There were moments during the filming of the Italian order The eightmountains who “came in hard”, says Belgian director Felix van Groeningen (45)during a conversation about his film. “When your own quest and the character’squest suddenly run parallel.”
The partly autobiographical novel by Paolo Cognetti is about the friendshipbetween Pietro and Bruno. The first grows up in the city, but spends thesummers with his parents in the mountains of northern Italy. There he developsan intense friendship with local contemporary Bruno. When they are teenagersthe contact fades, but when Pietro’s father dies it turns out that he has lefthis son a ruin in the mountains. Together with Bruno, Pietro rebuilds thisalpine house, after which their friendship and their shared love for life inthe mountains continues to take on new forms.
The Italians who had the rights for the book adaptation wanted to turn it intoa production with international allure. They contacted Van Groeningen, who wasat that time making his first English-language film, Beautiful Boy (2018),had shot. The Belgian previously scored international art house hits as theOscar nominee The Broken Circle Breakdown (2012) and The Misfortune ofThings (2006). Le otto montagne received the Prix du Jury at the CannesFilm Festival.
Difficult father-child relationships
Besides themes such as friendship, the passage of time or the tension betweencity and nature Le otto montagne also about difficult father-sonrelationships. Bruno has an absent father and later struggles with his ownfatherhood. Pietro has broken up with his father for several years when hedies. They had a conflict about his studies, among other things.
Both director Felix van Groeningen and his co-screenwriter and co-directorCharlotte Vandermeersch (39) react emotionally when it is mentioned that thestory of the film is also very much a quest by Pietro to find out who hisdeceased father really was.
Vandermeersch is Van Groeningen’s life partner. She also acted as an actressin several of his films and co-wrote the screenplay of The Broken CircleBreakdown. With this film she makes her directorial debut.
Van Groeningen explains that, just like Pietro, they both lost their fathersat an age when you are still trying to find your way in life and you areopposed to your parents. She was twenty-eight, he was twenty-six. VanGroeningen: “There are things that I was angry about at the time, but which Inow view with more softness. I now see, for example, that my father did try todo well.”
Van Groeningen calls the fact that he now has these insights, while it isactually too late, just like Pietro, “painful, but also beautiful”.
The character of Pietro’s father is one of the few elements where theydeviated somewhat from Cognetti’s novel, continues Vandermeersch. “Irecognized myself in the way young Pietro in the book longs for his father,but finds no way to access him and feels rejected.” In the screenplay that thecouple wrote based on the book, the father figure slowly took on traits ofVandermeersch’s own father.
“You see that young Pietro struggles with his father’s split. Mine also hadtwo faces. He was either grumpy, then you didn’t know if you could makecontact with him, or he was a kind of walking encyclopedia who explained theworld in a very pedantic way.”
Van Groeningen points – spoiler alert – to the scene in their film in whichPietro makes the mountain trips that his father undertook in the years thatthey were at odds. And thus discovers what the purpose of the inheritance was.
Also read the report: Visiting the village of Paolo Cognetti: ‘ The EightMountains is also a documentary about our village’
Van Groeningen: “I am proud of how that has taken shape in the film. It was akind of forgiveness and contact with our fathers.” According to Cognetti, hisown father was more gentle than the character in the screenplay, but he likedtheir adaptations.
Inhospitable
In other areas, the directing duo remained remarkably faithful to the originalstory. For example, it was Van Groeningen himself who chose to shoot the filmin Italian, instead of English as some suggested. “The book was so authenticthat it had to be filmed in Italian,” he says. The Belgians learned Italianfor the recordings.
Directing in Italian worked out quite well, says Vandermeersch, because theyknew the scenario through and through and therefore quickly noticed if a scenedidn’t work. Giving nuanced instructions was a bit more difficult in thebeginning. “But if the need is high because you work in remote places, or withchildren, then you progress quickly.”
The film was shot in the mountain area where Cognetti himself lives part ofthe year and where his story takes place. Cast and crew had to go up themountain daily by four-wheel drives, snowmobiles, helicopters or on foot,where they built the house at an altitude of 2,200 meters that plays a centralrole in the story. Working at that height literally involved trial and error:a make-up employee broke her foot when she slid off a ledge, they told theBelgian magazine Knack. Was filming in that inhospitable location worth itin hindsight?
Van Groeningen: “Perhaps a different kind of director, someone who haseverything perfectly in his head in advance, could have recorded this in astudio. But you make intuitive choices while directing that afterwards, alsovisually, fall into place.”
As an example, he gives the image that eventually became the poster of thefilm, in which you see a beautiful visual rhyme between the roof of the alpinehouse that Pietro and Bruno are building and the top of the mountain in thebackground. Or the recording in which Pietro and Bruno talk after a summer ofodd jobs about how they found each other again and about their future.According to Van Groeningen, it was a great scene when they rehearsed it, butduring the shooting on location it suddenly became an emotional blow thatensured that everyone watching on the monitor “sat bleach ”.
Van Groeningen: “The sun went down, you felt the cold and the actors played itafter we had been recording together in the mountains for four weeks and hadreally built half a house. Everything was real, everyone wanted to be thereand stay there.”
Discomfort
Are Van Groeningen’s films getting more and more serious? Opposite a fledglingfilm like Days Without Love (2007), which is about the friendship of a groupof people in their twenties in a Flemish city Le otto montagne serene. Inthat first film, drama, melancholy and coming-of-age are continuouslyinterspersed with humour. Van Groeningen: “I have the feeling that film afterfilm I am becoming more mature – and my work with me.”
But it is also because Vandermeersch co-wrote the screenplay and guarded “goodtaste” a bit, he adds with a laugh.
Vandermeersch: „Felix is very playful. The kind of friendship where youngmen push each other underwater while swimming and fart in each other’s face,as you see in Days without Love. That’s funny, but it didn’t fit for thisfilm. In the end, we cut out a lot of those moments.”
Much remains unspoken in the friendship between Pietro and Bruno.Vandermeersch: “You always feel the desire for closeness with them and howthat can never be fully expressed, neither in words, nor physically, nor intime. Without necessarily having anything sexual or romantic about it. Atleast that was not our intention.”
Van Groeningen: “What I also find recognizable is that every time Pietro andBruno come together after a long time, there is a kind of discomfort that hasto be overcome. Until it clicks again. It is precisely the search that makesit interesting.”