Joanna Hogg on Turning Personal Experiences Into Fiction

British filmmaker Joanna Hogg, who has been serving as president of the Feature Narrative Competition jury at the ninth edition of Egypt’s El Gouna Film Festival this week, tells Variety she prefers to know as little as possible about a film before watching it, “not even a synopsis of the story.”

“I prefer to go in with no criteria and a very open mind,” she explains. “I am looking for something that moves me, but it also can be something that strikes me in a particular way. It doesn’t have to reduce me to tears, but just something that’s maybe got a clarity about it, a feeling that the filmmaker has ideas and a vision.”

With films from both first-time and established directors, a range of genres and stories from different parts of the world, Hogg sees little sense in applying the same criteria to each. “I really feel like I’ve travelled, even though I’ve been here in El Gouna. I’ve really travelled all over the place.”

It is Hogg’s first visit to Egypt, and she describes herself as something of an outsider on a jury that includes filmmakers from Egypt, Iraq and Turkey. Listening to their perspectives, she notes, has “whetted my appetite to discover films, actually not just from Egypt, but the Middle East in general.”

The experience also marks a return to watching films after months spent largely immersed in her own writing. “I’ve been stuck at home for quite a few months writing and actually not watching any films,” Hogg explains. “It’s been really nice to come here with a sort of clear mind, not having been watching cinema at all. Reading a lot, but not watching. And so I think it made me more receptive to the films.”

Hogg is currently writing her next film, which once again has her grappling with the line between lived experience and fiction. The director’s work, which includes “The Souvenir,” “The Souvenir Part II” and “The Eternal Daughter,” is deeply personal.

“I’m very interested in the sort of tension between what’s personal and a real experience that I’ve had and turning that into cinema and into fiction,” she goes on.

Despite drawing on her own experiences across several films, Hogg doesn’t feel the process has become any easier. “It’s a different story that I’m telling with this film. Each time I’m learning from scratch in a way, which I quite like,” she says.

Hogg graduated from film school, but found herself working in television rather than making films, an experience she remembers with little fondness.

“It was a disappointment in a way that I went into television,” she acknowledges. “I went into it because I needed to work and it wasn’t as easy as I thought making a first feature film.”

The turning point came, she remembers, while she was directing a television episode to which she felt little connection. “I almost can remember where I was standing when I thought this,” Hogg recalls. “I was rehearsing a scene with these actors. It was very much television and it was not a story that I had any relationship to. I hadn’t written the script.”

Her realization was simple. “I thought, I really must tell something personal.”

The late American film producer Barbara Stone, a friend of Hogg’s who would go on to produce “Unrelated,” her 2007 debut film, supplied the final push. When Hogg told her she intended to make a short, Stone challenged her, asking, “Why make a short film? Make a feature.”

Hogg’s working relationship, and friendship, with Tilda Swinton dates back even further, to her 1986 graduation film, “Caprice.” Their career paths diverged creatively for decades before they reunited on “The Souvenir” films and later “The Eternal Daughter.”

“We talk about this sometimes and we said, ‘Well, actually, maybe it’s not a bad thing. We both developed our own way first,’” Hogg reflects. “Then when we came together with ‘The Souvenir,’ which was many years later, it was such a pleasure. We did think, well, ‘Why the hell have we taken this long to do another piece of work? We’ll do more work together.’”

For now, however, Hogg’s attention is on the still-unannounced film waiting for her back home. After days immersed in the work of other filmmakers at El Gouna, she anticipates some difficulty returning to the world of her own film.

“I’ll have to decompress,” she explains, allowing the films she has been watching to settle before she can “come quietly back to my story.”