Viggo Mortensen Talks Next Directorial Project After Western ‘The Dead Don’t Hurt’: ‘I Won’t Make a Movie Unless I Have Final Cut’
Viggo Mortensen is eyeing his next directorial project.
“It’s only indigenous languages, it has no white characters and there will be no movie stars – just lots and lots of horses. But I am convinced it will have wide appeal, because it’s a universal coming-of-age story about an adolescent boy,” he tells Variety.
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The “Lord of the Rings” alumnus, who wrote the script for his next project “many years ago,” has been hoping to bring it to screen even before he made his directorial debut with “Falling” in 2020. Three years later, he completed his second film as director, Western “The Dead Don’t Hurt” – selected as this year’s opener of Karlovy Vary Film Festival, where Mortensen is set to pick up the Festival President’s Award.
“I thought: ‘I’ll make ‘Falling’ and prove to everyone I can direct.’ But I still couldn’t get this one made, so I went: ‘Well, I’ll make ‘The Dead Don’t Hurt’ and that will prove I can work with these landscapes, and horses.’ Apparently, it’s not enough,” he laughs.
“The people who put up money are very conservative. It gets harder to retain creative control and I won’t make a movie unless I have final cut. This one’s complicated, but I know it will work. It’s just a question of convincing someone to invest in it.”
His determination echoes that of Kevin Costner, who recently admitted he “knocked on every boat in Cannes” trying to finance the third part of his “Horizon” saga.
“I know him, we have corresponded and I wished him luck. I hope ‘Horizon’ does well. Maybe it will mean people can make even more films in that genre,” he says.
With “The Dead Don’t Hurt,” Mortensen wanted to make a “classic, historically accurate” Western. But he also wanted to tell a story that hasn’t been told: not of a man who leaves to fight – this time in the American Civil War – but of a woman who stays. Vivienne, played by “Phantom Thread” breakout Vicky Krieps.
“Normally, you would go to war with him. Then he comes back and the woman is either dead or she married someone else, which is sad for him, or she is happy to see him, which is great for him. But what about her? What has she been doing all this time?! I thought: ‘If you want to see that, I guess you have to make it.’”
There were many “Viviennes” trying to survive in the West at that time, he argues.
“They had to be this way. It was definitely a lawless, wild society, but she isn’t some superhero, grabbing the gun and shooting all the bad guys.”
“I started writing this in 2020, during the pandemic, and the first image [I came up with] was that of a little girl, running around in a forest. It looked very much like the forest where my mother grew up, in the Northeast of the U.S. This mischievous character, independently minded and stubborn, was influenced by her. My mother was so curious about other people and cultures.”
Just like Mortensen, who was raised in Argentina and Denmark, and has been living in Spain. Although he wasn’t initially planning to do so, he ended up playing Danish immigrant Holger, who, before he enlists, convinces Franco-Canadian Vivienne to live with him in Nevada.
“I wasn’t consciously doing that, but maybe you are right. I may be partly speaking from my own experience,” he says.
“It was important to reflect what this society was back then. You hear different languages and accents [in the film], because unless you were an Indigenous person, a First Nation person, you came from all over the place.”
“Men from different countries decided to enlist in this effort, just like people from different countries were going to Spain in the 1930s or now to Ukraine. It happens. Even though they are not born there, they ‘adopt’ a country as their own.”
Mortensen starred, wrote, directed and produced the film alongside Regina Solórzano and Jeremy Thomas – he also composed the soundtrack.
“I did the music before we started to shoot. It sounds backwards, but I did it on ‘Falling’ too – by accident. I was waiting four and a half years to find the money to shoot and I just felt… restless. Later, I found it very useful as a guide in filming certain sequences. I don’t think I will do music on the next film I am doing, but I will keep an eye on it.”
The three-time Oscar nominee – for “Eastern Promises,” Captain Fantastic” and “Green Book” – has always been pursuing other interests, from painting to photography.
“There is nothing I can do about it. I just do things I am interested in doing and I like to share them, because it’s a way of communicating,” he states. But interesting roles keep coming his way.
“Obviously, I have been lucky. I didn’t have to run and do a job because I was running out of money, but I don’t care about genre or budget. I did Cronenberg’s ‘Crimes of the Future’ the same year I did my first studio movie in a very long time: Ron Howard’s ‘Thirteen Lives.’ It was supposed to come out in thousands of theaters around the world, but then Amazon bought MGM and they decided to stream it, which was sad. It’s one of his best movies.”
“Some people have this saying, ‘one for them and one for me,’ with ‘one for them’ presumably being a big-budgeted movie and ‘one for me’ is something close to your heart. I try to make sure it’s always close to my heart or at least something I can learn from.”
Eventually, if something is good enough, people discover it, he says. But it keeps getting harder for smaller films to get noticed.
“I was nominated for awards for ‘Captain Fantastic,’ but that movie, the writing and the directing could’ve had a lot more attention. ‘Falling’ was also a real shame, especially for Lance Henriksen [who plays a man coming to live with his gay son]. Here’s a guy who at that point has done 300 movies and he has never even been to Cannes. We were invited, and then it was cancelled [because of the pandemic]. He didn’t have that opportunity. I really feel sad about it.”
Still, he is not giving up anytime soon.
“With ‘The Dead Don’t Hurt,’ I did the best I could. I’ve never done that much work to promote a film, because the climate has changed so much after COVID. What Vicky does here, I haven’t seen a better performance in the last year or two, and I hope people will remember her by the end of the year. But unless you are a part of some big enterprise that has a lot of money to push it into voters’ faces, it’s difficult.”
After focusing on a female protagonist, Mortensen will now take on indigenous cultures. Which brings up a familiar question:
“‘Does he have the right to tell this story? Does he have a right to write about a woman?’ Why not? As long as it works,” he says.
“After ‘Falling,’ some journalists tried to provoke something. They asked me: ‘Do you regret playing a homosexual character? You are taking work away from gay actors.’ I said: ‘How do you know I am not homosexual?,’” he laughs.
“They said: ‘Are you?!’ Very excited, thinking there comes their headline. I replied: ‘None of your business.’ If you start going down that road, Daniel Day-Lewis should be condemned for ‘My Left Foot’ [where he played a man born with cerebral palsy]. It’s called acting.”
“In some cases, these are legitimate questions. Is there a limit to the roles we can play? But children don’t limit themselves: they can imagine being anything they want to be. We can’t forget it’s play.”
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