Interview: Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch on The Eight Mountains

Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch enter a new stage of their partnership, both professional and personal, through their co-direction of The Eight Mountains. Vandermeersch, primarily known for her work as an actress, had previously appeared in several of her husband’s other movies and received a screenplay collaboration credit on his Oscar-nominated The Broken Circle Breakdown. But as Van Groeningen began to approach shooting the adaptation of Paolo Coginetti’s novel that he’d co-written with his wife during pandemic lockdowns, he suggested that she join him in helming the film.

In many ways, their collaboration behind the camera gracefully complements the narrative that transpires in front of it. The Eight Mountains is a gentle two-hander following two friends, the impetuous Bruno and the introverted Pietro (played respectively as adults by Alessandro Borghi and Luca Marinelli), that charts the ups and downs of their relationship over the course of four decades. These two childhood pals bond as boys in the Italian Alps, a tender connection disrupted by Bruno’s departure for education and business in an urban environment.

Family tragedy brings them together again years later and inspires Pietro to begin fulfilling his late father’s (Filippo Timi) dream of building a mountainside cabin, a task for which he chooses to reunite with his old friend to help complete. The project brings them closer together than ever, yet forces both natural and societal exert their pull on the purity of their relationship. And Van Groeningen and Vandermeersch’s patient direction captures both the grandness and granularity of Pietro and Bruno’s story with sweeping scale and sincere emotion.

I spoke with Van Groeningen and Vandermeersch shortly before The Eight Mountains opened theatrically in the United States. Our conversation covered where they divided duties on the set of the film, how they translated Coginetti’s novel into cinematic terms, their approach to music, and what the film means for them both personally and professionally.

There’s a distinction in the film between the people who climb the tallest mountain in the world and the people who would wander around the eight mountains. It’s my understanding that Felix is the former and Charlotte is the latter. Was it important having both of those viewpoints represented behind the camera?

Felix Van Groeningen: Well, it comes in handy! [laughs] We very much—

Charlotte Vandermeersch: —complemented each other—

FVG: —so that’s why it functioned. It was a complex story to bring to the screen. And along the way, it was clear that two of us together were gonna do a better job. That was interesting for the story to have: four eyes, four ears. It really made it better. At different times in our lives, we’ve tended more towards one or the other. I think the most important thing was that when I panicked, Charlotte stayed calm. When Charlotte panicked, I was super calm.

CV: [both laughing] It helped.

Did that play a part in the way you all divided labor in your directorial partnership with Felix handling tech and Charlotte handling working with the actors?

CV: No, not at all. I mean, I did not have the experience to lead the set and the whole crew through all sorts of difficult situations. Weather can change at any moment, there’s animals, and sometimes you need to think quickly, change your idea, do something else, make the best of it. Also, to make the shooting schedule and keep the oversight, I did not have any experience there. An actor is just told, “Okay, now, we’re gonna change the lighting, so you have a break…and now you can come back in.” You don’t know really know what’s happening in between, so it was really an eye-opener for me to go through the whole process and see all the different aspects of being a director. It’s a big job! It’s going into the story with all of your sensitivity and vision while also guiding 50 people on set. I felt a bit more secure working with actors on the dialogue. Because I come from theater, I love working with the texts. That was a natural division of things, but he’s also very good with actors. But Felix, in the beginning, felt a bit shy with the Italian. We started out chronologically, with the little boys. I would be the one communicating more to them because they would only speak Italian. After a while, Felix also got really comfortable with it. And then we were working with adults, and it was all more mixed, I would say.

Charlotte, have you been back in front of the cameras since working behind them? I’m curious if having served as a director has affected at all the way that you approach being an actress.

CV: Oh, it’s been very enriching. It’s made me relax a lot more as an actor. I said yes to a part in a Belgian TV series. [Cinematographer] Ruben Impens’s wife is a friend and director herself, and she asked me to do it. I joined this fall, and I really enjoyed it so much. After having lived through the whole experience to see how casting works, I felt when she asked me to do this part, I was right for it. [The more] you have that feeling, the more you’re relaxed and focused, the more you flow. I understood how much preparation was there and how important things are.

