Dacre Montgomery and Vicky Krieps say Went Up the Hill camera froze twice while filming in the brutal cold

Went Up the Hill's main characters Jack (Dacre Montgomery) and Jill (Vicky Krieps), might be reminiscent of a nursery rhyme, but this story is more of a nightmare.

That's true for audiences of the supernatural, horror thriller directed by Samuel Van Grinsven, but also for its stars, who told Entertainment Weekly at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival that shooting some scenes were particularly tough, because it involved them and an ice-cold lake.

"The tip of my pen, in the scene where I'm painting on the page, froze during the take," Montgomery said. "It was like the scene from The Day After Tomorrow where the helicopter freezes in the air and then falls down... It was absolutely freezing. But I think again, all of it, I wouldn't have it any other way because I still feel like it's real. My lips are blue, your lips are blue. We're shivering."

The costars recalled that the camera battery froze twice.

Krieps added, "Someone asked me about the acting, but we were not acting, we were shivering. We couldn't talk."

In the movie, Montgomery's character Jack visits a remote area in New Zealand, where they filmed, to attend the funeral of his estranged mother. He meets Jill, who was married to his mother, and the spirit of his mother, who inhabits the bodies of both Jack and Jill. The Stranger Things actor remembered the shoot as "the coldest I've ever been."

Krieps, who's known for her work in Old and Phantom Thread, pointed out that her costar is not used to the cold.

"He's from Australia," she said, "and he was looking with these two eyes of, like, 'I cannot believe it. I can't believe it. This is actually happening.'"

Montgomery was wearing a wetsuit under his costume, but it didn't help much.

"The lake, however, despite how cold it was, was not frozen over," he said. "So the practical element was done in a sort of dirt pit near the house where they built a plexiglass frame and then had a portion of the ice and a portion of blue screen laid around it. But we were still outside. We went on stage. There was no cloud cover, so all of the warm air had left and it was minus eight and there was frost."

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With additional reporting by Gerrad Hall.