Orla Smith interviews The Farewell director Lulu Wang about making cinema of her own life and framing a family.
[Read more…] about An interview with Lulu Wang on framing a family in The FarewellReview: Midsommar is a chaotic, visceral horror
Orla Smith reviews Ari Aster’s Midsommar, an exquisitely crafted horror with innovative sound design that unfortunately struggles to come together thematically.
Listen to our podcast episode about Midsommar here.
[Read more…] about Review: Midsommar is a chaotic, visceral horrorApproaching center frame in The Souvenir
In The Souvenir, Joanna Hogg demonstrates Julie’s development from a shy observer to the main character in her own story through the way Julie occupies the room and the frame. This essay is a sneak preview of the new ebook on the film, Tour of Memories: The Creative Process Behind Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir. Get your copy of the book here.
[Read more…] about Approaching center frame in The SouvenirSundance London ’19 Capsule Reviews
Orla Smith recaps the best films of the Sundance London Festival, including Animals, Corporate Animals, The Farewell, and The Nightingale.
[Read more…] about Sundance London ’19 Capsule Reviews5 reasons we’re grateful for Joanna Hogg
In anticipation of our book on The Souvenir and Joanna Hogg, we reflect on all the reasons why this British director is one of the best. In the meantime, sign up to our Joanna Hogg challenge!
Joanna Hogg helped give us Tom Hiddleston
Hogg saw talent in Tom Hiddleston long before most of the film world knew who he was. Unrelated (2007) and Archipelago (2010) were two of his first leading roles, both released before he launched into international fame with the Marvel movies. Hiddleston has since made a cameo appearance in Hogg’s third film, Exhibition (2013), but there’s no word of him working with her again in any major way. One can only hope that he gets another chance to collaborate with her, because his performances in Hogg films are among his best work.
I was first introduced to Hogg’s films way after Hiddleston became a superstar. I had never really understood his appeal, having only seen him in Marvel films and as a rather uninteresting leading man in High-Rise. He seemed nothing more than another posh British actor who’d somehow managed to win his way into the big leagues with some thin layer of charisma. But watching Unrelated changed my perception entirely. As Alex Heeney points out in her essay on the ups and downs of Hiddleston’s career, Hiddleston has talent to spare — it just hasn’t been used right. Hogg knows how to use it.
In Unrelated, as the young and dashing (and blond) Oakley, Hiddleston is cheeky, sexy, and cunning. He’s the film’s object of desire, seen from the perspective of Anna (Kathryn Worth), who’s going through a midlife crisis. Hogg channels Hiddleston’s charm in just the right way for it to be irresistible. What’s more, it’s a role in which Hiddleston gets to have fun and not take himself too seriously, something we see too little of from him. It’s one of his only screen roles where he truly feels young.
Hiddleston’s Edward in Archipelago is less of a ‘fun’ role: he’s the son of a highly dysfunctional upper middle class family whose issues come to a head during an island vacation. There’s a certain kindness to Edward… or at least he has good intentions, however misplaced. But like all of these characters, he’s also grating, and gratingly posh. It’s one of Hiddleston’s only parts where his inherent straight-laced poshness is actually explored and dissected, rather than simply being a default element of his performance.
Watch the trailer for the ebook Tour of Memories
The book is an in depth look at Joanna Hogg, one of the best directors working today.
Joanna Hogg really gets the cinematic potential of dinner tables
For Hogg, a dinner table is the ultimate vessel for passive aggression. There’s nothing like a Hogg dinner scene to make you cringe and want to avert your eyes.
Eating a meal with a group of people — whether it be family or friends — is such a mundane, recognisable activity. That’s why Hogg finds such cinematic potential in disrupting that normalcy with unspoken ill-feelings. These upper middle class characters are so concerned with how other people view them that they’re desperate to maintain that look of normalcy.
In a scene in Archipelago, the family continues to eat, their eyes firmly glued to their plates, their voices calm as they talk — but the words they’re saying are acidic and hurtful. If you turned the sound off, you’d think everything was alright, but underneath that picture perfect visage is a world of unresolved issues. In the taut silence between words, the clink of cutlery on china becomes unbearably loud.
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On June 7th you can pre-order our book that goes in depth on The Souvenir and how it fits in with Hogg’s filmmography. Become an expert on her work.
Joanna Hogg is not afraid to self-reflect
Julie — the character in The Souvenir who represents Hogg’s younger self — wants to remove herself from her posh upbringing and make a film about a working class experience far from her own. Yet Hogg herself ended up doing the opposite. Her films are reflections on her own class, and they don’t pull punches.
There are plenty of upper middle class filmmakers like Hogg, but not many who are so aware of the privileged space they occupy and so willing to critique it from the inside. Her characters are repressed, obstinate, arrogant, and often annoying. There’s a certain tough love with her filmmaking: these are people she knows, so she treats them with humanity, but she doesn’t let them get away with anything.