What effect did learning Italian have on making the film, either in adapting the text or working on set?

FVG: The whole film felt like a huge journey. We even went to Nepal where we went trekking for 10 days. The language component was a part of it. I’m not sure if it matters further.

CV: We worked hard on the writing, and we knew our dialogues very well. And we soon discovered during the casting process that there’s no problem doing an audition with actors in Italian. To coach and give them directions if they don’t speak any English or French, that was a challenge. When you don’t really master a language, you can be a bit brutal in the way you speak. You want it to be very nuanced because it’s a very fragile thing to coach an actor. You want it to be right. That really pushed us to learn it well enough to be able to speak in a nuanced way. But to assess if [a scene] is well-acted, that’s a universal thing. That wasn’t difficult [to tell]. We felt that wouldn’t be a problem at all.

The film is so perceptive, too, in the way that the men don’t even need language to express themselves sometimes. They leave so much unspoken but entirely communicated to each other. How active were you in shaping the non-verbal expression between Bruno and Pietro?

FVG: A lot started with the building of the house. It was sensory. The physical labor, working together, walking up together…

CV: …feeling it out.

FVG: Pietro has an urge to communicate, but Bruno has a closedness that pushes away. It was extremely natural. It’s not that we spent rehearsal sessions on the non-verbal communication. We read through the text, walked it through, tried some stuff, and then we started shooting.

CV: Alessandro and Luca are friends. They did a great film together in 2015 called Don’t Be Bad which meant a lot for them. It launched their careers. They were looking for a next project, and it wasn’t so evident to cast them the way we did in the end with Luca for Pietro and Alessandro for Bruno. They were first attracted to the opposite role. It took six months trying to find that combination, and we saw a lot of actors. But, by that time, something had already clicked. They understood, and it was a very detailed script. There was a lot of silence and subtext, but not all written out because you leave that to the actors. We really wanted to feed and inspire them, and they are really very talented men. They know what the other one’s doing, what he’s giving, how to receive it, how to give back, how to give space to one another, how to take it.

FVG: They also both spent some time with Paolo [Coginetti], the author of the book. He’s written a story, but it’s inspired by real people, friends from the mountains where he also spends half of the year. He invited us to that place, and we shot the movie very close to his house. We also brought in the actors, so everybody got to know each other and spend time together. The real Bruno was based on two very different mountain people that we all got to meet, and they both spent some time with them. I think they took a lot from that.

CV: That’s true, seeing the real friendship between Paolo and his friends was really inspiring to all this. They sit together, they have silence together, they walk and talk about a bird instead of, “Hey, I haven’t seen you for two months, where have you been?”

You make time for these beautiful unstructured, unhurried bits that we don’t always get in films focused on streamlining to a ruthless economy of storytelling. Did they stem from discovering “Alpine time” and meeting the mountain men when you got into the locations?

FVG: All of that. Also, just us experiencing that place, getting to know it and the habits of people there, our own wandering about those mountain peaks and houses, the way houses are built.

CV: The film was really cut down to its essence. We tried and tried to cut more, but we just didn’t manage. This was it. This was all essential! We cut a lot of stuff. We had all the material.

FVG: It could have been a lot longer!

There are such beautiful ellipses in the film where we can sense the passage of time through just a glance or a shared silence between characters. They might be in the novel as well, but was this one of the methods you employed to help maintain all the richness of the text?

FVG: Yeah, or to catch up with what you haven’t seen, although we don’t do it very often. But at moments, yes. I’ve played a lot with time in other films that I’ve made. And here, from the beginning, we set out to tell a story that was told very chronologically. In the edit, we still tried other things, but we realized again that was strong about it is that you always move forward in time. It could be five minutes, it could be one hour, it could be 10 years. That relentlessness of time starts to work in a very powerful way. It’s nothing new; it’s part of cinema and done in other movies as well. The editing also really helped us to make bold choices. Some cuts, of course, were already pre-visioned in the scripts where we thought that they were really going to work. Other ones happened in the edit by cutting away other stuff.

