Sequels and spinoffs and origin stories fill the multiplexes, but it’s vanishingly rare to see two feature-length dramas centered on the same, real-world character.
Her relationship with Anthony, a witty, debonair older man, goes off the rails as it emerges that he’s addicted to heroin.
“Joanna Hogg — where have you been all my movie-loving life?” Manohla Dargis wrote when the director’s first three features were finally released in the United States in 2014.
Like Julie, Hogg studied filmmaking in the 1980s, at the National Film and Television School, and dated a devastatingly charming man with an all-consuming drug addiction.
Hogg went onto a career in British television and did not direct her first theatrical feature until 2007 at age 47: “Unrelated,” starring Tom Hiddleston, also making his feature debut.
“I didn’t get to make a film at film school that spoke about the relationship that I’d been in,” the director said.
The ties of friends and family are further entwined through Hogg’s cast.
“I feel like I was very like Julie when I was a bit younger.
Hogg’s two-part idea — which she dates at least to a journal entry in 1988 — wasn’t a sure thing.
It’s easy to see this ability to adapt and find an alchemy in the shifts of reality as part of her filmmaking style.
Hogg is already editing her next film “The Eternal Daughter,” a ghost story starring Swinton.