Vicky Krieps is quite driven. Today, she’s in the back of a London cab as it rumbles down the Kingsland High St. As she talks animatedly, her iPad camera frames her face against a sunny background of double-decker buses and leafy, busy streets. It’s 7.30am on a Friday there and Krieps, rosy-cheeked, sporting a single feather earring and an expensive designer bouclé baseball cap, is off to work on a project that she can’t yet discuss.
But the trilingual 41-year-old actress, who, since she went head to head with Daniel Day-Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2017 couturier drama The Phantom Thread, has become quite a star. And she doesn’t lack for movies she can talk about. She’s now an in-demand international arthouse name, a kind of EU answer to a Tilda Swinton or a Cate Blanchett. Though one who purposefully turned her back on Hollywood after the hype and the awards campaigning that followed her breakthrough role got too much.
“I survived it by running away,” she says later in the Zoom call with the Listener. “I still don’t know if it was the right thing to do, or the wrong thing to do, and I really don’t care. I don’t think it’s about doing things right, but it was my natural reaction. I felt so repulsed from this, whatever is the Hollywood system, and especially the so-called press tour. To me, it just felt like the devil hiding in some nice clothes. I had this intuitive feeling of, ‘I have to stay away from this because it’s dangerous … I just continued doing what I did before, which is independent movies that have small budgets, and so I’m free.”
She rounds off her thoughts with a quote about creative independence from legendary New York Times fashion photographer Bill Cunningham: “You just don’t take their money, and they won’t tell you what to do.”
Krieps has effectively got four films coming out this year, among them is Went Up the Hill, the one she shot in the Southern Alps with NZ-born, Australian-raised director Samuel Van Grinsven and which is screening at the NZ International Film Festival. It’s a chilling psychological thriller and ghost story that’s also a tale of sex, death, possession, child abandonment and love in a cold climate.
“It’s almost like an Ingmar Bergman film as a ghost movie,” says Krieps, who would know. In 2021, she starred opposite Tim Roth in Bergman Island, a scenes-from-a-marriage drama about a film-making couple staying on Fårö, the Swedish director’s old summer stamping ground. In Went Up the Hill, true to the nursery rhyme, she plays Jill, a woman who has just lost her wife Elizabeth, whose long-estranged son Jack (Australian actor and Stranger Things star Dacre Montgomery) arrives for the funeral and feels the need to stay.
But Elizabeth, an architect, who has built a brutalist mausoleum-like home in a picturesque Arthur’s Pass mountain lake setting, isn’t quite ready to be the dearly departed. She starts to alternately inhabit both Jack and Jill, effectively making the film a two-hander with three characters.
“This is maybe one of the very important reasons I did the movie … it seemed like the biggest challenge to be able to do two characters. I don’t know why, but I always need some sort of risk.”
There is one other main character – Elizabeth’s older sister Helen, played by Sarah Peirse. But mainly the performances of Krieps’s Jill and Montgomery’s Jack, both dressed to complement the house’s austere decor, can make Went Up the Hill feel like it’s verging on a gothic contemporary dance piece, captured by Van Grinsven and cinematographer Tyson Perkins’s near-monochromatic visuals.
“It was much more beautiful than I thought it would be … everything seems to fall into place with a style,” says Krieps of the film she first saw when it debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival – and where she sang the film’s closing song live with NZ songwriter-producer Mark “Merk” Perkins. She recorded an as-yet unreleased album’s worth of songs with him while she was here, all written from the perspective of characters in her past films. Writing a song is part of her preparation for a role. “Vicky is a wonder, and I’ve loved her friendship and collaborating with her,” says Perkins in an email (see interview below).
She says she signed on for Went Up the Hill, and being a long way away from her Berlin-based family – she married Greek production assistant Lazaros Gounaridis, whom she met on a film set in May and has two kids from previous relationships – with her usual gut instinct.
“It was something about the idea of using the imagery of ghosts, even in an almost supernatural movie style, to talk about the ghosts of our past and the ghosts of past relationships. It spoke to me very much. I also had lost someone very close to me, and I was really stuck in that grieving process. I knew – it’s not that I necessarily use my work to process things – but I had this feeling that I needed to go to New Zealand and work this out.”
She had liked Van Grinsven’s 2019 first feature, gay coming-of-age film Sequin in a Blue Room, very much. “It just showed me again, the notion of someone trying to understand the human soul, and I think that’s why I’m an actor also. I feel like I’m one of the many scientists who are working on this unsolvable equation of what is the human soul.”