Hogg’s willingness to put herself under the microscope in this way comes to fruition in The Souvenir, which is literally about herself. She’s fictionalised a version of the tumultuous, life-changing relationship she had when she was a film student in the ‘80s. She’s so blatant about the fact that this character is her that the apartment Julie lives in is an exact replica of Hogg’s student apartment. It takes guts to expose yourself like that.
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Joanna Hogg challenges you to look away from the screen
A Joanna Hogg film will make you feel more full on physical revulsion than most horror movies. From Anna’s (Kathryn Worth) cringe-worthy obsession with the much younger Oakley (Tom Hiddleston) in Unrelated, to Cynthia’s (Lydia Leonard) smug complaints at a restaurant in Archipelago (2010), Hogg has crafted her fair share of horrifying moments.
This particular kind of horror, which causes even the bravest of souls to look away from the screen, is borne from its absolute, scathing truthfulness. Cynthia’s righteousness with customer service workers is particularly awful to watch because I know these people exist, in abundance — I’ve met them. Especially living in Britain: Hogg precisely pinpoints a specific kind of British upper middle class entitlement that’s all too real. We want to look away because it’s hard to face just how real it is.
She’s a connoisseur of depressing vacations
With the exception of Exhibition, all of Hogg’s films feature characters going on vacation — some of the most depressing vacations you could imagine. These getaways end up putting these characters face to face with the very problems they were trying to escape.
Unrelated’s Anna runs away from a rough patch in her marriage to holiday with friends in Italy, but when she gets there, she feels out of place in the group. It’s a midlife crisis induced vacation that ends up kicking that crisis into full swing, especially when Anna starts swooning over a much younger man.
Archipelago is another film set during a vacation, this time a family holiday to Scilly. What’s supposed to be one last warm family get together (on a cold and windswept island) before son Edward goes off to Africa for a year turns sour. The family passive aggressively bickers the whole time; being stuck together in a confined space brings all of their issues to the surface. What’s more, the family unit isn’t even complete: the father is notably absent for the entire film.
Finally, The Souvenir features one extremely memorable (and extremely brief) set piece in Venice. Anthony (Tom Burke) whisks Julie (Honor Swinton-Byrne) off to Venice for a brief getaway. We see the trip in a series of fleeting vignettes that give us a sense of how the trip felt while leaving us in the dark about how exactly it played out. When Julie arrives in her hotel room, she’s small in the frame, with a wide expanse of space above and around her. She quietly cries in the corner of the room, perhaps because travelling all the way to Italy hasn’t fixed anything like she thought it might. The sequence is over before it began; we cut straight back to their apartment in London without warning. Suddenly, it’s back to reality. The brevity of their trip is a harsh reminder of how a trip that was supposed to be so grand and further the couple’s intimacy can ultimately, in reality, be insignificant.
Join in the Joanna Hogg challenge!
Catch up with (or revisit) Hogg’s excellent filmmography over three weeks with our latest challenge
Klayman on filming Steve Bannon in The Brink: ‘Let him underestimate me and let me never underestimate him’
Alison Klayman discusses her new documentary, The Brink, a character study of Steve Bannon that spans a year.
The Brink begins with Steve Bannon discussing the mechanics of Nazism and Hitler’s rise to power. He’s critical, of course — no political figure wants to be seen praising the literal Nazis — but the irony is inescapable. This is a man who incites hatred and violence proving that he knows exactly how Hitler manipulated the public to follow his own beliefs. We cut straight from that to Bannon making breakfast. All of a sudden, we have to confront the fact that Bannon is a person who goes through the same mundane rituals as the rest of us.
A key focus of Alison Klayman’s documentary The Brink is this contrast between Bannon’s sickening political machinations and his quite friendly and ‘relatable’ every day persona. The Brink isn’t a cold, removed political study, but rather, a study of the real people behind the political monsters of our time. In understanding Bannon, we can better understand how the alt-right works and how people like him come to be.
I talked to Alison Klayman about The Brink, how she gained such intimate access to Bannon’s life and her views on whether a film can ever be “politically neutral.”
Seventh Row (7R): So first of all… how the hell did this happen? How did you get this kind of access to Steve Bannon for The Brink?
Alison Klayman: My producer is a woman named Marie Therese Guirgis. She knew Bannon from the early 2000s, back when he was in the investment banking space, in the wannabe Hollywood era of his career. He bought a film distribution company that she worked at, so he became her boss for three years. Then, the company folded.
When he joined the Trump campaign in the fall of 2016, she got back in touch with him, really to send him hate mail and rage text him like, “This is terrible. Why are you doing this?” Of course, that didn’t matter at all and had no impact on his actions. But it did put them back in touch. She had the idea to do a documentary because his image in the press was so one-dimensional: even though it was sinister and evil, it was also very powerful, and she felt that was something he could use to his advantage. It was a disservice to the public to not really understand him when he’s in such a position of power.
