by Gill Pringle at the 19th Zurich Film Festival

Renowned German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta was enamoured with Luxembourg actress Vicky Krieps from the moment she saw her co-starring with Daniel Day Lewis in Phantom Thread six years ago.

“After I saw Vicky in this film, I was totally in her spell,” says von Trotta whose films include Hannah Arendt, Rosenstrasse and her 1975 debut The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, co-directed with Volker Schlondorff.

As von Trotta began writing her latest drama, Ingeborg Bachmann: Journey into the Desert – a biopic about the celebrated Austrian poet who died tragically in a fire – she couldn’t imagine anybody but Krieps in the titular role.

Setting out to write the script, she promptly reached out to Krieps. “There was no choice. I had to have Vicky in the role – and since I met her before in Luxembourg, we already knew each other – and she immediately agreed to play Ingeborg which meant Vicky was in my mind from the start of my writing,” says von Trotta when we chat at the 19th Zurich Film Festival.

Margarethe von Trotta, Photo by ©Ferda Demir (Getty) for ZFF

Presented at Zurich’s Gala Premiere section, ahead of its European release, the film focuses on Bachmann’s relationship with Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch and the impact it had on her life. It also depicts her famous friends, composer Hans Werner Henze and writer Adolf Opel, the latter with whom she escaped to Egypt to find respite in the desert.

In writing Ingeborg Bachmann: Journey into the Desert, von Trotta found inspiration in more modern celebrities who had also died young after falling victim to addiction.

Vicky Krieps, ©Ferda Demir (Getty) for ZFF

Krieps, 40, likewise responded to those themes. “That’s probably the reason I made this movie, because I was shocked to see that one of the greatest thinkers of our time, apparently also suffered the same thing as more recent generations,” she says of the poet and intellectual who died in Rome in 1973, aged 47, after falling asleep with her cigarette still burning.

Friends also reported that Bachmann was popping up to 100 pills a day – mainly barbiturates – as well as being considered an alcoholic.

“I was fascinated how Ingeborg had apparently bumped into the same walls as so many other creative people, from Whitney Houston to Janis Joplin, and then of course you have actress Romy Schneider and even Empress Sisi,” she says of the Austrian/Hungarian empress who apparently used cocaine although she met her death after being assassinated.

Ironically, both Schneider and Krieps have portrayed Sisi, Krieps most recently in her award-winning role in last year’s Corsage.

“So, all these women seem to have bumped into some sort of wall at some point. They crashed against this and something inside of them crumbled,” says the actress.

Krieps herself is not immune to the sense of “crashing”, living a very visible life in Europe.

“Personally, I keep bumping and I keep crashing. But I go on. And there’s a lot of this in my job. You know, like where people will say, ‘What did you do?’ or ‘Why are you doing this?’ and I know you will think it’s super kitsch, or whatever, but I think it’s the audience. It’s my children. It’s my neighbour. It’s the people I see in the street. It’s every tense person that has like a smile in their eyes. I’m like – me too – but I just keep on believing that we are more than just the structure of this life and we are more than the construction of society and that each of us is a better person than we even know we are, because we are just suffering or frustrated… so, when I crash into the wall, I try to see why was it put there… And maybe someone put it there who was sad… Or maybe someone put it there who was frustrated,” she argues.

She was also drawn to the fact of Bachmann being a woman ahead of her time – with little interest in motherhood or marriage, despite numerous affairs.

Bachmann’s four-year romance with Max Frisch was considered as the merging of two 20th century literary powerhouses – and it is these four years that von Trotta chooses to focus on rather than a traditional birth-to-death biopic.

Living together in Rome and Zurich, jealousy and fame served to drive the literary couple further apart, rather than creating any kind of harmony.

Bachmann felt exploited as Frisch’s muse while, in turn, Bachmann’s fierce independence – initially intriguing to the playwright – ultimately became the nail in the coffin for their romance.

Struggling against the restraints placed on her by Frisch’s jealousy, Bachmann escaped to Egypt where she drew strength in the desert, far removed from his constant criticism.

As a mother-of-two, Krieps understands Bachmann’s desire to carve out time for solitude and reflection, away from the world, having also recently escaped to Africa for some time alone. “I think, for me, it’s understanding that you cannot have everything in life. And life can never be the perfect thing of like, ‘I would like to have spaghetti with a little less salt or a little more’. Life just happens. And so – even if I cannot regularly take time to visit Africa, I call it my inner Africa. Yes, I may not be able to get a week. But I will have one afternoon – where I go to the park and I sit and this afternoon will feel like a week – and I will come back very renewed,” says the actress, who will next be seen in Viggo Mortensen’s western, The Dead Don’t Hurt.

By the same token, von Trotta also found common ground between Bachmann’s life and her own. “Absolutely. I am like her. I was born from a mother who was very emancipated and was not married and she didn’t want to be married, just like Ingeborg then. So, I grew up with this idea of being a woman who is free. Yes, I was then twice married but that was for other reasons!” laughs the filmmaker who was regarded as a leading force of the New German Cinema movement, but later felt her career become overshadowed by her marriage to German director Volker Schlondorff from whom she is now divorced.

“Ingeborg wanted to have it all, while nevertheless being protected perhaps by a man. But those were two things that didn’t go together. Frisch was a man of his time – a total example of a man of his time – and she was very much already a woman of the future. It couldn’t go well between them. From the very beginning, it couldn’t go well, but both hoped that perhaps their union could be a very creative story for them,” says von Trotta who did extensive research into Bachmann’s personal life.

“I read everything that was written about her, and I even met her brother who was very friendly. He is 14 years younger than Ingeborg, so he was not present when she was young, but it was very helpful to speak with him,” she says.

In tackling von Trotta’s unconventional approach to Bachmann’s life, Krieps concludes, “Whenever I do something, I go in and think: How can I do this so that the audience are either feeling or thinking something they were not before? And then I become like a scientist in taking this life that has already existed and turning it into something that’s alive.”

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