STARIGHT SHOOTER

Viggo Mortensen is riding high with The Dead Don’t Hurt, a revisionist western that sees him write, direct, produce, score and star alongside an awards-worthy Vicky Krieps. Total Film saddles up with the no-nonsense multi-hyphenate to discuss how he wipes the dust off the Old West to focus on women, immigrants and a tender love story…

Viggo Mortensen is in good spirits. Last night, his second film as director, The Dead Don’t Hurt, played to a standing ovation at the Glasgow Film Festival, and today the 65-year-old star, always a calm, modest man, admits to being ‘very happy with the reception’. His back is turned as he walks around his hotel suite twiddling at the window blinds to moderate the sun, but his smile can be heard in his voice. Another twiddle. When he finally sits down to face Total Film, his handsome features are dramatically swathed in shadow.

‘I actually wasn’t trying to reinvent the western; I wanted to be respectful of something that I admire, which is the well-made, classic western,’ he explains of the revisionist The Dead Don’t Hurt. Set in an 1860s frontier community in Nevada, the understated story focuses on the burgeoning romantic relationship between two immigrants, the fiercely independent French-Canadian Vivienne Le Coudy, played by Vicky Krieps, and Danish carpenter Holger, played by Mortensen himself. ‘But I grant you,’ he continues, ‘the one subversive or unusual thing is that, yes, it has a female character at the centre, and a love story is central to what the movie is about.’ He muses. ‘I guess, most importantly, when Vivienne’s male companion goes away [to fight in the Civil War], we don’t see him for quite some time. We stay with her, which is completely unusual for a classic western.’

It’s unusual for modern westerns, too. ‘I mean, even [in] newer westerns, whether they be The Hateful Eight or The Power of the Dog, female characters are secondary,’ he says. ‘They’re not really fleshed-out. It is very unusual, for some reason, even in our times, to have it be about the women. I would say that Kelly Reichardt [Meek’s Cutoff, First Cow] is more attentive to women than these other guys.’

‘I’VE ALWAYS LIKED TO BE AROUND SETS EVEN ON THE DAYS I’M NOT WORKING, JUST TO SEE WHAT THEY’RE DOING‘

VIGGO MORTENSEN

Mortensen didn’t cynically set out to make a feminist western as a point of difference, but instead started writing a tale about a girl, which he organically followed to discover who she became as a woman. It was a novelistic approach, inspired by some of the storytelling in modern-day TV series, which enjoy the luxury of allowing stories to unfold in unforced and often non-linear style to better explore the characters. And so he arrived at a woman of modest means who refuses to let her status or sex reduce her, and who is unbroken by the terrible events that befall her in the movie. It was crucial that Mortensen now find the right person to play Vivienne.

Enter Luxembourg-born actor Vicky Krieps, who Paul Thomas Anderson cast in Phantom Thread because she neither shrank nor dropped her eye when she first met acting legend Daniel Day-Lewis, but greeted him as an equal.

‘Yeah, I can believe that,’ says Mortensen, the shadows shifting as the corners of his mouth curl upwards. ‘She really has a strong sense of herself, like the character she plays. She’s a free human being in that she thinks for herself and is self-sufficient. Once she commits to something in terms of acting… Even if it’s not the perfect take, it’s never false. I can’t imagine anyone doing what she did with it, really, and believably playing someone where I look at the screen and I see every detail. She’s completely a woman from that time, and I believe her 100% in what she’s going through, and every second of her performance.’

GO WEST

Born in New York City to a Danish father and American mother, Mortensen was raised in Venezuela and Argentina, where his father managed ranches. His parents divorced when he was 11, his mother taking him and his two younger brothers back to the state of New York. The peripatetic lifestyle didn’t stop there. Upon graduating St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, he moved to Denmark and wrote short stories and poetry while working odd jobs, and then upped sticks to again return to New York, this time tending tables and bars while taking acting lessons. Next stop, Los Angeles. Mortensen’s film debut was a small part as an Amish farmer in Peter Weir’s sombre thriller

Witness (1985), and gigs of varying sizes followed in movies as diverse as Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, Carlito’s Way, Crimson Tide, The Portrait of a Lady, G.I. Jane and Gus Van Sant’s Psycho remake. Then, in 1999, he was approached to play royal ranger Aragorn in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, a role he took primarily because his son, a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s source books, urged him to. Mortensen was crowned with stardom.

