Joanna Hogg and Honor Swinton Byrne: ‘Everybody should work like this’

Joanna Hogg’s 1986 graduation short film Caprice is an inventive and effervescent joy, the story of a young woman who finds herself inside the pages of her favourite fashion magazine. It stars a then unknown actress, the British film-maker’s former school friend Tilda Swinton.

Now, 36 years later, the actress’s daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne, plays a character based on Hogg who, in The Souvenir: Part II, we see directing her own graduation film. There’s a pleasing circularity to it all. But this was not, says Hogg, at the front of her mind when she cast Swinton Byrne — who was then 19 and had almost no acting experience — as Julie, the lead in The Souvenir, the first part of her ambitious two-film project.

“Completely not, [though] it seems so obvious now and I can’t think of any other way it could have been,” says Hogg, when I meet director and star in central London. “It was really not at all preconceived, and I love that. There’s some magic when you’re making a film, and particularly casting it, that’s out of your control.”

Hogg was in the process of casting The Souvenir (Tilda Swinton also appears, as Julie’s mother) when both she and Swinton Byrne, her goddaughter, happened to be travelling by train on the same day — one returning from Scotland to London, the other heading in the opposite direction. An overlap in the timetable meant that they could meet for a friendly chat in a station café.

Swinton Byrne recalls that she “naturally started talking about relationships, because I love talking about that sort of thing”. Something in this brief conversation sparked an idea in Hogg, ever the film-maker. “I got a real feeling of Honor and what she was grappling with and how that could connect with what Julie was grappling with in a very different way.”

Casting Swinton Byrne was an enormous leap of faith, but it paid off. Her performance in both films is completely lived-in. Slightly gauche, all skittishness and tumbling words, but underpinned by an innate poise, she is utterly persuasive in the role.

Hogg had already enjoyed critical acclaim for Archipelago (2010) and Exhibition (2013), but the Souvenir films represent a step up in terms of artistic ambition — and success. The first film won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and topped Sight & Sound magazine’s annual critics’ poll in 2019 (the second, which debuted at Cannes last year, repeated the latter feat). 

It’s a deeply personal project, with the central character closely based on Hogg’s younger self. She has described the long-gestating project, which started to take shape in the late 1980s, as a form of catharsis. In the first film (warning: spoilers ahead), Julie is a diffident young woman who has tentative aspirations to become a film-maker and who is shaped by the tastes of her charismatic but oppressively erratic older boyfriend, Anthony. A heroin addict, he dies at the end of Part I and in the second film — the more ambitious and complex of the two — we see Julie processing her grief while also finding her identity and her creative voice. A frothy coming-of-age tale this is not.

Having spent time on sets with her mother, Swinton Byrne had some familiarity with the world of film-making (she had a non-speaking cameo in 2009’s I Am Love). But, she says, “The process I’d experienced with my mum was very regimented and structured. That was so foreign to my experience in making this movie with Joanna that I might as well have not had all that knowledge.”

I am struck by how close the two seem, both literally and psychologically. Sitting on an expansive leather sofa that stretches the whole width of a room, they are cosied up together in one corner and their answers seem to harmonise. Hogg, 61, is chic in dark trousers and knotted scarf; Swinton Byrne, 24, is all sunshine and warmth in a daffodil-yellow T-shirt.

“Someone said to me that the first film is about things happening to Julie, and the second film is about her making things happen independently from other people. I think that’s spot-on,” Swinton Byrne says, adding that this was reflected in the way she approached the role. “The second one was such a different process. I wanted to be included more on where things were going.”

It helped that in the period between the two shoots, she too had changed, spending a year living in Africa and starting a university degree. “I like to think I did mature a lot in those two years.”

Hogg’s creative and collaborative way of working — rather than a set-in-stone screenplay, she uses an outline document that provides a jumping-off point — is one that lends itself to improvisation and discovery.

“Part of the plan,” explains Hogg, “was that Julie and Honor would merge. I always felt that I could see Honor’s frustration with Julie’s passivity. And I thought, ‘God, really it’ll be so satisfying to see Honor emerge out of this shell of a woman into somebody very confident, not needing to have a man to complete her identity.’”

There are other elements in this mosaic of memories that feed into Julie’s character — the hint in one scene, for example, that she is suffering from an eating disorder, something both women have experienced. Swinton Byrne is matter-of-fact. “I suffered from bulimia, and I speak very freely about it to everybody who will listen. I mean, it’s so normal — and it really shouldn’t be. I have very, very few friends that haven’t suffered from some eating disorder.”

For Hogg, however, her experience was something she regarded at the time as “very shameful”, which perhaps explains the fleeting reference in a film that is otherwise forthright in confronting taboos. “I like to move away from the obvious a lot,” she explains. Swinton Byrne lets out a giggle of recognition — Hogg has unwittingly paraphrased a line from Part II. “I don’t mean to quote that! There’s no conversation really to have about it within the film because it’s something that’s very secretive. It’s not something you share, in my experience, you don’t tell anybody. But it’s there.”

As well as their vivid evocation of the thrill of burgeoning love and the discovery of cinema, what makes the films so absorbing is seeing an actor growing and maturing into a character. It’s not something that is easily repeated. With that in mind, does Swinton Byrne see herself doing more acting? “I’d like to try other things. But I just feel like everybody should work like this. It makes so much sense to me.”

In UK cinemas from February 4. ‘The Souvenir’ is back in select cinemas and on streaming platforms now