Vandermeersch: You can’t escape yourself. In a film, sometimes, you can, because you can jump backward. You can go back to your childhood years, and it can be touching. Suddenly, you see adults as kids again. But the only thing you have in real life are your memories, your pictures, or your stories. In our film, we wanted that same feeling, that you can’t go back. You can only imagine yourself as a kid again, but you can’t really go there. There is this impossibility and this relentlessness, having to accept that you’ve grown, that you’ve done things, that you’ve made deliberate choices but also unconscious choices. You have to live with all their consequences, and accept the choices of the other: to accept where you are now, to accept one another the way you are, and support each other the way you can.
There’s such beauty to the film’s philosophy of life, and to Cognetti’s idea of “the eight mountains,” which comes to signify the different paths its characters have taken, one traveling across a great distance and the other reaching a single peak and remaining there. Tell me about translating that concept to the screen.
Van Groeningen: While it is all part of the book, bringing in the concept of the eight mountains took us a long time to get right. Writing the script, it went all over the place. We tried to place it everywhere. At some point, we came across the idea that they would tell this story to each other while drunk, to take away the seriousness it had in the book, though it worked there. We loved that story from the beginning and found it very beautiful. It reminded us of “Narcissus and Goldmund,” by the author Hermann Hesse, which is more about ascetic life.
Vandermeersch: In that novel, they are two friends; they are Pietro and Bruno in a way. It is also about the wanderer and the monk, let’s say. And the monk stays and climbs this one mountain, but it’s in his head. You have ideas like these throughout history.
Van Groeningen: They’re archetypes, but they’re also real characters. They are discussions: “Are you more this person or that person?” Everybody has a bit of both in them, depending on where you are in your life.
Vandermeersch: And we made this film going through a huge relationship crisis, questioning ourselves very much: “Who am I? What do I carry with me? What do I think life is, and why have I done some things and not others? Why are we here? Should we still be together?” Let’s reflect upon life through this film, we said. This film is not about a relationship between a man and a woman, but it’s about life. That was really beautiful. Mirroring our own lives, we could talk about our youth together and about our fathers, whom we both lost at 61, at the same age as Pietro’s father. We both lost them pretty early on.
It was a great reflection for us, also, to consider that I’m more of a Pietro, and Felix has a way of living more like Bruno. For him, there is no other way. He’s going to make his films. This is the only path. Whereas I’m surprised to be standing on this mountain or sitting here doing this interview. I hadn’t ever thought I would do that. Five years ago, I wouldn’t have ever dreamt of it, and I didn’t expect it. Then again, in some ways, I have my Bruno and he has his Pietro inside. It depends which moment in time you develop and prioritize more.
Van Groeningen: These two quite different people each long for connection with the other, and so it makes sense that they become friends. Because of life, their paths diverge and then come back together again. In each of these moments, they are mirrors for each other. At moments, they can really help each other, with the bigger choices they make in life. And they reach a point too where they realize that they cannot really help each other. They have to accept that too.
Vandermeersch: And it’s the depth of the work, too. We had issues with each other and then, through working on this story, through putting our love and our empathy and our reflection on life all into the work, he could see my qualities in that again, and I could see his. That was powerful for us, to rediscover each other and to mature, somehow, through this process.
Thank you for speaking so openly in this way, about the bonds of love and friendship in your relationship and your filmmaking, and the connection between the two. It is clear this is a subject that is deeply rooted for you both, in “The Eight Mountains,” and in the films you made before it.
Van Groeningen: Thank you very, very much. It’s true that I learn from the movies that I make. They teach me to deal with the hardest things in life. They teach me, or through them I learn. Sometimes, it’s more conscious than other times. But, here, I also fell in love with the story. And I wanted to spend time with those characters and those mountains, because I needed to get away from the cynicism. We’re living in a very polarized world, and everybody’s shouting. This film was extremely necessary to get me through something, to spread love.
Vandermeersch: Felix often walked to the set. You would go an hour and a half early, which means, very early in the morning, you’d start walking up the mountain. You really integrate what the characters go through into your life.
Van Groeningen: I’m the Method director. When the character has a mullet, I have a mullet. [both laugh]
Vandermeersch: On “The Misfortunates,” he had a mullet and a mustache. During this shoot, he had a beard and became a mountain man.
Van Groeningen: Well, not really. It doesn’t grow. I became a mountain goat. [laughs]
Filming in the Alps and Nepal, you built a house at 2,000 meters of altitude, and you filmed scenes on glaciers. How did being so present physically inform your approach to telling this story?
Van Groeningen: Our initial idea was to make it as real as possible. Everything you see is real, except for the crevasse that you see on the glacier, which we added digitally. Also, sometimes, we had to add snow digitally. But, other than that, everything was very physical: to get there, to build a house. It was a pretty long shoot. We started at the beginning of summer, and we ended in the winter, shooting in blocks. But we learned along the way that the path we had chosen was paying off.
