Interview: Marie Kreutzer on “Remixing” Empress Elisabeth of Austria with Corsage

“People fear the ephemeral,” opines Empress Elisabeth of Austria (Vicky Krieps) in writer-director Marie Kreutzer’s film Corsage. Her observation most directly relates to the nascent art form of cinema in an encounter with early motion picture innovator Louis Le Prince (Finnegan Oldfield). This meeting of the minds was invented by Kreutzer, who’s not one to let recorded history constrain her imagination. But through this fiction pertaining to the art of representation and recreation itself, the Austrian filmmaker cuts through over a century of mythmaking around a figure both iconic and iconoclastic in her country’s national imagination. What lies underneath is something real and human.

Kreutzer trains her focus in the cheekily anachronistic Corsage on Elisabeth’s 40th year, an age in which the fabled beauty is both more scrutinized and less visible to the world around her. That anxiety over her image manifests itself publicly in punk-rock displays of defiance, moments in which Krieps and Kreutzer reveal lesser-known facets of her character that are both entertaining and enlightening to behold. Yet the film also finds space for intimacy and interiority where the doubts and delights of Elisabeth create a fuller picture of a woman who’s been reduced to little more than a visage on Austrian souvenirs.

The aforementioned ephemerality to which the empress refers when talking about film is but a projection of her own struggles. “I have nothing to hold on to except myself,” as Elisabeth says later in the same scene, “and sometimes even that feels like an incredible effort.” With Corsage, Kreutzer achieves the difficult feat of rescuing Elisabeth’s legacy from mothballs without reclaiming her as a present-day feminist triumph. The film restores the empress to her own era, albeit with a few flourishes for dramatic effect, to vividly illustrate how being ahead of one’s time doesn’t make living in that moment any easier.

I spoke with Kreutzer earlier this fall as she was presenting the film at the New York Film Festival. Our conversation covered how she eclectically approaches writing historical fiction, what she does to create opportunities for unexpected comedy on set, and why she chose a different death for Elisabeth within the context of Corsage.

You’ve distanced Corsage a bit from Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, which is a frequent comparison people have made when describing the film. What, in your own words, is the difference between them?

I think the great thing about Marie Antoinette is that it really goes for it. It wouldn’t have come to my mind to compare them, but I get the [comparisons] because it’s also a period film that isn’t classical. And I think that maybe the difference is genre. I think Marie Antoinette is a pop song. It’s very joyful and full of energy. And Corsage is more of an unplugged track.

Corsage is also sincere in the way that it attempts to understand Elisabeth, where Marie Antoinette is maybe a little bit more ironic. She’s trying to create a distance.

Yes, ironic! That’s also absolutely a point. It’s just a different approach.

I think a prevailing mode of depicting these misunderstood women in history is that their legacy needs to be reclaimed somehow, and I get the sense that not starting from this predetermined judgment might have affected the way you approached the film and the character.

One of the most important things I found out in doing research—not about her specifically, but about dealing with a non-fictional character—is that you cannot really know what happened or how the person really was. Because everything that’s been written about her is slightly different. It has to do with the person who wrote it, or it has to do with the time it was written in. It’s a lot like in the film when she says to the photographer, “Photography claims to be objective, but nothing is.” And, also, history isn’t objective. It always depends on who wrote it down.

So, early on, I realized, “I cannot do the perfect film about her that everybody will like and say this was exactly what happened.” I read all these books, met people, and went to the museums. I sensed a character that also had very little to do with the character [of Elisabeth] that was played by Romy Schneider. That film [Ernst Marischka’s Sissi from 1955] is a child of its time. In post-war Austria and Germany, everybody just wanted to see something happy and light. Of course, there’s drama in the film, but it’s not sad dramatics. It’s all just beautiful.

And when I read about her, for me, she was a completely different woman. She was already very introverted as a child. I think she loved to be alone in nature. She was not the plushy-cheeked, funny Romy Schneider. And I tried to stay true to the character that I saw when I read all this. Not true to the facts, but true to what I thought was her character—complex, melancholic, smart, but also sometimes mean and just unfair. Hard on herself but also on others. All of that had a darkness to it that I found very interesting. I didn’t try to make a portrait of someone that would be accurate or perfect. I just tried to make her feel-able as a person.

I like the idea of Elisabeth as an introvert who held a public position. Do you think that’s why the character you created fears the camera? Given how a camera reveals secrets, it threatens to chip away at the last thing that she had of herself.