But stardom was never his desire. Swiftly he turned down a chance to be in The Hobbit movies (‘One of the producers did ask if I would be interested,’ he explained in 2013. ‘I said, “You do know, don’t you, that Aragorn isn’t in The Hobbit? That there is a 60-year gap between the books?”’), and his work since – films like The Road, Captain Fantastic and Green Book, plus David Cronenberg movies A History of Violence, Eastern Promises and Crimes of the Future – has consciously repositioned him as a character actor. Meanwhile, international productions Everybody Has a Plan, Jauja, Far from Men and Eureka have evidenced an experimental yen.

There was, however, one constant during his journeying through this varied body of work: he was never satisfied with simply being an actor. ‘From the beginning, I’ve been interested in the storytelling aspect, and hence the collective enterprise,’ he points out. ‘I’ve always liked to be around sets even on the days I’m not working, just to see what they’re doing. My film school has been film shoots.’

Mortensen made his writer/director debut with 2020’s Falling, an affecting drama about the relationship between a cantankerous, aged father (Lance Henriksen) suffering from dementia and his gay middle-aged son (Mortensen). It was a deeply personal work, Mortensen having lost his own dad to dementia.

‘For better or worse, I want to make a movie that I’d like to go see,’ he says of ensuring that the subject matter chimes. ‘When the director is not allowed to make the movie they want to make, it’s never as good as it might have been. Or as interesting, or as original, in any case. I could not think, “OK, I want to meet all the demographics. I want to please everyone. I’ll put in voiceover. I’ll put in, ‘San Francisco, 1869.’ I’ll make sure everybody understands every single bit, and it’ll appeal to every racial, sexual profile of an audience.” I understand when huge-budget movies do that, because there’s a lot at stake, investment-wise, but it’s not a recipe for making memorable, original movies.’

OLD SCHOOL

Mortensen has learned this from the filmmakers he has worked with over the years, along with how to stay calm and best communicate with cast and crew. Cronenberg, Jane Campion and Ron Howard are names he cites. When asked what he learned from Jackson on Lord of the Rings, he says: ‘Problemsolving. It was like a giant, mobile film school. It was fantastic to be able to run over to one soundstage as they built Rivendell, sculpting, painting, adding trees, or to drop by Helm’s Deep. And just seeing Peter Jackson solve logistical filmmaking problems on the fly, out in nature, depending on the weather…’ He ponders. ‘And inspiring a large number of people. The crew was large and mostly Kiwis, and not all of them that experienced. But they learned. It was film school for everyone. I don’t know how he did it. It was one man commanding this giant, floating circus.’

Mortensen not only wrote, directed and starred in The Dead Don’t Hurt, but also produced and composed the strikingly plaintive score. It’s some achievement, though he’s quick to point out that plenty of suggestions from many other skilled people helped him to fashion the film. That he encouraged all voices is fitting given one of the key themes in The Dead Don’t Hurt.

‘People came from lots of places,’ says Mortensen, pointing out how the town in his movie is a melting pot of ethnicities, while many classic westerns focus on white cowboys. ‘You know, 12 or 13 years earlier, that part of the country was Mexico. In 1848, the United States took basically a third of Mexico away. So the population is a mix of Anglos and the Latino population.’

Right now, Mortensen points out, there is huge division in not just the United States and the UK, but in Spain, France, Hungary, Poland… ‘It’s everywhere. It’s not really a national thing, it’s a human thing. It’s the fear of the other. And the political use or incitement of the fear of the other, to get power, and keep it, and control populations.’ So while he didn’t write The Dead Don’t Hurt ‘to make a comment about now’, he’s pleased that it resonates. ‘It’s unrealistic what the extreme right tries to do in France or Britain or the US or even in Canada. “England for the English” – what the hell does that mean?’

Mortensen is a man with plenty to say, and with many stories to tell. ‘I just hope,’ he says, again pushing back the shadows with his thoughtful smile, ‘that enough people go see this one so that those who have the money will trust me with another new story.’

THE DEAD DON’T HURT OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 7 JUNE.