lack of creative freedom they can entail.
During the Q&A there are numerous clips shown from Hogg’s films. Every one is received with a mixture of quiet laughter and uncomfortable shifting. It raises the question of what genre she might fall into, and perhaps points to something wider: that naturalism is harder to categorize than stylisation. When asked about the possibility that her films come under a poetic realist umbrella, Hogg is keen not to be pinned down. Her shots, especially the apparently “poetic” ones, are not necessarily conceived that way in advance. She elaborates: “One’s striving for some type of poetry, but I don’t know what that means. A lot of the process is getting rid of things.” If there are poetic shots, she puts that down to interpretation by the viewer. Likewise, when her films are compared to Chekov in structure, she is careful not to commit to agreeing.
Hogg is articulate and thoughtful. She has just re-read Anna Karenina and names her influences variously as Derek Jarman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Kraftwerk. She is in the middle of running a two-year retrospective of Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. She clearly doesn’t want to be shackled to any single label or slave to other people’s visions, whether on account of their money or their involvement in the production process. She is perhaps non-committal in her answers, if only on account of valuing subtlety over cinematic buzzwords. A director who doesn’t like actors to perform, doesn’t want to promote her films, who prefers the editing process to shooting, who doesn’t want a larger team or more money — Joanna Hogg is unlike any other you’ll find working in the British film industry at the moment.
