Went Up the Hill is a unique kind of supernatural movie. While it deals with ghosts and possession, it’s less about jump scares and more about the careful exhumation and examination of lies, relationships, and trauma. The movie was directed by Samuel Van Grinsven, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jory Anast.
In Went Up the Hill, aptly-named lead characters Jack and Jill meet at the funeral of Elizabeth—Jack’s mother and Jill’s wife. We learn that Jill wasn’t aware of Jack, and he was just one of many secrets Elizabeth kept from her. That’s where this ghost story movie begins.
Most of the movie is spent with those two characters, with Elizabeth’s ghost possessing each in turn to have fascinating and haunting moments with the other. To bring this strange dynamic to life, the director turned to Phantom Thread’s Vicky Krieps and Stranger Things star Dacre Montgomery.
ScreenRant interviewed Vicky Krieps and Dacre Montgomery about the intense amount of work they put in to create the gripping performances that ScreenRant’s Went Up the Hill review praised. They also discussed how they barely interacted on set outside of scene work, how the character of Elizabeth lived through them, and more.
Dacre Montgomery & Vicky Krieps Avoided Each Other During Production
Went Up the Hill succeeds on the strength of the onscreen dynamic between Dacre Montgomery and Vicky Krieps, which may have been helped by the fact that their off-screen dynamic was nearly nonexistent.
“Vicky and I didn’t talk to each other while we were shooting,” Montgomery shared. “We stayed in separate spaces when we weren’t on set together. We didn’t socialize on set. We were in the middle of nowhere in this house, super isolated and removed from the rest of the world.”
“We didn’t break out of that, really, until the film premiered at TIFF.”
“It’s the most peculiar thing that’s ever happened to me,” Krieps said. “We both don’t know why, because we liked each other from the beginning.” But, she added, “the only explanation is that it was so intense … that every time outside the set, we needed to be alone, and even be away from this other person.”
“There was so much tension all the time,” she continued. “We were thinking with our skin, like, ‘Where is the other person?’ And he was on the other side of the house, but I knew he was there. And we knew, the next time we meet, it’s happening again.”
Creating Jack & Jill For Went Up The Hill
Jack and Jill are two very different people in Went Up the Hill. Jack is a troubled adult whose mother gave him up to foster care as a child, and Jill is a woman so used to a life in which she is in thrall of an abusive partner that she has barely considered dreaming for herself.
Interestingly, Dacre Montgomery and Vicky Krieps had opposing ways of getting into the skin of their characters. For Montgomery, Jack’s journey was not entirely dissimilar to his own. “For me, it was actually about finding connective tissue in Dacre’s upbringing,” Dacre said, specifically referring to reuniting with his family.
“My family’s from New Zealand,” the actor continued, “and coming back to New Zealand [to make the film] was in parallel [to] the pilgrimage that Jack was going on. I went and met with a lot of family that I hadn’t seen in many, many years after we wrapped the film.”
“It was a really cathartic and therapeutic experience for me, shooting the movie and then going straight into meeting with all of this family.”
Vicky Krieps, on the other hand, “found Jill a lot in nature, hiking or walking, and being in this solitude that is of someone being left behind when someone leaves. But also realizing that she had been alone before, and is absolutely not made for the world.”
“She probably [couldn’t] even walk out of the house before, and now this person is gone,” Krieps said.
“The prison is gone, and she realizes that the prison is herself.”
How Two Actors Combined To Play A Third
Most of Went Up the Hill features only its two stars, who were tasked with bringing the character of Elizabeth to (after)life. But, as it turns out, the actors saved that challenge for last. “We didn’t rehearse Elizabeth until we arrived in Christchurch,” Montgomery said, “which is where we did pre-production.”
The pair worked with Polly Bennett, who is a movement director Montgomery previously collaborated with on Elvis. But while they originally planned to have a week of rehearsals, Montgomery said, “Halfway through day two, we were like, ‘We shouldn’t be doing this.’”
There were two reasons for this, Montgomery revealed. “One was [that] we didn’t want to overcook it and over-rehearse Elizabeth,” he said, “and secondly, neither Vicky nor I, we discovered, perceived the movie as a supernatural film. We perceived it as a movie where two characters create their abuser in themselves in order to deal with their trauma and grief.”
