Sometimes a project arrives at the right time—but in the case of Bergman Island, it was more about just how long it stayed with star Vicky Krieps. The Luxembourg-born actor had broken out in a big way in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2017 period piece Phantom Thread, yanked from obscurity and into the Hollywood spotlight practically overnight. “I was so lost,” the actor says now over Zoom. “I had all these crazy Americans talking to me. I come from a different planet.” She felt scared, alienated, and needed to digest the experience. She avoided public events, retreated back into her “cave.” A few months after the 2018 Oscars, which concluded her Phantom Thread whirlwind, she began production on a new film called Bergman Island. For many reasons, production wound up lasting two years, on and off. “The movie is a milestone in my personal story because it took so long,” Krieps says. “Over those two years, the film helped me to accept the artist I am.”
Bergman Island also serves as a reminder for audiences of what kind of artist Krieps is—an actor whose portrayals brim with life in every frame, a spontaneity that could be mistaken for quirk but truly reflects a deep-rooted humanity. The film—watch the trailer exclusively below—is Krieps’s most significant starring vehicle in a year which finds her featuring in many projects, following a fairly quiet stretch. (Other 2021 titles include the European releases Next Door and Hold Me Tight, as well as the Hollywood thrillers Old and Beckett.) This is not a comeback, exactly; we’re smack in the middle of the period in which Krieps has realized that to be a working and rising actor, exposure comes with the territory—say, in a profile like this one.
In Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island, Krieps plays Chris, an indie filmmaker married to a relatively famous filmmaker, Tony (Tim Roth). The couple decide to spend a retreat-like summer on the Baltic Sea island of Fårö, site of a number of Ingmar Bergman films as well as his eventual residence. As Chris and Tony work on their screenplays, lines between the former’s fiction and autobiography start to blur; a movie-within-the-movie emerges, starring Mia Wasikowska as the central figure, in love with a man she’s separated from. Krieps is the emotional anchor in all this, as an artist struggling to find her voice in her work and her relationship while wading through past regrets, present ambivalence, and future anxieties.
“It’s a movie made to make you think,” Krieps says. “It takes you really deep, somehow. Watching it, that’s what happened to me—I started crying. I was like, Why am I crying?”
True to Hansen-Løve’s established form, Bergman Island balances stark realism with much grander, more philosophical questions about life and art weaved throughout. Krieps’s own approach to the material seems aligned with that vision—how she slips into a giggle fit in bed, or the distinctive way she brushes her teeth. The actor wanted to make it “lively,” but also feel common, everyday: “I tried to keep it all internal in order to pull the audience more inside and then go out, when you see her vision.”
If it sounds like Krieps thought this through, remember: She had the time. Before shooting was set to begin, Owen Wilson, who was originally cast as Tony, left the project. “This is when usually everyone goes, Okay, we’re fucked,” Krieps says, smiling. But because everything was in place, they decided to move as planned, and jetted off to Fårö. While the producers figured out a backup plan, they shot all of Krieps’s scenes alone, without the husband character. “It was really spooky to make the movie without your partner,” she says. Alone, she felt haunted by the island’s namesake: “I would walk around the island, and I remember thinking, I can feel this Bergman…. I got the impression I could almost tell who this man was, who I’d never met, who is very mysterious and somehow spiritual. This is something you can feel in the movie.”
Then production took a yearlong hiatus; Krieps made another movie before filming resumed with Roth on hand. The energy shifted dramatically, from Krieps and Hansen-Løve making their own little arty ghost story to something more dynamic and unpredictable. Krieps found working with Roth a thrilling challenge. “He comes out of something like Tarantino, loud and messy,” she says. “If Tim would go too crazy, I would go really silent, and say my line very paused, really present.” And she forged a sisterhood with her director too. “Whenever I want to work with an actress, it’s not only about how great I find her, but also about how much of myself I can project through her,” Hansen-Løve tells me. “It occurred to me that the way she emanated this balance of discretion and authority, of shyness and determination, was exactly what I wanted for the part of Chris.”
Indeed, Chris hates the spotlight, just as Krieps did when she joined the project; Chris discovers her own artistic strength over the course of the movie, like Krieps did. “I think I lost time over those two years; I had to cross borders and pass walls inside of me to finally accept that I had done Phantom Thread,” she says. Following production, and just before COVID-19 hit, she went back to L.A. for the first time since that press tour. She felt as if a book had been left open, unfinished. She shared a “round of soup” with Paul Thomas Anderson. “I remember him sitting across the table and saying, ‘I think we made a good movie,’” Krieps recalls. “I said, ‘Yeah, I think we made a good movie.’ It was so nice. It was like a closing of the book. I didn’t realize this was something both of us hadn’t closed the circle on. Then I was ready.”
The casting shakeup on Bergman Island and pandemic-induced release delays mean that years of work by Krieps are now all getting released at the same time. But there’s a particular kind of blossoming in Bergman Island that can be explained by the years-long shoot—a great actor realizing, gradually, just how much further they can go.
When Krieps watched the film for the first time, “I saw the whole thing in a different way.” She couldn’t believe how the film-within-the-film corresponded, with eerie closeness, to what Krieps felt while making Bergman Island, “the feeling of longing and also of not being seen, and the question of love.” Big, thorny topics. It’s the kind of stuff Krieps can only find and express in her art. She’s accepted that. “I’m not interested in being famous,” she admits. “But I love my job. I really do. I love what I do. And I’m not scared anymore.”
Bergman Island debuted in Cannes and made its U.S. premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. It will next screen at the New York Film Festival, before IFC releases it in select theaters and across VOD platforms on Oct. 15. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall-festival coverage, featuring first looks and in-depth interviews with some of this coming season’s biggest contenders.
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