Vicky Krieps is an internationally acclaimed actress who is currently starring in the contemporary ghost story Went Up the Hill, which is in theaters now. Her recent notable films include the period drama Corsage, for which she won the Un Certain Regard Best Performance Prize, Mathieu Amalric’s Hold Me Tight, Ferdinando Cito Filomarino’s Beckett, opposite John David Washington and Alicia Vikander, Mia Hansen-Løve’s drama Bergman Island, opposite Tim Roth, Barry Levinson’s The Survivor, and M. Night Shyamalan’s Old, alongside Gael Garcia Bernal, Thomasin Mackenzie and Alex Wolff. Krieps had her breakout role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, opposite Daniel Day Lewis, which received an Academy Award nomination in the category of Best Motion Picture.
I love nature and it plays a crucial role in my life and my work. To give you a sense of its importance, let me give you an example. Recently, I went to my parents’ weekend house, which is a farmhouse – or rather now only a stable, because the actual farmhouse was bombed during the Second World War. It’s the place where my great grandmother lived, and the nature around there has always been very powerful and important to me. There’s one tree in the garden that I love and always look after. It’s doing well now and I’m so happy about that, but I’m always worried and so every time I’m there, I go to check on it. But there’s also another tree, which you see when you walk out the house and up the hill. It’s very, very old and might be 200 years old. It got hit by lightning once and still survived, and it was a magical tree to me as a child. I would go up there and just hug that tree and feel its energy. And this is something I did without me reading a book or anyone telling me to; it was really just something that felt natural for me to do. This last time when I went to the farm, I could see the tree on the hill was sick, and I cried. That’s how important nature is to me. Seeing a sick tree is something that makes me cry.
I think the part of me that connects with the tree is the part that knows something that I don’t know, and that I don’t have the intention of knowing what that something is. I connect to this with the tree. We both are connected with this existence, and we both don’t know and we both are not trying to know. And so when I connect with the tree, I feel relieved, because the tree is letting me be and is not asking me to pretend to know. In my acting, that’s very much what I am trying to do. The question I ask myself is: How can I be for other people without knowing, and also not pretending to know? What I exchange with the tree feels similar to what I do in my work.
To me, being in nature is one of two things that provide an antidote to my acting work. The other is music, and I think the two are very deeply linked. I wouldn’t be surprised if trees can hear music. Probably they can and I wouldn’t be surprised if some musicians, without knowing, have been directed by nature, somehow. When I work, even if I’m in a city, I always try to find a window; at some point, I’ll look out at the tree, because when I’m with the tree, I feel forgiven. I feel accepted and let off the hook. Because so much of life is people asking, “Did you do this? And where did you go?” Or “How did you do that and what do you think and how do you feel about it?” I seem to be asked questions incessantly. But when I look at a tree, I know that the tree was probably there before me, and hopefully will be after I’m gone. And the tree definitely doesn’t care about the minutiae of my life. If I can just connect to that realization for a minute, it helps me.
Shooting in New Zealand was definitely a big part of what drew me to my new film, Went Up the Hill. And something attracted me to the ghost story, also having had my own experience of grief and losing someone and thinking a lot about how then we live our lives, we have these ghosts (although we’re supposed to not have them), and how they can be dark ghosts or light ghosts. Going to New Zealand was my way of changing my ghost from a dark one to a light one. To me, New Zealand seemed the perfect place for this kind of deep exorcism that I was interested in. Even more than I expected, I think New Zealand is a place where you feel ghosts, even though it’s a very free place and you can really breathe. The ghosts are definitely there.
Before filming started, my co-star Dacre Montgomery and I spent a lot of time rehearsing and working on body language between our characters with a choreographer, Polly Bennett. Only after that did we move to the countryside, near Lake Pearson, on the South Island, where Went Up the Hill was shot. Once there, I got time alone in the house where the film is set. I slept there before production started, which was very scary, and then I went on walks by myself a lot. It felt like I was walking the whole time! Sometimes before shooting, I would go climb up a rock and just meditate there for a little bit, and then climb down from the rock and go to set.
I think all that time in nature informed my character Jill’s loneliness. And what helped me a lot too was writing the music connected to Went Up the Hill. I usually take my guitar with me when I’m working on a film and then I write a song for each character. Similar to the walks, writing a song helps me let go of the work, but also the walks help me when I’m writing the songs. That’s something I’ve never discussed before, but that’s actually how it works. It’s like a recycling system. There’s the work and the psychology, and then there’s the walk, and then there’s the song. And then the same process, all over again. On movies where I’m not allowed to go on nature walks, it’s much more painful and difficult for me.
Today is also the world premiere of Yakushima’s Illusion, a movie that we shot on Yakushima, in Japan, where they have a lot of ancient trees. I’m clearly drawn to films with a deep connection to nature, though it’s never something that I’m conscious of at the time. I don’t take a script and say, “Oh, there’s trees!” But when I look back, it’s very clearly a thread that runs through my work.
As told to Nick Dawson.
