Interview with Samuel Van Grinsven / Up Went The Hill

Billy from Film in Revolt spoke with Samuel Van Grinsven (Director, Writer) about his upcoming film Up Went the Hill. Samuel generously shared insight into the behind the scenes of making the film.

I wanted to start by asking, where did the core idea for this film come from? What was the driving premise that made you want to make this film?

It’s always the most elusive question in a way because it stumps me. It’s similar to asking where a dream came from. There are all these fragments that you can recognize, that you can logically draw to a place, but it just sort of runs away from you.

I’m approaching my third film now, and they’ve all started the same way, from an image, from a visual place. Here, the thing that I was dancing around the most, which stems from being a queer filmmaker in many ways, was the idea of families, the maternal, and what is passed down from parent to child. The way in which we either run toward the parts of our parents we want to be or run away from the parts of our parents we don’t want to be.

Yes, for my first film, it was a young man looking up at an apartment block, and one of the apartments was glowing blue. For Went Up the Hill it was a coffin in the center of a room, with two people mourning for the person inside. Both of them were equally mourning, which was very important to me, but they knew nothing about one another. That felt very true of crisis or tragedy to me in the way in which you are able to form new connections in that raw, heightened state. That’s probably where the first 10 pages came from, then from there, it just kept running.

The only thing that was in the image was the windows and the idea of looking out to something. Then that idea grew, and finding the real location became really tricky. It probably took us six months to a year to find that house in New Zealand. I knew I wanted to return home to New Zealand to make this film. That naturally started introducing ideas of what landscape would exist beyond that window. It was quite surreal when we found the real location because it is eerily similar to what we wrote.

In terms of its materials, its color palette, and even the layout, which in the script was written really specifically with this living room space at the centre of the house. This place of death in the first instance is with the place of the coffin, but also this place of life and return, sort of like the womb of the house. It’s pretty rare, often you know, you find the ideal outside of your house, and then you find the inside, and maybe you build the bathroom. A lot of the references I was looking at from a filmmaking perspective, they did that. You have to jigsaw a house together, but instead, we actually found it, and it worked. It made life so much easier, but also probably drove us a little insane; it kind of turned into The Shining after a while.

A little bit of both, the colour palette in the film is really specific, extremely stripped back, and contained to four main colours. Colours that came from the landscape, which I was familiar with, being born on the South Island. I’ve always loved that in winter, in this particular region of New Zealand, all life gets stripped out of the landscape, and the daylight is so different. All the tussocks turn that beautiful brown color that’s featured throughout the film. The rock is volcanic and has these beautiful tones of gray in it.

There’s almost no sense of earth in the way that we associate with it in Australia because the earth feels black, dark, and charcoal. That void I just find so fascinating, I think it’s a large part of why there’s a strand of cinema of the unease and gothic that runs through the history of New Zealand film. You put a camera up in New Zealand, and you’re infected by what’s in front of you. It just so happened that the architects of the house had kind of gone on a similar journey in response to the landscape and to New Zealand itself. There was something really intriguing to me about there not being this seamless sense of world indoors and outdoors. So that our antagonist character, Elizabeth, would be on every surface, no matter where they went, which is similar to grief. You can run as far as you like, but it’s there.

No, we never shot in a studio. We ended up coming up with some new ways of doing ice; shooting on a frozen surface has been done a few times in New Zealand. With Lord of the Rings and these few big, big budget projects that have, that have created those kinds of surfaces to shoot on. But we worked with an incredible art director called Ben Milsom, who has a history with Weta and has worked on those kinds of large-scale projects; he really helped.

It was really important for me to do it practically, mainly because I wanted to maintain the background. So we built an ice surface in front of the actual lake so that we could keep all of our backgrounds for real. Which one makes it more cost-effective, but two, it’s also just so much more real. In a film that is not a gigantic genre piece or doesn’t have a ghost that’s created through the effects, our ghost is all done in the body, so it just would have felt completely out of character to suddenly be existing in a soundstage world.

We did something really cool with the ice, where we created it in this way, where it was layered, using actual water and salt rocks, so that the surface was reactive. It was safe, but it still elicited that feeling of a fragile surface. You feel that in their performances, it’s instinctual the way the human body responds when it’s standing on a surface that isn’t stable. It’s very specific and hard to mimic the way it would crack beneath their feet, how they would hear it, and see water. It was very cool to do and a real challenge on a film of this scale to pull off something like that.

