Danny Leigh 

Home movie: how Joanna Hogg made Exhibition

Joanna Hogg's new film is about an artist couple who are selling their house. Danny Leigh visited the set and found that stars Viv Albertine of the Slits and artist Liam Gillick had moved in
  
  

Exhibition film still
Location, location, location … Liam Gillick in Joanna Hogg's Exhibition, which also stars Viv Albertine and Tom Hiddleston Photograph: PR

In September 2012, Joanna Hogg was about to make her third film. Later it would be called Exhibition; its working title was the London Project. There was a budget, location, a story about a married couple in crisis. It just didn't have the couple. Ten days before shooting, Hogg had no actor for either role.

Bright-eyed and well spoken, she remembers it vividly. "I was getting desperate. I was at the point of approaching people in the street."

Five years earlier, then in her late 40s, she had seemed to arrive out of nowhere as a director of startling talent. Her first two films, Unrelated and Archipelago, had a fearsome stillness and surgical eye for the mores of the English middle class. Both starred Tom Hiddleston, in his first film roles before becoming the fiendish Loki in the Avengers movies. To him, what set Hogg apart was her grasp of the "strange truths" of families, her knowledge that "real life is often mysterious".

Another fan was Martin Scorsese. On seeing Archipelago, he contacted her to express his admiration. Since then, "he's been an incredible source of encouragement". The story of a quietly disastrous family holiday in the Isles of Scilly, her second film gave its last line to Hiddleston's character as he left their ill-fated rental: "Goodbye, house," he said.

Soon after, ideas for her third began to collect around a modernist west London townhouse. She had known the house and its architect James Melvin since the 90s. With its glass walls and spiral staircase, it felt perfect for a film about people and their homes.

In her own life, she says, she always found her sense of self bound up with where she lived. Moving "terrified" her. She was also interested in "Objectum-Sexuality, the syndrome where people want to have sexual relationships with buildings."

If her own feelings were not quite so ardent, the Melvin house did become a muse. A story evolved about a couple selling up after many years – artists, married, childless.

Her filmmaking began in the 80s as an informal apprentice of the late Derek Jarman. A decade on, she was directing Casualty; her career in early evening TV ended in 2003 with the EastEnders special Dot's Story. Now, her "process" is personal and non-negotiable, beginning not with a script but a document of prose and photographs that acts as a road-map for improvisations. Her first two films were financed privately; this time she was backed by the BFI and BBC. She was "wary. I had to know the process would be supported before I accepted the money."

The budget was less than £1m – her biggest yet. She secured the house for six weeks. But she still had no leading actors.

Panicked, she phoned Viv Albertine for ideas. Still best known as the guitarist in fabled all-girl punk band the Slits, she and Hogg had been friends since 1984. After quitting music, she too made films. Now, she suggested names.

"It was only when I hung up," Hogg says, "that Nick said 'What about Viv?'" She called straight back.

"I was blindsided," Albertine says. So ineffably cool you'd like to ask for her autograph, Albertine had never wanted to act, unexcited by the thought of learning lines. But this, she felt, would be different. "In fact, the minute it came out of Joanna's mouth, I knew I was right for it."

Days passed. Hogg remained half a couple short.

Unlike Albertine, she had never met the conceptual artist Liam Gillick. But she had seen him talk about his work. A call was made.

"I was in Spain," Gillick says. "Up a hill in Guernica. And they said 'Can you come to London for Monday to make a film?'"

In the 90s, Gillick had been among the first wave of Young British Artists; his Plexiglas installations saw him nominated for the Turner Prize. He lives in New York. "My theory is they saw me and said 'We need someone like this.' I was the 'someone like this.'"

He says he never wanted to make films. But he did like Hogg's, their nuances, their look. And being "material" intrigued him. "Because usually I decide what goes where."

That Friday, he met Albertine and Hogg in a Camden pub. They talked for 10 minutes. On Monday, they started filming.