It was always conceived of as a verité film because watching him reveal himself is much more beneficial than sitting down for an interview with him. He said no several times, and then he said yes. I was the first call. I was totally down from the beginning because it seemed like an opportunity, if it could really happen, to get behind closed doors on the far right and the Republican party, and I was very interested in that. But I said, “I have to meet him, because I don’t know what he’s like, and I also don’t know if I can stand it. It’s going to be very intimate if we do this.” I met him in September of 2017, and he walked in and started talking, and I was like, “Oh man, he’s going to be a very good character.”
7R: I was surprised by the things he was willing to say and do on camera. Why do you think he felt comfortable letting you film all of that for The Brink?
Alison Klayman: It definitely builds up over time. My access grew over the 13 months.
I’ve done documentaries in this style before, and my goal is to be the fly on the wall. What I’m seeing is what would happen anyway, and what people say to me… they’re being honest. I try to create those conditions, and in this case, I treated everything he said to me with the highest level of suspicion, which I kind of do with every film. Even if it’s someone I agree with or support, I still feel like I’m always aiming for something that feels real and authentic. That’s the lens I always have on: the bullshit detector.
He may not be an intellectual, but he is very savvy and smart as a communicator. My daily mantra was: let him be underestimating me, and let me never underestimate him. I was very concerned with what he was doing to try to use me. But I felt like, on my part, it’s just me with a camera. I’m very professional, but I also feel like if that makes him think, “How bad could it be? It’s just her with a camera,” I don’t mind. I do think people tend to underestimate women, as well, so I hoped that that would be the case.
7R: The Brink tries to humanise this very controversial figure. It’s not just about his political views: we see his diet plans and everyday things like that. Why do you think it’s important to understand the humanity of a person you disagree with?
Alison Klayman: My goal was not to humanise him in the sense that, “Oh, does he love his dad? Did he have any pets growing up?” There were certain storylines I purposefully did not pursue because I didn’t think it was in the public interest. But to view him as a human is of the utmost importance.
All atrocities that have been committed were all done by people. Hitler was a person, not to go incredibly hyperbolic. This is the stuff that was driving why I thought this project was important. I think that if you make him out to be a monster, it’s actually safer, because then maybe there’s only one of him, or a few of him; he’s an extreme case, and he’s other. The reality is… I mean that’s why the movie starts the way it does, too, [showing Bannon going about his day to day life]. It’s the banality of evil, the day in day out of what people’s lives look like who are inciting violence or advocating for policies that are incredibly violent and hateful. They’re people, too. It’s not about making him more appealing or more warm and cuddly, but just facing the reality that he’s a person.
7R: What was your approach to the politics of The Brink? Technically, you’re just presenting what he’s doing without commentary, so you could argue that the film is politically neutral. But obviously, you have a distinct perspective on him. How much did you want that perspective to come through?
Alison Klayman: I reject the term “neutral” when it comes to the film, but I do think that the film is fair. It’s not in the style of a Michael Moore. My voice is in there. I always like that. You hear me, sometimesl, in films, but the goal was not ‘My Travels with Steve Bannon.’ It’s not really about me.
But I think that you have to bring a political perspective. Filmmakers should have a point of view in any film that they make, and I brought my politics and my values to the table. To treat him fairly, what it took was to not assume anything about him and to let everything be proven and revealed to me. But what that doesn’t mean is I have to check every political idea. Every concept of right or wrong doesn’t get checked at the door when I meet him. It’s not up for debate, “Is it right to separate families at the border?” You don’t need to question your fundamentals as an artist or journalist or filmmaker. You have to bring them to the work.
I was also pushing myself to be like, “What about this film makes it my film and not like another left-leaning filmmaker came in and did it? I think the humour in it is an eye that I bring, the absurdity. I think things like the “rose between two thorns,” [a phrase Bannon keeps repeating whenever he takes a photo with a man and a woman], I certainly wonder if a male filmmaker would have obsessed over that in shooting. I think once I brought it to the edit, it’s clearly funny, and I pointed it out.
Then there’s my Jewish identity. My grandparents are Holocaust survivors. The film, at the very end, is dedicated to them. The events of the year ended up making that storyline come to the forefront. But I think the opening of the film [, where Bannon discusses Nazism and the Holocaust,] was like that because of what I was interested in. I saw that as an incredible piece of tape.
7R: How did you know when it was over? When did you decide to stop shooting? It’s the story of modern politics, so it’s always ongoing…
Alison Klayman: I felt I had that experience when filming Ai Weiwei. I spent three years filming that film. I knew that the movie wasn’t going to end because this guy comes to an end. It’s going to end once I have enough of a story to tell.
In this case, I always planned to film until the mid-terms, because I hoped that something would be drawn to a close. I didn’t know he was going to be so active in them when I first set out to do it. But I also felt like it was going to be a national referendum on the Trump administration and the Trump agenda, so I picked that as the end. It was nice to be able to take the microphone from him and wrap it up.
