A new tale about a British family abroad makes for hilariously uncomfortable viewing. Tim Robey meets its director, Joanna Hogg.
Ten years ago, Joanna Hogg was directing episodes of Casualty and EastEnders. Now she finds herself the toast of the British independent movie scene with her second film, Archipelago, opening on an impressive 20 screens – extra impressive when you consider that it was made, like her first one, on a budget of less than £500,000, and extra, extra impressive when you hear that it’s a low-key drama about upper-middle-class Brits having an intensely miserable holiday in the Scilly Isles.
Why the fuss, then? Because the film is tremendous, and often excruciatingly funny, in the way that only acutely rendered moments of social embarrassment can be.
“I haven’t been privy to where the laughs are,” Hogg admits. “But I’ve heard that people have been laughing, and that’s the most satisfying thing to me, because I was hoping for that. You somehow know that by extending those moments, the only response has to be laughter, in a way.”
At the heart of the film is a mortifying lunch scene that stands comparison with the finest set pieces of Mike Leigh or Curb Your Enthusiasm, without for one second going over the top.
It takes place in a wanly unwelcoming off-season restaurant that’s entirely deserted except for the five main characters and staff. First there’s the dawdling about choosing a table – Hogg says she instructed Kate Fahy, who plays the mother, Patricia, to know exactly where she wanted to sit, but not to let on to the other actors. Her first line – “It’s a little bleak” – sets us up for an inevitable fiasco, as does the lowering weather.Then Patricia’s daughter Cynthia (Lydia Leonard, equally superb) sends back her guinea fowl starter because it’s pink in the middle. She asks to see the chef, uses the word “dangerous”, and is told she’s wrong. No one knows where to look, other than squarely down at their plates, not getting involved.
The stage is set for a magnificent scene of English embarrassment. “I really enjoyed writing that scene,” says Hogg with a smile. “Shooting it was excruciating for the crew as well as the cast, because it was genuinely very tense. There were times where you didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t.”
Hogg, now 49, grew up as a contemporary of both Diana Spencer and Tilda Swinton at West Heath Girls’ School. She’s very skilled at pinpointing these self-denials in British etiquette, the things we submit to and say in order not to cause a fuss, and how infuriating they can be for those prone to complaining.
Her previous film as a writer-director, the award-winning Unrelated (2008), was a similarly fraught tale of Brits abroad toting all kinds of mental luggage, and leading to the hideous closing of family ranks against a visiting friend. She may not intend to specialise forever in a niche subgenre of hapless holidaying, but it’s hers for as long as she wants it, and you can see how the tensions thrown up by travelling are great tools for exposing her characters’ frailties.
“There’s an intensification that happens when you’re on holiday,” Hogg explains. “You don’t have the anchor of home, the habits of home to fall into. You’re at sea to an extent, yet you’ve got all those family patterns that are still swirling around. It makes for a cauldron of insecurity.”
At a moment in British film culture where funding cuts are rife and the need to make commercially ingratiating films oppressively apparent, Hogg has done amazingly well to get these sad, spartan pieces made and distributed.
I ask her how difficult she’s found it. “Deep breath! I just know that I’ve got away with two films made on really small amounts of money but with total creative freedom,” she says. “So far we’ve had to finance these films in quite unusual ways.
“I wouldn’t say no to bigger budgets, but the more money you have, the less creative freedom you’re going to get, which is understandable in a way.
“It’s not that I don’t want to communicate to a big audience,” she adds, “I just want to keep the process of making the films quite close to my heart. I like to work with a very small crew and I like to choose my actors and my non-actors.”
By non-actors in Archipelago she means the two playing a local artist and hired-help cook, and she’s now worked twice with Tom Hiddleston, the statuesque, Rada-trained leading man who played Cassio in the Donmar’s Othello back in 2007, and will next be seen in Kenneth Branagh’s Norse superhero movie, Thor.
No such multiplex ambitions for Hogg? “I have an absolute horror of being transported back into the sort of process where I came from in television,” she says.
“It was all about executives. You’d have episodes of things taken out of your hands and re-edited. I didn’t have the same investment in them, obviously, because they weren’t my own stories.”
She starts to sound a little sheepish about the television years, then checks herself. “I think I should stop apologising for it in a sense, because it was something I spent at least 10 years of my life doing, and I know there were good things I gleaned from that. But it’s hard not to view those years as rather uncreative and a bit of a waste of time.”
What’s up next? “I don’t feel I’m finished with a character like Cynthia. Some people find her a difficult person to empathise with, but I think she’s very misunderstood and very frustrated, and I think her anger comes out of quite understandable things. What I’m thinking about now is pushing those traits even further in another character.”
After the hills and heat of Tuscany in Unrelated, and the other-worldly, windswept exoticism of the Scilly Isles in Archipelago – both longtime haunts of hers – I have to ask what location Hogg might have in mind for the next film. “London! I think it’s going to be London. At home and at work, so quite different.”
Archipelago (15) is released on March 4
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