A month later, I meet the cast and crew at the ICA. Inside, a screen shows a lorry turning in circles. Hogg is friendly but on a schedule. Albertine waves hello. The producer Gayle Griffiths tells me they're spending a day away from the house to film a scene Hogg just devised.

Gillick rolls a cigarette, neatly bearded in black suit and T-shirt. "The ICA was where art started for me. When I was 15 I'd come and see Hungarian movies in case they had sex in them."

The characters now have names. He is 'H' and Albertine 'D'. "It might not be working," he says, beatifically.

In the ICA's cinema, two chairs are set up in front of the screen. Hogg confers with her cinematographer. There are eight people here, including me. Griffiths says agility is a benefit of the stripped-down crew the director works with. The scene, she says, will be "spontaneous".

Before I see any of it, I'm ushered out. The next day, they go back to the house. Its exact location is a secret. "Otherwise," Hogg says, "it becomes about postcodes." (I say it's a spit from High Street Kensington).

Shooting days go on until 3 am. After the crew leave Gillick and Albertine stay – because in Hogg's process the actors live on set.

The day before filming started, Albertine moved out of her family home. After a 15-year marriage, she was newly divorced. Her daughter, then 13, was to stay at her grandmother's one-bedroom flat. Albertine arrived at the house with "nowhere else to go".

"I was physically robust enough to do the film," she says later, "but I wasn't 100% emotionally. And it took a toll." At first, she saw 'D' as "soft". Soon though, "I merged with her. It was hard. There was nowhere to go. We'd do a sex scene and I'd have to sleep in the same bed."

Gillick too arrived having divorced in 2012. But Albertine believes the shoot was easier for him. "Liam travels, he dips in and out of people's lives." Having met for 10 minutes before becoming married on screen and flatmates off it, their relationship was "sparky. There was a creative friction. People thought 'Oh God, they're having an affair,' but we weren't."

Hogg came in the mornings with scenes written the night before, so her stars didn't have time to memorise lines. A first take was improvised around what was on paper, after which she would tease out what she liked and what she didn't. Five takes typically did the trick. Albertine relished the work: "It was so meaty and satisfying."

Gillick admits he gave Hogg "a hard time. Not giving someone their line. Having my back to the camera. Just playing."

There were few visitors. On alternate Saturdays, one was Tom Hiddleston – cast in a small but pivotal role as a butter-smooth estate agent. He first met Hogg in 2005, a fortnight after leaving drama school. In 2012, he joined her after working weeks spent at Shepperton making Thor: The Dark World.

He emails to discuss his role. First was a period of research, a mastery of conveyancing and contract management. "A lot of work for a small part, but I didn't want to screw it up."

Albertine's discomfort may have been unavoidable. Sharing their clothes and creating their dialogue, Hiddleston writes, "you can't help but pour parts of yourself into Joanna's characters, to the extent that sometimes by the end of the shoot, it's all begun to feel alarmingly real."

Yet Exhibition sounds not unlike a trip home. "A big budget studio film can feel necessarily like a military operation. Joanna's set feels like a family."

The shoot wrapped in November. The result is many things – a film about creativity, childlessness, London, sex. It's a caustic domestic comedy and a modernist gothic set in a haunted house lit by MacBook screens.

For Hogg too, a film about the creaking marriage of a pair of professional creatives was strange ground. Her own husband is an artist. "Of course," she says, smiling awkwardly.

I don't ask what she borrowed from real life, but she says she sometimes felt like a double agent in her own home. "I feel guilty. But when you were at the ICA, something interesting was happening, because by then the actors weren't just a vehicle for my experience. It was theirs too."

Albertine and Gillick make a great on-screen couple, which appears to surprise everyone. They haven't seen each other since filming. "I don't know if Liam knows even now," Hogg says, comparing Albertine's presence to a "silent film actress".

In 2014, Albertine is back making music, with a memoir coming out. She watched the film "through my fingers" with her daughter. "To me it felt like fragments. I couldn't forget what was happening when we made it. But I looked so different, my daughter didn't even realise it was me."

 

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