Staying Home: Joanna Hogg on Exhibition

Joanna Hogg has been living in London for over three decades, but it has taken her three feature films to finally make a picture in the city she calls home. Her acclaimed debut, Unrelated, was set in Tuscany and her second film, Archipelago, took place on the small island of Tresco, but Exhibition is set almost entirely in and around a very unusual residence in west London. The house is the work of the late architect James Melvin, to whom Exhibition is dedicated and, as with her earlier work, Hogg drew upon her surroundings for inspiration as she put her story together.

"There were a number of ideas I think I'd formed before finding the house," Hogg told me in London recently. "One of the themes or ideas I'd wanted to explore was an idea of seeing an artist creating a piece of work, actually seeing inspiration at work, and how that creativity or inspiration is also connected with sexuality. All these ideas change and develop over months and weeks, and that's what's exciting about the early stages of creating a story; sometimes you'll have all these different ideas and they seem to be disconnected, but the glue became the house, in a way. So many of the ideas came from just being in that house and observing the character of it."

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“There is a plan but within that plan there's a lot of room for the unknown” – Joanna Hogg

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What Hogg eventually came up with was the story of two artists, identified only as D and H, who have decided to sell their home and whose suppressed anxieties and fraught interactions are mercilessly captured by Hogg's rigorous camera. Having cast non-actors in key roles in Archipelago, Hogg made the bold decision to enlist Viv Albertine and Liam Gillick in these parts, neither of whom had ever acted before. "It's a total leap of faith. It's a kind of bolt of lightning realisation that this person is going to be right," Hogg says when I ask her how she came to this decision. "With Viv, I had the advantage of having known her for many years, but what I didn't know was how good an actress she would turn out to be. Likewise with Liam, I knew he had some kind of performing gene in him, but not to the extent that he did. They both became actors. They're not playing themselves as they're both very much playing against type, and they do it brilliantly."

Albertine and Gillick's performances are even more remarkable when you consider that they were cast in the film less than two weeks before shooting was set to begin. It was a gamble that could have backfired spectacularly for the director, but she sees an element of risk and a willingness to embrace the unknown as crucial aspects of her filmmaking process. "There is a plan, but within that plan there's a lot of room for the unknown, for me to change my mind. I've got a clear idea of what I want on some level, but I'm not afraid of something unexpected happening, and that's a really interesting balance to try and maintain."

Having achieved her desired goal of "setting out to explore depicting different levels of reality and creating a piece of work that was less linear, more fragmented and more dreamlike," Hogg is already looking ahead to future projects. "I'm quite guarded at home and I don't talk about my ideas until they're formed enough to withstand any criticisms," she says, "until the ideas stand on their own." But one thing she is sure of is that she wants to make more films closer to home. "I've got another film that I'm developing, which is set in London, but I've also got another and I'm not sure where it is set yet, which is quite unusual for me, to not know where the film is going to be set when the story is already coming together. So that's a bit of a mystery."