“I didn’t expect to find a friend like Bruno in my life. Nor that friendship was a place where you put down roots, that remains waiting for you.” It’s with these words, delivered in wistful voiceover, that Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch open “The Eight Mountains,” their sublime and gently aching adaptation of the Italian bestseller by Paolo Cognetti.
Set against the breathtaking mountain vistas of northwestern Italy, the film — which won the jury prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival — first explores the bond between two young boys, one visiting a village in the scenic Valle d’Aosta region over the summer and the other born there to cow-herder parents. Together, the two frolic in shimmering lakes and traverse snow-capped ridges, with lonely city boy Pietro (played as a child by Lupo Barbiero) becoming close with the spirited local Bruno (Cristiano Sassella) as they trace similarities and differences in their backgrounds, their personalities, and — they soon realize — their fast-approaching futures.
Both boys join Pietro’s father (Filippo Timi) on a fateful mountaineering expedition, finding in the heights of the Italian Alps a beautiful refuge, but their paths gradually diverge. Reconnecting as adults under tragic circumstances, Pietro (now Luca Marinelli, of “Martin Eden”) and Bruno (Alessandro Borghi, of TV’s “Suburra”) resolve to together rebuild a mountain cabin. At a high altitude, their friendship endures, but Pietro’s increasing wanderlust leads him again from this alpine idyll, while Bruno’s innate connection to the landscape only deepens.
For Belgian co-writers and co-directors Vandermeersch and van Groeningen, life partners as well as collaborators, telling such an intimately emotional story on an epic, decades-spanning scale was at once a profound challenge and a transformative experience. “The Eight Mountains” marks Vandermeersch’s directorial debut and is van Groeningen’s first Italian-language film; he previously directed “Beautiful Boy” as his English-language debut and before that broke out with Oscar-nominated “The Broken Circle Breakdown,” a Dutch relationship drama on which Vandermeersch served as a co-writer.
With the film opening on April 28 in U.S. theaters (via Janus Films and Sideshow, which will expand it in the coming weeks), both filmmakers spoke to The Playlist over Zoom about their personal affinity for nature, the film’s leisurely pace and deciding to build a house at 2,000 meters of altitude.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“The Eight Mountains” is gorgeously attuned to the relationship between our identities and our senses of place, how entwined, we become with what we grow up around. What role did nature play in both of your lives, especially in your own formative years?
Felix van Groeningen: In his book, Paolo Cognetti often speaks about this character, Pietro, and about how once he goes back as an adult, to that place, [in the mountains of the Aosta Valley,] that it’s the place where he feels really at home. Although he cannot stay there, and he doesn’t want to live there, it is where he can breathe, where he feels like the best version of himself. Even so, by the end of the summer, he needs to leave. It’s not that he wants to stay there through the winter.
I had that place in my life, in the center of France, where I always used to go, where I had these beautiful, endless summers that felt so incredibly free. We were living in a tiny village of four houses, and everything that surrounded us was ours: the lake, the meadows, the hills, the roads, the woods, the trees, everything. I kept going back there during my adolescence, and I kept bringing friends there too. I have a very important friend there, who is also my Bruno, who is also like family to me.
That’s my basis, I’d say. Before encountering the book, I was attracted to higher mountains than those mountains because those mountains are actually not so high. It’s a very remote place. It’s far from everything, but there are no super-high mountains. Lately, I have been hiking in the Alps, discovering these very physical yet also mystical journeys when going into the mountains.
Charlotte Vandermeersch: As for me, I grew up in the countryside, but I did not have a place like that, where I could go to spend my summers. We would always just go somewhere else, to a resort or another country, and then come back. I got introduced to the world at an early age, and I wanted — as soon as I could travel by myself, when I was old enough — to travel by myself and explore pure nature. I come from the countryside, but that’s the Belgian countryside. We ran in the fields, but the fields belonged to the farmer, and he was angry, so he would just fill it with pesticides.
It was beautiful, but I longed for the real outdoors. I went on trips to be there: to be in a steppe in Mongolia by myself, in the Amazon by myself, or in the Himalayan mountains. Well, that last one was not alone. I tried to walk in front to ignore everyone and imagine that I was there by myself. [laughs] Even standing in front of the ocean, I remember, at a young age, I would have these deep moments of being mesmerized by nature and the wholeness of the universe, feeling small yet powerful and grateful. I think I had this experience early on.
For me, [this film] wasn’t especially about the mountains. It was being somewhere pure, where you get this sense that something has touched you deeply. That is what I brought to this film. I knew it was important, the silence in between everything. When you look at a mountain, when you walk, when you talk to someone, the stillness and the experience of it is as important as the message, or the place you’re walking to, or what you want to say to someone. The journey is more important than the end result. That’s everywhere in this story.
Time and its constant passage is important to the narrative, but the experience of watching “The Eight Mountains” is serene, often spiritual, and there’s something so rich about the gradual nature of the film’s progression. It moves at a hiker’s pace.
Van Groeningen: When I first read it, because I did the first pass by myself, my basic feeling was that it was going to be simple. It’s chronological, and in that sense we more or less stay true to the book. The book jumps around in time, but it is pretty straightforward. Yet, it still had to work as a film, and when Charlotte came on, she was an advocate for bringing in the voiceover, for example. She felt it needed some punch; my first pass was pretty flat. Pietro is a character that doesn’t share so much, but I had put a lot of the ideas that were in the book in his dialogue, which was working against it. We needed the voiceover.
The pacing comes from the book. It was always our feeling that we wanted to give it time. We wanted to give that first section with the kids time to play out; we didn’t want to use it only as a prologue to tell all the rest, because everything that happens is so subtle. Their friendship, the idea of the parents perhaps taking Bruno away… These work throughout the story, in important ways, but they would not work if you highlighted them. So many things go on in the story that work together but taken separately, felt too small to focus on.
We also just wanted to be there with them. That was always the basic feeling. We had to defend it throughout the development process, throughout the making of this film. Even during the script phase, we felt a lot of pressure to cut it down, to have less shooting days, to focus more on the friendship. In the edit, too, there was pressure. We experimented with different beginnings, but it was also through the process that we made it work. We came back to that basic feeling, realizing that was what it had to be, that it was the purest form in which we can tell this story. It matched what the story conveys.
This conversation continues on the second page.