That is partly what drew both Dacre and Vicky to the film. It’s one of those things that you can prepare for all you want, but the moment you’re actually with the cast, it all just goes out the window. Dacre and Vicky are a really interesting combo in that they come from very different schools of acting in quite different parts of the world.

That meant the first few days of rehearsal were spent finding a common language between the two. It was quite beautiful, they found something that they had in common, which they didn’t know about each other prior, that they both create custom scents for all their characters. They find a fragrance, and both of them actually go to great lengths for this; they will travel for it, even. So Vicky, who is a wonderfully generous actor, arrived on set with a scent for Jill and a scent for Elizabeth, the third character that they both share. She pitched it to Dacre that what if they both wore it when we’re playing her?

It became this really beautiful thing, a secret that they share that the audience can’t have. It gave them a connection and a place to start working from. From there, there was physical work, and what we ended up landing on was the idea of capturing an essence of someone, an energy of someone, as opposed to any kind of form of mimicry. It was truer to who Elizabeth was in that it’s a hypnotizing intensity, right? Then Dacre and Vicky would steal things from each other throughout the shoot, which was very fun.

Dacre has amazing control of his eyelids, so he decided that the character wouldn’t blink, and he wouldn’t. Then you would see Vicky take that. It was this constantly evolving and organic process, never burdened by the feeling that they had to do something kind of a replica of each other’s performance. Which I think was liberating for them, but also the best thing for the film.

We did a little bit of work forming some back story, not in a written sense, more in a playful improvising sense, we created a couple of  memories for Jill and Elizabeth. The interesting thing is that they’re actually not playing the same person because who Elizabeth is to both the characters is a very different person, from very different points in this person’s life. Therefore, they may share the same name and the same energy, but the relationships are very different. There’s a degree of liberation in that and, to a degree, a level of ownership that they could each take for a part of that character’s soul, which is quite freeing. It also allowed them to keep secrets, to keep things close to the chest, and that’s quite true to who that character, of Elizabeth, is as well.

There’s a lot of that. This is a ghost story with elements of genre throughout, andany time you’re playing with genre, you’re always retreating into the rules of the world. It’s a constant push and pull in the screenwriting process that you need to lean into. Often, what the rules breed is the stakes, structure, or evolution of the story. Then, on the other hand, you also have to lean away from them to focus on character. It’s a constant push and pull, even on set to a degree. What the film is dealing with and what it’s actually about is this ghost being a sort of manifestation of grief for these two people.

At times, it becomes a real question of whether what’s happening is even real. Are they just becoming who the other person needs them to be in order to get through this? There’s a liberty that comes from that as well, from this beautiful tradition in horror or in ghost stories and supernatural tales, where you can lean on those who have come before you. On this core set of stories or core archetypes that have come before. Then what you’re often doing is blowing that up, expanding that, or pushing against it. In this film, there are a few things we do that challenge the way things are normally done. Knowing that the audience has this potential, an ingrained knowledge of this kind of world.

Yeah, tone is probably the most fascinating part of directing for me because so much of directing is conveying your vision for the entirety of the film to everyone around you at all times. You have to be in response to being challenged, being pushed, being awake to what you’re actually making, and not being so in love with what you wrote/the original idea. Very often, the original idea is really not the most interesting idea at all.

What you’re using as a filter throughout that whole time is maintaining the tone of the film. A mistake I often have seen being made, coming from even back in my film school days, is people getting bored with their tone. Shoots are long, and it’s really easy to lose that or go down the rabbit hole of something happening on set that doesn’t align with the rest of what you’re making.

For me, a lot of it comes from working with music. I’ve worked with the same composer in both films now, starting before even pre-production begins. We write sketches really early on that are just in response to reference material, the initial casting, the screenplay, or, of course, the locations. Then I share those sketches with the cast and crew. I play them on set. I play them in rehearsal. To me, it’s a clearer way of indicating how I see this world, how I see the tone of the film, how I see the edit of the film, how I see the pace of the film. Music is so about pace. Way Up The Hill is quite a poetic edit in a lot of ways. It’s also quite classical at times, but also quite elusive. A lot of that came from the sharing of those sketches early on.

Interview by Billy Newbery