It was making sense. It was physical, but it was working. We were also learning what wasn’t working, which actually pushed us to go even further, to go to higher places, to not compromise on that idea of making it real. It was helping us. It was helping the movie. It was helping the actors. It was making us experience what the characters were going through. The physical aspect of getting to that place where we built a house was such that, every time we arrived there, we were a little bit above the world. It’s a place where you can still feel where you come from, but you’re not at the peak yet. You’re in between. It’s this little paradise that is secluded but still feels intimate, as if you can feel the world but are protected from it.
In Nepal, we wanted to walk, with the whole film crew and with our actor. And it wasn’t easy to convince the production to do it that way, but we did, and it was incredible. And so the journey that Pietro takes there, we all shared it. The experience of the film is also our experience. At times, it was challenging and very stressful. Every day, everything could change. And even during the day, we sometimes had to rush to get down in order for the whole crew to be safe. But it was all worth it.
Vandermeersch: I’m adventurous, but to combine this physically demanding task with the vision and concentration you need to make a film, all the organization you need to keep your priorities straight when you start filming, how fast you have to think and how flexible you have to be to know your options and go after them… At every moment, you have to believe in what you are doing but still be able to switch to another option and believe in that one as well. It was great to stand next to Felix and Ruben Impens, our director of photography, because they know very well this reality of filmmaking. You adapt, you go with what you can do, you make the best of it. and you don’t doubt what you’re doing. I’m good at bringing ideas into the text and analyzing it, but to then have 50-70 people standing together, saying, “This is not possible, so let’s go there,” was quite a different aspect of the work. I sometimes felt very sure of myself, and sometimes I felt very insecure. It was my first experience. Learn from the best.
Let’s discuss the 1.37:1 aspect ratio, which imparts the verticality of the mountains and allows them to tower above the characters, and the long focal lengths through which the film so effectively communicates the grand scale of these landscapes.
Van Groeningen: It was a running gag on set, Ruben and his massive zoom, [achieved with a Angénieux Ultra 12x FF,] but of course in taking a film like this on, you know the landscape is going to be very important. It has to be a part of the storytelling, of the characters, of the film as a whole. And it all started with integrating the landscape enough into the story, on a script level, then being aware of choices in location and how these convey certain ideas. We discussed the house, and we took a long time to choose where it would be, because this had consequences. It was the center of the film, in a sense.
I want to go back to the book, which inspired how we shot the mountain at different altitudes. It is something that Pietro’s mother says: that everybody who loves mountains has a favorite altitude, that makes sense and that you love but that also reflects you. For some people, it is where the villages are, at 1000 meters of altitude. For Pietro, it is where the Barma is, that old alpine hut, above the tree line where there is still grass but you can see the peak. And his father wants to be at the peak, between the rocks and overlooking everything; it’s harsher, but it’s about ambition and getting there. We tried to make the audience aware of where we were and to use that almost musically in the film. You start at the village, then up one time with the father, then down again and then higher and higher. The mountain is tied to the dramaturgy of the film.
We decided on the aspect ratio along the way. At first, we planned to shoot in CinemaScope, as it was meant to be overwhelming. Blocking scenes, we weren’t fully happy with it; at some point, I saw pictures of our locations in the square format, and then we realized we’d found the film in that choice… And the zooms also found their way into the style of the film. We didn’t want to be too close. We were confident that we needed distance, to let it all happen. With the zoom, we could be far away, let the kids run, and it would capture those details.
We recently passed the 10-year anniversary of “The Broken Circle Breakdown,” which was Oscar-nominated and is perhaps still your best-known work. What do you remember most about that project and its impact?
Van Groeningen: It’s funny. I got a text today from my Belgian assistant director who said, “A month from now, it will be the 20th anniversary of [“Steve + Sky,”] the first film we shot together, in 2003.” It’s crazy to realize that me and my peers are 20 years in this business. We started out together, also with Ruben and the editor, [Nico Leunen,] and that whole crew in Belgium. That was our first feature. We wanted to take on the world and were fearless in a sense. When I look back at the picture, it’s uncompromising. It is what it is, but it wasn’t compromising.
Along the way, I made different choices, because of the films that I had made and how they were received and what I wanted from them. To get that recognition with “The Broken Circle Breakdown” was incredible, I have to say. But, also, it was strange, because it took a very long time for that film to find itself. In the beginning, it didn’t get accepted in major festivals. And it came out in Belgium, and it was a success, then we went to Berlin [Film Festival,] and then, a year later, we were nominated for the Oscars. It was a very long run that didn’t start out that great and that made me doubt if I was on the right path. I even rejected the movie at some point.
And the movie I made after that, “Belgica,” was different. It had to do with the initial reaction to “Broken Circle.” I thought I had to go back to my roots, which were rougher, and I made a movie that certainly didn’t find its audience, maybe rightfully so. Everything is a process, and how it’s perceived leads to something else. That’s fascinating to see and experience. I’m grateful. What I can say is that, while I was making “Broken Circle,” I had the same feeling that I had when we were making this film, in the sense that it was larger than us, that it was a story that deserved to be told and to find an audience. It moved me so much. I felt that it could find a large audience and that they would come out of the theater more open and vulnerable.
“The Eight Mountains” opens in limited release on April 28 and will expand.