[The movie camera scene] wasn’t accurate. I stumbled across Louis Le Prince at the time when I was already working, but it had nothing really to do with Corsage. I read about him, and I was so fascinated because I hadn’t heard about him. He came before the Lumière brothers, and he had a tragic ending [disappearing without a trace before he could exhibit his invention]. I just felt drawn to him, and then at some point he found his way into the story. Maybe because I was doing research about when she went to England all the time, and then I read that he lived there.

I always like filming film moments, and I very much liked the idea that there would be an opportunity for her to create another image of herself. She lived and struggled with an oversized image of herself all the time. Maybe that wasn’t the only possible image. She would have been able to create her own Elisabeth [with cinema]. It was also for playing with that medium, with this guy who didn’t expect her to do anything exactly besides sit there.

It’s also part of how things are told differently. I know, for example, that she spoke with a very low voice, so it was hard to hear her. She never really opened her mouth, which is why people thought she had bad teeth. And then she ordered a lot of products for her teeth. Even today, people say she had bad teeth. But when you go to the Sisi Museum, and you see her death mask, it says that she had perfect teeth. I think she was just so shy that she didn’t really open her mouth. And she was like, “Don’t look at me!” And, of course, there’s a tension between “Don’t look at me” and “Look at me, I’m beautiful.” This was interesting to me. This has two sides to it.

Does that play into the tragedy of Elisabeth? She had the desire to break out. but not necessarily the tools yet, as a woman slightly outside of her own time.

Yes, a lot of people say that she was ahead of her time. And, in many ways, she was. She was also interested in technology and everything new. That’s how the bathtub came into the film because she had one and nobody else in the castle did because it wasn’t common at that time. And her husband said, “I don’t need that stuff!” She was always interested in practical new things.

You’ve talked about doing research and getting in the weeds, but there’s a time when you have to just let it go. Do you recall a specific “breaking point” in the writing of Corsage?

I had all this information, but then sometimes I would think, “That’s cool, but can’t she instead of doing that do something else which would suit me better in the script?” I had all the material, and I could take what I needed and forget the rest just like a buffet. Whenever I was stuck in the writing, I got back to one of the books. I opened it at some random page and read something and I was like, “Ah, yeah, I remember that now! That was when this happened.” And I could take it into the film, although it was five years later or earlier. It was actually a big luxury to have all these stories, having them but not having to tell them. I can use parts of it, maybe, if I want. It was an enjoyable and fun part to take what you want and remix it like you want it.

Did the culmination of her story always have to be achieving the freedom on screen that she may or may not have had in real life?

For me, it was important that she take control—that she take her life and start to create what she thought it would be. In this case, by creating a double for herself. When they’re going to the ship and they’re all wearing the same dresses, it’s like theater play. She’s staged it, creating an ending—and we know that people who commit suicide very often do that. Not like that, but they bring things into order and make everything perfect before they go. That’s a little bit how I wanted it to be, but in a freeing way. She could create that now. Within what was possible for her, this was freeing because she could create and decide. I didn’t want her to be murdered like she was in real life because, of course, I think we have seen too many women being killed by men in films.

She really didn’t let anyone paint her after she was 40. She always wore a veil, so nobody saw her for over 20 years. Isn’t that like, if you have ever read a crime story, it gives you space for so much speculation and interpretation? And I was like, “Who knows if it was her anyway?” I mean, nobody saw her. This is what brought me to the idea that it wasn’t her anymore.

There’s a streak of irreverent humor that peeks out during the film, such as when Elisabeth drops her cigarette during a portrait painting. How did you calibrate when that could rear its head?

When you’re working with great actors, it’s the greatest thing to try out very different things. When I’m shooting, I try to not repeat takes. We do a take, and then we do something else. I always try to capture moments, but to have a real moment, it has to be a moment. You cannot repeat it 13 times, or it won’t have any life anymore. That’s at least my experience. You can make it perfect, but it’s not alive anymore. So, for example, when I’m shooting a scene with the emperor and empress on two sides of the table, it was one of the most enjoyable things to shoot. We were so focused on these two people, and they were both immediate and great actors who can really play with different subtexts. That’s basically what I’m doing. And I’m telling one actor something, and I’m telling the other one something else. I don’t talk to them together, so they never really know what the other person will do in the next moment.

And that’s what very often creates comedy, but also real emotion because you really don’t know what to expect from the other person. You don’t know what the other person is planning or thinking, which is as it is in real life. You are very much there and really focused on the other person. And when you add a subtext which is absurd and has nothing to do with the scene, then comedy is possible. And I love that. Because if you give someone a subtext and they’re really convinced, playing it really with the conviction, then it becomes great fun. That’s basically how I do it. It’s very technical now, but this is how I create these moments.