To say that The Souvenir is a personal project for British filmmaker Joanna Hogg requires a finessed understanding of what this clichéd description means. A hoarder of letters, diaries, photographs and miscellaneous creative mementos, Hogg has both returned to a specific period in her life – London in the 1980s when she was a film student and in a tumultuous relationship with a troubled man – and also recreated it. Production designer Stéphane Collonge projected old photographs taken by Hogg as exteriors to the windows of the central apartment, itself an inch-by-inch reconstruction of her old Knightsbridge flat, albeit based, like most of the set, within a former RAF hangar in Norfolk.
Casting herself, as it were, was a long process. While she quickly settled on Tom Burke to play…