“Because of that,” Montgomery added, “Elizabeth never needed to be a particular performance style, because the performance of Elizabeth was coming from my performance of Jack, as it was coming from [Vicky’s] performance of Jill.”
There was one thing Montgomery and Krieps did to get into character, relatively unrehearsed as she was. “Vicky and I [both realized we] work with scent,” Montgomery shared. “I create a perfume or a cologne for every character I play, and [Vicky[, funnily enough, does the same thing. But she’d brought another one for Elizabeth.”
“I would wear Elizabeth’s scent when I was playing Elizabeth, and she would wear a perfume when she was playing Elizabeth, so you could smell Elizabeth’s scent versus Jack’s or Jill’s scent, which were different.”
Vicky Krieps detailed the challenges of playing Elizabeth on an emotional level, saying, “We would shift the energy and become this other person, which took a lot of Dacre and me, because we are not predators.”
“To be Elizabeth, and be the abuser, or the one who crushes another person, was maybe what was the most difficult for us.”
Vicky Krieps Reveals Her Suggestion That Changed Everything
The most gripping moments in Went Up the Hill are the intimate ones between Elizabeth–in Jack’s body–and Jill. With Jack’s one mother acting through his body, the scenes are just as unsettling as they are eerily tender. But they were almost entirely different.
“In the beginning,” Krieps said, “there was a scarf that was supposed to cover the face, more like a supernatural element, and then we would become the ghost. And, to Sam and the producers early on, I said, ‘I would love to do the film, but I have a feeling we don’t need the scarf.’”
“‘I’m really more interested if there’s no scarf, because it feels more daring and honest.’”
“‘And what if it works?’” Krieps continued, “‘What if we take the scarf away and it still works? Wouldn’t that be amazing?’” Thankfully, she said, “They accepted, and Dacre accepted, and I think this is why it was so intense.”
After Went Up The Hill, Dacre Montgomery Is Climbing His Own
Dacre Montgomery has been going for broke creatively at least since he recorded his self-tape for Stranger Things, which not only landed him the role, but won over 18 million views on YouTube and became a point of reference by which agents and casting directors judged other auditions.
“For me, I had just wrapped Power Rangers, which was my first job,” Montgomery said about the decision to approach his self-tape the way he did. “I kind of was sitting at home, I got the thing one day, and I went, ‘You know what? F**k it. F**k you. I’m doing my own thing.”
“That was the win for me,” he added, “even if I didn’t book the role. I’ve done a couple of other nuts auditions once or twice … next level from that tape, that no one will see.” He shared his philosophy, revealing what he tells his partner with each audition.
“‘I’m either going to get a call within a couple of hours [where] they’re like, ‘You’re the only person for this role,’ or this person … will never hire me ever.’”
“I’d rather go down that avenue and take that risk then send some bull**** that I just don’t care about, if I’m honest,” he continued. “I would rather go hell for leather, like Went Up the Hill, or not work.”
Went Up the Hill was the next step for an actor who proudly throws himself deep into any role. “I was chasing something that was the next level of intensity and of discovery beyond Stranger Things,” he said. For this film, that meant playing an Australian character for the first time.
“I often will put on a big look or a big voice … and this was like, ‘No, you take the masks off and be more closely aligned with Dacre,’” Montgomery shared. “It was me going, ‘What’s the next level that I can go to in terms of my explorative discovery of the idiosyncrasies of another human being?’”
“That’s far more impactful than any other role or process that I had been involved in.”
But that may change soon, as Montgomery is–at the time of this writing–about to take on his biggest project yet. “I’m directing my first film,” he shared at one point during the interview. “We start pre-production in about eight weeks.”
“That’s been nine years in the making–the whole time I’ve been working as an actor,” he continued. And he won’t just be directing: “I play the male lead in the film as well, and I’m producing the film.” Ultimately, he said, “I’m intensely focused right now [on] what the next level of creative discovery is.”
Went Up the Hill has a limited theatrical release August 15.
