Tina Kakadelis
After a series of interviews with Dacre Montgomery and Vicky Krieps, Film Obsessive News Editor Tina Kakadelis had the opportunity to talk to the man in the director’s chair of Went Up the Hill – Samuel Van Grinsven. Went Up the Hill marks the sophomore feature from the New Zealand-born Australian whose debut film, Sequin in a Blue Room, won the audience award for best Australian feature at the 66th Sydney Film Festival. Van Grinsven co-wrote Went Up the Hill with Jory Anast, with whom he wrote his directorial debut. Their second film is about how trauma is passed down generationally. The writing duo tied this generational passage to the way nursery rhymes are told over and over again. They’re meant to be a soothing story, but there’s often a darkness to them, like the one that takes hold in Went Up the Hill.
The ghost featured in Went Up the Hill was initially going to be denoted by a facial covering, like a scarf. Montgomery plays Jack, the estranged son of recently-deceased Elizabeth, and Krieps plays Jill, Elizabeth’s widow. The two learn that Elizabeth has not left them. That she’s able to possess them both as she pleases and, in a way, remain alive. The decision to remove the face covering altogether came from a suggestion from Krieps at the perfect time in Van Grinsven and Anast’s writing process.
“The wonderful artist that Vicky is, which is provocative in the best way, she challenges you,” Van Grinsven explains. “We were sitting on her balcony in a hotel in LA, and she just goes, what if we stripped it back even further? Just posed as a question. I left the hotel later and caught the bus back to where I was staying in LA, and the whole way, I was just like, oh my God, yeah, we need to do that.”
“One of my favorite things about filmmaking is that, often, every step you take toward production and shooting, and even during production, is like stripping something away. You’re constantly boiling it down to its raw essence and determining what’s actually the most important thing.”
As for where the idea came from for two actors to play the same role? Van Grinsven chalks it up to “the brain works in weird ways.” Beyond that, though, he came to the table knowing he wanted to tell a story that captures the role of nursery rhymes in a child’s life.
“I’m a queer filmmaker, and I knew I wanted to play around with ideas of the maternal and the absence of family in a queer dynamic,” describes Van Grinsven. “If you have a wound from that, how do you try to fill it? Also, the blindness it can cause people around you who are willing to or naturally are able to fill that void. I knew that was the thematic space I was looking to play in. From that came this idea of a nursery rhyme, because it was really raw and simple. Something that’s passed from parent to child.
“It’s simultaneously an act of caring, to lull someone to sleep, but it’s also a cautionary tale. That tension, I thought, was really bizarre and quite interesting. They also have this repetition and rhythm to them that I thought would be a really beautiful way of creating a film. I wanted the film to feel almost hypnotizing in a way, as a nursery rhyme does.”
Van Grinsven cites directors like Gregg Araki,Todd Haynes, and the era of Ingmar Bergman around the time of Persona and Hour of the Wolf as inspiration for the way Went Up the Hill dances between genres.
“Genre can almost act like a Trojan horse to go further than grounded realism can,” explains Van Grinsven. “To go somewhere even more truthful, to the wound itself. That’s what we’re able to do with this film, because it’s two people giving over self control. The abused welcoming the abuser. I think that’s true to real life in sort of a psychological way, but with the magic of genre and the magic of cinema, we can push that even further.”
When it came time to cast this two-hander, Krieps and Montgomery might not seem like the obvious choice. Their past works have very little in common, but Van Grinsven knew this would be the key to their shared performances. They have different careers, but their artistic process is very similar and they deeply want to participate in the creation of the film.
“It was really important to me in this film that these are two people who are strangers give over absolute control of their bodies to one another,” says Van Grinsven. “They share and use each other’s bodies in order to communicate with this third person. What I loved about writing the film was that they always remain strangers until the end, because they’re using each other’s bodies to talk to someone else, and they don’t spend a lot of time genuinely getting to know one another.”
“What excited me about Vicky and Dacre, coming from different schools of acting, different backgrounds of performance, was that they would feel like strangers. I think if they had too much in common or if they had similar filmographies, the audience would start painting connections between them. I really like that tension comes from the fact that these two actors in real life don’t have much in common, at least to the naked eye of the viewer. It retains their sense of absolute strangers.”
Adding to the deeply uncomfortable tone of the film is Hanan Townshend’s score. Van Grinsven chose Townshend specifically because he wanted a New Zealand composer who could inherently understand the stark loneliness of the natural environment.
“The landscape of New Zealand is so specific. It’s so gothic, it’s so cinema-of-the-unease. Hanan has that natural connection to the country. I’m from New Zealand as well, so it just means that we get to start from a place of kind of equal understanding.”
“I think the English language is pretty limited. I had a very clear idea of what I wanted the film to be from very early on in the writing process,” continues Van Grinsven. “One of the most elusive parts of being able to explain your intention is tone. The English language is quite limited to properly share that. For me, I work with music really, really early on. It’s the clearest way to get us all on the same board of what this film might feel like when it plays in a cinema.”
When interviewing Montgomery, he referred to Van Grinsven multiple times as the “Australian auteur director of my generation.” It’s quite the profound, glowing declaration, one that feels earned after viewing Went Up the Hill. It’s audacious, unsettling, an important conversation about abuse, and what stays behind after an abuser passes. Van Grinsven admits that he’s flattered, but that he never set out to have a career in film, so everything feels surreal to an extent. It’s never the ones who set out to become auteurs that live up to that expectation, but the ones who search for truth in their art who reach such heights.
“I’m always drawn to directors who wear their heart on their sleeve. Especially with queer film as well. I’ll be behind the monitor, like, if Dacre’s crying, I’m sitting there crying too. I love it,” says Van Grinsven emphatically.
