She didn’t fit into that beauty icon thing. For me it was very inspiring because it told me that she didn’t fit in. Trine Dyrholm: I saw an interview where she was asked, ‘Do you regret anything?’ and she said, ‘No, I don’t regret anything other than I was born a woman and not a man’. Was there anything in the interviews you listened to that really stood out? You know, being a child in a destroyed Berlin. I think she struggled with being a German after the war. Trine Dyrholm: I think she struggled with a lot of things. She had many admirers up until the end but she struggled with addiction. I could’ve been the journalist in the film who says, ‘Can you tell me about Andy Warhol and that period?’, because that's all I knew. Of course I knew of her, but I didn’t know much about her. I only knew her connected to The Velvet Underground and also as a model, this icon. Trine Dyrholm: I didn't know that much about her, actually. I think it helped me a little bit that I had done these theatrical things, because in the studio I just tried to search for some sounds. That was another genre, but I have also done some rock things, and I’ve done some theatre where I had to explore my voice in different ways, like singing or screaming. Trine Dyrholm: Yes, I started out in the Eurovision Song Contest when I was 14. I then just started to work in the studio with the songs, because that was the key to embodying her. Trine Dyrholm: I looked up concerts from the last days of Nico – that was very inspiring – and I also saw some interviews and a documentary. So that was kind of what we did, didn’t stick too much to reality. So Susanna immediately said to me, ‘You don't look like Nico, we're doing our version’. She has this deep voice, and I had to sing the songs and everything. It’s a very complex character, very complicated, and in the beginning I was afraid to imitate her. How did you and Susanna Nicchiaralli come up with this version of Nico? The result is a powerful portrait of a woman taking control of her life just as it is about to end. “She created a unique style combining personal research with provoking experimental solutions and irony, always refusing to worry about the commerciality of her production.”ĭyrholm admits that she had previously only known Nico from her time with The Velvet Underground, but came to understand her though listening to interviews and watching hours of footage of her in concert. While not commercially successful, the music Nico made “was by far one of the most interesting, uncompromising productions of the period”, claims Nicchiarelli. Warhol once said that Nico “became a fat junkie and disappeared”, but this is as untrue as it is insulting. The film places Nico at a point when she is performing small gigs around Europe in the 80s, attempting to shake off her past and come out from the shadow of the men had always been associated with, while also trying to reconnect with Ari, the suicidal son she gave up as a child. The Nico being portrayed in the film is no longer the glamorous, statuesque beauty who performed with The Velvet Underground, but a junkie still fighting to make her voice heard as an artist in her own right during the last three years of her life.ĭyrholm captures the “priestess of darkness” perfectly – the German-accented, deep-toned vocals don’t drop a note, and it’s a complex performance that reveals vulnerability, sadness and regret. “Vanity kills art,” says the Danish actress Trine Dyrholm, who plays former Warhol muse Christa Päffgen, aka Nico, in Italian writer-director Susanna Nicchiarelli’s gritty and unconventional low-budget pop biopic, Nico, 1988.
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