Despite a thriving television career, film was the medium that most attracted director Joanna Hogg. She just had to 'bloody do it', she tells Donald Clarke
JOANNA HOGG'S Unrelated is very much an ensemble movie. This modestly budgeted drama concerns itself with the discontents of certain wealthy British people holidaying in a sunny corner of Tuscany. They booze. They squabble. They booze some more. Yet, though the picture is busy and crowded, it still feels like a personal statement.
The protagonist - a middle-aged woman played touchingly by Kathryn Worth - journeys to the crumbling farmhouse after falling out with her husband. As events progress, she undergoes a significant life change.
It's hard to avoid drawing parallels with the director. Now 47 years old - youngish for a presidential candidate, but elderly for a debut director - Hogg has spent the last few decades of her life shooting mainstream British TV shows such as Casualty, London's Burning and EastEnders. Like her heroine, she, too, has embraced change in middle age.
"I had just reached a stage where I thought: 'go on and bloody do it'," she says. "My father died recently and that, I think, pressed home how short life is. It reminded me that if you want to do something you should just do it."
Hogg, who has flown in to Dublin to introduce her film at the Light House cinema in Dublin's Smithfield, goes on to explain that her father's death was not the only motivating trauma.
"Yes. I had been trying to have children and it was becoming clear to me that that just wasn't going to happen," she says. "So there was a lot of sadness around that. Some of that got channelled into this. There were two roads - my desire to make film and my longing to have children - and they converged in this project."
The last few comments may lead you to think that Joanna Hogg is a sombre piece of work. This is not the case. Well-spoken, with long, thin features, she can be intense when talking about her work, but never allows the conversation to drift too far from a good joke. I wonder how posh she is.
Unrelated, a tense film, which mixes a very European taste for leisurely drama with a very English enthusiasm for savage, waspish dialogue, is concerned with old Etonians and their country houses. Was she from that sort of background?
"Not really. Though I suppose we were semi-posh," she laughs. "It was a very liberal background. My mother was something of a socialist, though my dad was, maybe, a bit more conservative. But whenever I moved to London, I fell in with a very different set. I suppose I was, then, able to look at the characters in Unrelated from a cooler perspective."
After taking her A-Levels, Hogg decided to forego college and embark on a career as a stills photographer. Drawing her friends to the studio where she worked, she set about constructing elaborate surrealist tableaux, but soon realised that, addicted to narrative, she really wanted to be a film-maker. One day, while strolling through Soho, she spotted Derek Jarman, the near-legendary experimental film-maker, and asked him for a job. He advised her to grab a small camera and start making her own films.
"It was good advice. Mind you, I told that story just once and, somehow, it has now become part of my biography. I do relate to the early experimental films Derek made. I think what I really got from him, though, was that sense of having a cast and crew that worked together like a family."
A quarter of a century - and a lot of life - intervened between that meeting with Jarman and the release of Unrelated. After putting together a portfolio of experimental shorts, Hogg went off to study at the National Film and Television School and was subsequently fortunate enough to secure a substantial amount of work at the BBC and ITV. It was Hogg who directed that episode of EastEnders in which Dot Cotton mused on her life while travelling to Wales.
I would guess that working on soap operas helps instil certain disciplines. Such shoots require directors to work efficiently to an unforgiving schedule.
"I'd say that's right," she says. "It teaches you to work fast and be very economical. In fact, making this film, though it had a low budget, involved slowing down for me. In television you have to work to a very precise structure and there is no room for reflection or instinct. What I was longing for, during all those years of television, was to do something that I really felt right about. Actually, I got to stretch out a bit on this film." Indeed, Unrelated has turned out to be a very loose, individual piece of work. A critical success at the London Film Festival, the picture was quickly acquired for distribution.
"The film was financed by a lot of smaller companies," she says. "That was good in a way, because none of them had invested enough money to feel they could tell me what to do. But we were lucky in that the BBC have now come in. So it will eventually screen there."
Just when she thought she had escaped telly, the Beeb have dragged her back in again.
Unrelatedis showing at Dublin's Light House Cinema