How did you calibrate the voiceover not to impede on what the actors were and were not saying?

CV: Pietro is telling you everything [in the novel].

FVG: So, in that case, it’s not very different. When you adapt a book, it seems obvious to go with a voiceover in the beginning. I didn’t want it, but then Charlotte said we really needed it. And she was right. In the novel, we have this main character who’s talking about the fact that he’s not talking a lot. To have him explain more in the film than he would in the novel [could have been] a tool to talk about certain themes, and Charlotte was like, “No, you cannot have him say those things!” We needed to voiceover to be in his head while he wasn’t doing a lot.

CV: The nature of his character, he’s so introverted that you cannot make him otherwise, or it just changes the nature of everything. I remember in your first version without voiceover, to try and understand things, he would talk with his mother more, and you know. They would say things to each other which actually are understood without saying. I felt this was really going against everything because we need silence in this film. We need tension, and there has to be a lot beneath [a scene]. I said to Felix, I really think we should work with his voiceover. It’s not going to be explaining things easily. It has to elevate a moment when you use it.

FVG: Voiceover had to have its place but not fill the film or we were going to lose ourselves.

CV: You want to feel Pietro and his power to observe and find the words. He’s a good writer. It’s a sensitivity that Paolo has and gives to our character. We also worked with Paolo on this voiceover because you have endless possibilities. Where are you going to take away scenes and just bridge something with a voiceover? You go crazy at a certain moment with 500 little pieces written out. Delete this one, put this one there, try this one, try that one. In the end, you make a puzzle. With the music and everything, the whole edit comes together. [Paolo] really helped us elevate the words and language because Pietro was a difficult challenge. As he’s the narrator of the story in the book, he becomes a very static, silent character. But as a man, we didn’t want him to be boring. We want him to be mysterious.

Since you mentioned the music, how did you settle on your approach to using it in the film? There’s a real earnestness to the way it accompanies the action you depict, especially in montage, where so many filmmakers can use it as ironic or removed commentary on the action.

CV: We didn’t do irony in this film! No cynicism. It had to be pure.

FVG: We always love to go big on the music. It’s just such a great tool to work with. Yes, some people think it’s a bit too much at times. But I don’t care.

CV: We didn’t set out with the idea to have these words sung over the images, not at all. We thought it was going to be only soundscapes, maybe his voice humming. But, in the end, there was a whole process with musician [Daniel Norgen]. He first accepted to make a soundtrack, then he backed out. He’s a very special, stubborn man…like a Swedish [version of the character] Bruno. You cannot really force him to do anything. This was a big film with a big production company behind it, and he felt, “Oh, this is gonna be too much for me.” But eight months later, we were already editing and just couldn’t let go of him. We checked out other people to do the soundtrack, but the earnestness and pureness of high-pitched voice that’s like a mixture of male and female [became] like a synthesis of our two protagonists. He was like a third friend. We could use his existing music on the edit, and then it became a lot more about songs. It was not a preconceived idea, just something that really clicked at a certain point.

FVG: We felt that as you got to know this voice it started to feel like an album you were listening to. You were expecting this voice to come back like [Eddie Vedder’s music for] Into the Wild.

Felix, do you see that approach to music as similar to your other films? I always think about your use of “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof in Beautiful Boy, which at first had me skeptical but eventually won me over with its sincerity.

FVG: [laughs] We got some notes on that song from people who thought it was too much! Somebody’s super important in all of this who I haven’t mentioned is editor Nico Luenen, who’s an amazing partner and who pushes limits. He has a great musical taste, so he chooses together with me—or even for me. As a through line in my films, he’s part of that. I’ve also made The Broken Circle Breakdown and Belgica, where music was part of the narrative, so I’m also very much drawn to it. The exciting difference here for us when we decided to work with [Norgen’s] existing music was that it was very much defined in volume. We had five albums and 50 songs, and from those songs, we had like six or seven that were instrumental and lent themselves to scoring. We started working with that, and because it was limited, we felt it was going push us to be more creative with where it was going to come and how it’s going to work. If he would have composed things, they would have also arrived at different places with a different emotionality.

