This story about “Corsage” and Vicky Krieps first appeared in the International Film edition of awards magazine TheWrap.
In “Corsage,” Vicky Krieps does more than offer a hauntingly compelling portrait of the iconic “Empress Sisi,” the 19th-century Austrian monarch Elisabeth, Empress of Austria, and Queen of Hungary, as familiar to Central Europeans as Queen Elizabeth was. nowadays. times. She also brings her own wit, politics and feminist views to what has been hailed as a modern interpretation of a tragic celebrity story, in collaboration with writer-director Marie Kreutzer. Krieps’s performance, which won her Best Performance in the Un Certain Regard section at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, forced her to endure breath-defying corsets and learn to ride sideways, among other tortures. of 19th century femininity. Still, the enforced tedium of life in a gilded cage may have been the most exquisite torture of all, and the one at the heart of the role.
The Luxembourg actress first leaped into the American imagination as the muse of fashion designer Daniel Day-Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson’s lyrical and sly “Phantom Thread.” As it turns out, the experience of a stark stare from a celebrity led him directly to “Corsage.” She spoke with Wrap editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman at the Toronto Film Festival.
You have described your performance in “Corsage” as an act of rebellion. And I wanted to start there, to understand what you meant by that.
So, it was my idea.
Was the movie your idea?
Yes. Marie wasn’t too convinced at first, because she thought it was too kitsch and cliché and maybe superficial. Because the figure of Sisi in Austria is actually the figure of the princess on top of the cake. What caught his attention about her is that she could feel some act of rebellion when reading about her. If you read about Empress Elisabeth, you can feel that she at least she was trying to rebel against certain things, the rules of her time, especially the rules of being a woman of her time. That was the first thing that interested Marie and made her write the script.
And that was mine too, I think. I read his biography when I was 15 years old. And reading it, she was too young to understand what it is to be a woman. But I think that at 15 she could already feel the walls and the demands of society: What do you look like as a girl? What are you wearing? How you behave? You have to be nice and kind and sweet and cute. I wasn’t even raised that way, because my parents raised me freely. But it was enough that there was some kind of society that gave me this feeling and made me feel that I had to behave and fit into the role of a girl.
And then I became an actress. And when you’re an actress, it’s even worse. Because you want to be a mother and beautiful and sexy and successful and independent, and we push ourselves too hard and we know it. As an actress, we are also being watched, and I think Elisabeth was suffering a lot in the public eye. Maybe she was the first victim of celebrity culture.
Of course you know about Princess Diana and it’s almost the equivalent of that in the 1870s.
I think it’s the same with Princess Diana: she was adored. When Sisi was 15 years old, she was being drawn. (She Was) like the Instagram of the time: they made drawings and distributed them to people everywhere, saying that she was the most beautiful woman in Europe. So while they adored her, they also wanted to control her image. She was forced to be the most beautiful girl in Europe, she had to be slim. And she had to have beautiful long hair once she was given the image of her. She was in this prison and gilded cage because of society, and then she was also putting herself in that prison. Because you become this thing, you become more and more alone. And I think that’s why she wanted to talk about this. Because today, we are all also becoming more and more lonely and alone, because of this strange look that the internet has added. Now there’s this constant thought of, “How do I look from the side right now?” And I think now, thanks to the internet and social media, we all have our image everywhere, which is something new.
It seems very clear that you are now talking about yourself as an actress, someone who has people stare at or stare at her, just to feel a connection to you and somehow feel like they know a public figure. You said you grew up very freely, but I really don’t know what that means.
I really don’t care what people think of me, whether they like it or not. And it took me time to understand why. Why don’t I care? It seemed normal to me. And it’s not that I’m stronger than anyone or that I’m cooler. I looked back and understood that this is how my parents raised me. I like to say they were hippies. They were normal.
Our house was on the edge of the city. And there was forest around and a field. So it was always on some kind of grass (or) lying somewhere on the ground. I remember coming home from school and saying to my friends, “Let’s play in the mud,” and they’d say, “No, we can’t. My mom will be mad.” And I was like “What? No.” And then they said, “Okay, if you roll in the mud, we’ll give you a bag of candy.” And I was like, “Yeah, no problem.” Because I knew if I came home, my mom she would never be angry. She studied art. She was an artist in my family. I think she still is now. I mean, she just got back from two weeks of strip camp with her best friend.
When you decided you wanted to be an actress, didn’t you think about what would happen if you were successful?
No, I did not do it. First, I never thought I would be in movies. I thought I would only do theater. But then something happened. I could feel it myself. It was something between me and the camera, it felt like the camera was alive. I can feel how it is like a dance. I feel what the camera likes and dislikes. It is very intimate and personal. When I work with the camera, for me, it’s all about what’s happening at that time and place. And I never think about what comes on top of that.
But that also touched something in you as an artist.
Ever since that happened, I feel like I’m like a scientist or something. I’m studying something about humans. Whenever I feel like I’m being sent to some kind of jungle, I sit there and study this plant. Only I see it. Sometimes I find it and get something out of it. And sometimes I don’t. But I always go with the same curiosity of “What will happen this time? What am I going to find? So when I do what I do, I’m really in my own world. And I never think about showing it later.
Most of us got to know you on “Phantom Thread”. The experience of the movie being successful and drawing attention to you also led to this movie.
Yes. While I was making “Phantom”, it felt exactly like this jungle. Daniel (Day-Lewis) being the king of the jungle, and me coming to study a little plant in the jungle and little by little making my own space in his world. So I think Paul Thomas Anderson, the director, and Daniel let me know that it’s okay to be this weird scientist. They gave me absolution, they gave me the feeling that it’s okay to be who I am and do it the way I do. But what nobody could prepare me for was what happens when you see it. And all of a sudden people look at you and go, “Oh, you’re the girl from ‘Phantom Thread’.” “It’s not me”. It’s very weird, but the first couple of months I always wanted to go have coffee with every person (who saw the movie). “Oh, did you see my movie? Really?” Because to me, it’s about my plant. And someone saw my plant. And I had to learn to deal with this more ordinary aspect of you. Suddenly, it’s not personal, because you’ve become the movie for people.
And all of a sudden it was very painful for me, because I felt like it was disappearing. I felt like I was constantly running into invisible walls. Like everything I did was wrong, because I didn’t know how to play the game. Because I didn’t want to play the game of “What are you wearing? As you look? What do you say? What don’t you say? How you behave? And I could not. I was really suffering. So I retired to my forest again.
And then Maria. I came back from Los Angeles, I had just finished the whole press tour, I opened my mailbox and there was the script. And I opened the script, and it had a postcard that said, “Vicky, you were right. I went to the file. And I think there’s something here, and here’s the script.”
Yes, I got goosebumps. And then, holding the script in my hand, I started crying because I realized that now it all made sense. Because coming from Los Angeles, she had now lived through what Sisi had lived through in the 19th century, in a different way, and definitely not as famous as her. But coming from where I come from, that was already a lot, and too much. And in that moment I decided why I want to make the film, because I want to talk about this phenomenon when you are put in a place and people decide that you are something to be seen.
Now that I’ve heard you explain the context, I have to ask: How do you feel about going on in this life? Because that’s not going to change. Yes. At some point I thought: “I don’t care. I can grow salad. But then I thought, “Who’s to say I can’t do it my way?” In a way, it’s my duty to have the guts and say that I do it my way. And she fell on me, she fell on me like a glove. And now I’m doing what I do, which is the same as before. But I’m doing what I feel my heart tells me.
Read more from the International Film Edition here.
