How 4 Directors Found a Way to Go Home Again

The film lingers on Gray’s childhood home and his school. The director replicates family dinners, where everyone—including his benevolent grandfather (Anthony Hopkins in warm, generous mode)—sits and laughs and argues, giving Paul a real sense of pride in his Jewish heritage. But the home can just as quickly transform into a battleground, as in a scene where Paul’s furious father (Jeremy Strong) charges at his son after finding out he’s gotten in trouble at school. Paul escapes into the bathroom and is briefly safe, until his father busts down the door.

School, though, is the place of true awakening, as Paul whiles away the hours by drawing and acting out with his friend Johnny (Jaylin Webb). Gray is so devoted to capturing his memories that he shot the film in as many real locations as possible, including his former school. He even took his own children to see his childhood home. “They were so unimpressed with the space,” Gray told Vanity Fair. “I don’t know what they thought my house would look like. But what I started to think about when I was there was a kind of ghost story of all these people who had inhabited this house…. There was something beautiful and sad about the ephemerality of our lives.”

Where Gray’s movie feels like a ghost story, Joanna Hogg’s film literally is one. In her last two films, Hogg drew directly from her life, with a two-part series, The Souvenir, about her experiences as a film student. The films star Honor Swinton-Byrne, with her real-life mother, Tilda Swinton, playing her onscreen mother. It’s tender, familiar casting: Swinton starred in Hogg’s first major film-school short. Now, in The Eternal Daughter, Hogg takes things one step further, casting Swinton again to play an artist going on a haunted trip with her mother, Rosalind. To make the casting even more meta, Swinton plays both the artist and the ghostly mother. (Rosalind is also the name of Tilda’s maternal character in The Souvenir, a thread holding all three films together.) 

Though it’s a genre film—a “dreamscape of mist and gargoyles,” as Swinton has put it—the narrative is personal. Swinton’s character, Julie, is weighed down by loss and guilt, particularly over the fact that she picked her artistic career over becoming a mother herself. Hogg, who does not have children, wanted to make the film over a decade ago, but felt too guilty to make it while her real mother was still alive. Spielberg and Gray also finished their respective films after their parents had passed, but for differing reasons. Spielberg says his parents would have embraced this “very, very much,” but died before he began production. Gray’s elderly father was alive when production began on Armageddon Time, but died before it was finished. “I feel, almost, a sense of relief that he never saw it,” Gray said. 

The Eternal Daughter is preoccupied with the decision not to have children. Hogg has discussed the subject in the past. “I would be unlikely to be making the films I have been making if I had had children,” she told The Guardian in 2014. “I see my films as a way of creating something.” It’s worth noting that Spielberg has seven children, Gray has three, and Iñárritu has two—which may say something about female directors and their male counterparts.

Iñárritu’s Bardo dives directly into his experience as a parent. Like Hogg, he uses a grown-up stand-in and confronts questions that have plagued him his whole adulthood. Silverio (Daniel Giménez Cacho) is a Mexican journalist and documentarian living in the US, who wins a landmark award in his home country, codifying his status as a celebrated artist. When he returns to Mexico, he confronts the spiral of existential guilt and accusations of betrayal waiting for him on the other side. Silverio is, of course, a “squint your eyes and there he is” avatar for Iñárritu himself. The Mexican filmmaker began his career in his native country, then moved to Los Angeles with his family, later finding enormous success with ambitious hits like The Revenant and Birdman, which earned him back-to-back best-directing Oscars. About five years ago, he began dreaming up Bardo, inspired in part by watching his kids grow up far away from the place he called home. “It’s like a branch in a tree,” he tells VF. “When it starts growing, the branch needs the roots, but the roots are far away.”