How did you come to find a visual language with cinematographer Ruben Impens that could encompass the vastness of the terrain and the intimacy of the people?

FVG: The Academy aspect ratio of 4:3 was defining. It wasn’t our first idea, but we did get stuck at some points as we were blocking and figuring out how we were going to shoot things. We weren’t feeling it. During that time, I came across photographs of locations we were going to shoot [that were] in a squarer format. I got really excited because I saw the mountain work in a way that I hadn’t expected. Because a mountain is vertical, when you cut left and right, you don’t miss it. I presented it to Charlotte and Ruben, and they immediately were super excited…so excited that I got scared! [I was] like, “Oh, I’m not sure! 4:3 is also boring, like television from back in the day.” We decided to do tests with 1.85:1, 1.33:1, and 2.35:1. When we saw the test, it was immediately clear for the three of us that we had found the look of the film. It defined everything. It gave us a liberty in a sense. There was something exciting about it. The mountains and the people worked in the framing, so we had a lot of things we could try. In a weird way, the landscape became more part of the characters.

The film finds a correlation between the challenges of building a house and building a relationship. It shows how people can deepen their connections through doing work together, which you did behind the camera. Did this process have any bearing on your own lives off screen?

CV: We really needed this, somehow. We were going to pretty rough times as a couple, actually, but we had already decided to work together on the film. Although we were really going through a crisis, we decided to go for it. It became a very intense, focused writing period also because Covid came into the world. The lockdown came, so we were all confined and couldn’t escape each other anymore. We just really got sucked into this story, and it was such a great gift to us. It’s a simple yet epic story that makes you reflect on life in a lot of different ways about being a daughter or son to your father or mother, being friends, being lovers, making choices, finding your path. Am I more of a Bruno or Pietro? How do I deal with death and how do I forgive? How do I accept the cycle of life and death and the four seasons of nature itself?

It really helped us rediscover each other and see how complementary we are and trust each other’s instincts. When one of us said, “I believe in this,” then there’s something there that’s really valuable. The writing process was so purifying in a way for us. We worked on the version for four months. We were happy, the producers were happy, and Felix suddenly proposed to direct the whole thing together. It surprised me, but it was also like, “Yeah, we need to do that. I don’t know why, but it’s going to be good. Have faith.” It was this big journey for us as a family, going to Italy with our son and making it a very shared experience, not [Felix] leaving us for a year and a half. [We were] sharing and learning this language together, immersing ourselves into new world. Also, our boy really found his way there and made friends, and he loves to go back to the mountains. It really helped us mature and enter into a new phase of our relationship.

When you watch The Eight Mountains, then, do you feel like it’s a documentary of its making for you?

FVG: I very much go into the story when I watch it.

CV: It’s everywhere, but it’s not literal. It’s like a filter.

FVG: It’s very much about people trying to find connection. You see people struggling with that, but really wanting and needing it. At moments, they’re getting it, but because of life, it’s always too short. It’s not that we were going through that, but the longing for connection is what unites all of our stories. We were extremely fortunate to take another step in connecting more deeply.

Is that longing for connection something that you felt enriched by developing the screenplay during the Covid-19 lockdowns?

FVG: It’s weird, the book [had been] there for a long time when we decided to work on it. The themes from the book became clearer because what was happening in the world. Maybe we defined it even more because of that, the idea that you step out of the world when the world stops. Maybe you don’t need this 24/7 life, and we should not neglect he most essential things in life. The longing for nature and outdoors, and through doing that, finding ourselves.

CV: It became more urgent than ever.

Are you all planning to direct together again? What’s next from here?

CV: We don’t plan these things.

FVG: Not in the immediate future.

CV: Directing, probably not. Writing, yes. I see that happening in the next year, 2024, writing a version together.

FVG: I’m going to write it down. January, February?

CV: [teasing] We can plan that out.

FVG: Alright. We have a witness!

CV: It’s been recorded now! But it depends on the project. Felix is still juggling two different options to go for. If it’s one of them, then I might not and just read your versions and be a soundboard like I’ve always been. If it’s the other, I can really join in the writing.