A script is often a crutch. It allows an actor to retreat into memorization rather than existing in the terrifying present moment. For most directors, the script is a security blanket that they violently cling to. In The Souvenir, Joanna Hogg stripped that blanket away, pushing her cast into a state of terrifying, absolute freedom.
The ‘One Rule’ Constraint: No Screenplay
Hogg’s central constraint was simple but radical: there was no traditional screenplay.
Bref, the actors were not provided with dialogue. Instead, they were given a “treatment”—a prose document outlining the atmospheric flow of the film and establishing the specific emotional endpoint that each scene needed to reach. How the actors arrived at that endpoint was entirely up to them.
Spontaneous Discovery
C’est le risque du métier. This approach requires immense courage from both the director and the cast. Lead actress Honor Swinton Byrne noted that before the first take of a scene, Hogg would explain almost nothing.
The cameras would simply roll, and the actors were forced to “discover” major plot revelations organically in real time. Because there was no safety net of pre-written lines, the performers could not anticipate their reactions. They had to listen, panic, and respond exactly as a human being would in reality. It is a grueling, exhausting method of directing, but it achieves a level of hyper-naturalism that no written dialogue could ever emulate.
Insights regarding Joanna Hogg’s refusal to use a traditional screenplay, and her reliance on a treatment-based improvisation process that forced actors to discover plot points on camera, were extracted from interviews with the cast and crew published in MUBI Notebook and Seventh Row.