Well, Went Up a Hill, a film that could be another candidate for NZ’s “cinema of unease” certainly adds to Krieps’s genre kaleidoscope. In past years, her films have included the quirky period costume drama Corsage, in which she played Empress Elisabeth of Austria, two Three Musketeers movies, and the M Night Shyamalan twilight-zone horror film Old. She’s even managed a western – 2023’s The Dead Don’t Hurt, directed by and starring Viggo Mortensen, whose cowboy character marries hers after a sweet love-at-first-sight scene that recalls her first encounter with Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread. It’s mostly set in a bleak frontier California. She likes Danish-American actor Mortensen, but says she also signed up for the movie filmed in Durango, Mexico, because she likes horses. Her character in that film, she thinks, is indicative of many of her other recent roles – they all seem to be about women fighting for survival.
“Maybe if there was a common thread, it would be the word of survival. And now you’re going to ask why … well, my grandfather did survive the concentration camps, and they say that you carry trauma, or you carry the genes of your ancestors. I’m not a specialist, but that might be a reason.”
Her grandfather, Robert Krieps, was a wartime member of the Luxembourg Resistance and later a socialist politician and cabinet minister who successfully repealed the country’s death penalty. What about being from Luxembourg, a tiny, rich country with a small population possibly best known for, well, being a tiny, rich country with a small population. How does that affect one’s sensibilities?
“I guess it’s similar to New Zealand. It influences you in a way that is kind of dreamy. I grew up very dreamy in the sense that I had a broad education and I read a lot of books. But if I walked down a street in London, my heart rate would go up because it was too many people. I would venture into the forests of Luxembourg – I literally grew up talking to trees and I think that’s a similarity with New Zealand, maybe. Coming from a small country, it gives you a chance to dream a little longer. When you come from Luxembourg or New Zealand, if you’re lucky, you’re off the hook a little longer.”
She’s sorry she couldn’t return for the Australian-NZ co-production’s NZ premiere. A combination of work in London and children in Berlin prevented it. “If I don’t stay home, the days that I can stay home, I’m facing mutiny,” she laughs as the cab reaches the end of the ride.
“Like Leonard Cohen or Nico” – capturing Krieps’ characters in song
Recording an album with Vicky Krieps of songs she’s written about her film characters came out of leftfield for Mark Perkins, the Kiwi songwriter-producer-musician who has recorded under the name “Merk” and worked with Marlon Williams, Delaney Davidson, Fazerdaze, Tom Lark, among others.
The project – as yet unreleased and looking for a label – has taken him from Banks Peninsula to Iceland, Berlin and New York. He played with Krieps when she sang at the end of the film’s world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
It started, Perkins tells the Listener from Los Angeles, when he got a call from the producers of Went Up the Hill after they had heard the song Krieps was working on sung from the perspective of the film’s character as she had done before.
“As I understand it one of the tricky things about being an actor is what to do with a character once you’ve embodied them and then have to let them go. You work so hard getting into the role then once filming is over all of a sudden you have to go back to your normal life with your partner and children and, you know, not be the murderous haunted widow villain anymore.”
They recorded the song in an afternoon. Krieps enjoyed the recording experience so brought out her previous songs.
“She felt comfortable sharing all her other songs with me, which I was really moved by. And it just so happened to be an album’s worth. Within a month I was on a plane to Berlin to make an album with her.”
Krieps’ singing voice he says is “wonderful, undefinable but equally classic and timeless”.
“She doesn’t think of herself as a singer or musician, but she absolutely is. She’s a poet and a storyteller so that really comes through. When I hear the music, I think of artists like Leonard Cohen or Nico [the German chanteuse who sang with the Velvet Underground].”
So far, the project has proved quite an adventure for Perkins.
“It includes journeying from snowy South Island mountain writing sessions, to drag shows in Berlin seafood restaurant basements, hiking through the snow over Icelandic volcanos before being late to meet the Icelandic Prime Minister, a dinner with Bjork, a performance in the Luxembourg Consulate in Manhattan where Jim Jarmusch shook my hand and told me he liked my guitar playing.”
Went Up the Hill screens at the NZ International Film Festival throughout August. The Dead Don’t Hurt is on the Rialto Channel from Saturday, August 9