Viggo Mortensen on making a classic Western with a modern twist
Mortensen writes, directs, stars in and composes music for the new film The Dead Don't Hurt – which also stars Phantom Thread's Vicky Krieps.
Few genres are more closely associated with old-fashioned Hollywood filmmaking than the Western. It's a genre that was perfected by a number of Golden Age filmmakers from John Ford to Howard Hawks and gave us a huge variety of classic films characterised by sweeping vistas, enigmatic gunslingers and sheriffs both heroic and corrupt.
For his new film The Dead Don't Hurt – which he wrote, directed, starred in and composed music for – Viggo Mortensen wanted to draw on some of these tropes while also putting a modern spin on a genre that's not anywhere near as popular as it was in its heyday.
To go about doing this, he decided to tell a story that focused not on the groups of men that populated the American frontier but on a woman named Vivienne (played by Phantom Thread's Vicky Krieps) and the battles she faces in a violent world of corruption and greed – especially after the man she loves goes off to fight in the Civil War.
"I was writing a story about this woman, independent, with a very strong interior life," he told RadioTimes.com during an exclusive interview.
"You put that woman in that setting, the Western frontier in the 19th century and it would be very difficult for her. It's a challenge because society is kind of devoid of law and order, really. And it's dominated by just a few powerful men."
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He continued: "These stories… there hasn't been an interest in telling them either in literature or the newspapers of the time. And then when movies started being made, the screenwriters didn't write stories that had a woman at the centre.
"There have been some Westerns where the lead character is a woman, but they're usually extraordinary woman like Barbara Stanwyck in Forty Guns or in The Furies – where they're really powerful, but they're big ranch owners or in sort of exploitation movies where the woman behaves like a man and gets a gun and shoots everyone, and that's not what we're doing."
What sets The Dead Don't Hurt apart, according to Mortensen, is that this is the story of a "relatively ordinary woman".
"[She] is intelligent, and has an unusually strong interior force," he said. "Psychologically, she may be the strongest person of anybody in the story. But she's still a regular person and she can't physically overcome… she's limited by her circumstances and the time she lives in."
There are a couple of other ways in which Mortensen wanted his film to differ from Western classics – for example, he was keen to see show diversity "society, racially, ethnically and architecturally" and also wanted a mixture of influences when it came to different accents, with neither of the two main characters having English as their first language.
"That's unusual," he explained. "But all in all, it should look and feel like a classic Western where the camerawork doesn't draw attention to itself...you're just there watching and enjoying it, like I remember doing as a kid, [and thinking] I want to be there, I wonder if I would be brave like Vivienne or I would make the same mistakes as Olsen."
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He continued: “And it's the same for me as an adult. When I go to the movies, I want to go on a journey. And I want to really imagine what it would have been like to be there. So the way things look and sound, all of that is done that way. And the same with the music – it's original, but it feels like it could be from that period. So we're following the rules of a traditional Western in the way it looks and sounds."
For Krieps's part, she explained that she was "already almost emotionally involved" with the story before she'd even read the script, owing to an experience she'd had while walking in the desert and instantly feeling like her next project should be a Western.
"Then suddenly out of the blue, I was reading a Western script from Viggo," she said. "Then I read it and I could really relate to the character. I felt that it would be a great opportunity to bring my modern understanding and I know I will always be honest, I will always try and find the truth in that story.
"And I thought that this is a film that needs this kind of truth. And maybe it's also a time where we need to see the truth for a woman in a harsh male environment in order to talk about humanity, in order for her to be human. It's a woman but it's actually just a person. She's just a person. And we're not used to seeing women in the western genre in the centre of attention."
Interestingly, the role of Vivienne's love interest Holger Olsen was not always going to be played by Mortensen himself. He had another actor lined up but then, just as they were heading into the final two months of pre-production in Mexico – where the film was shot – he received a message explaining that that actor was having to pull out.
"I don't know why – he decided to go do something else, I guess," he said." And so we tried to replace that actor with someone similar in terms of age and type and all that. And they just weren't available – they loved the idea of working with Vicky and they liked the character and they liked the idea of being a Western, they don't make that many of them these days.
"But they said 'well, you could wait till next year till they're available' and I said next year... maybe the money will disappear. And anyway, I have a crew already and I have the other actors, I've found the locations and people have sacrificed this part of their year.
"And if I suddenly say the movie's not happening, you know, then they're screwed. So I didn't want to do that. And so I thought, well, I could play it, I'd have to change the character, make him older and the producers said yeah."
Krieps was one of the people who pushed Mortensen to fill the role himself, and said that the changes that had to be made to the character as a result of this casting actually made the film a more interesting proposition.
"I think, first of all, [he's] a great actor," she said. "But also I thought it made the film different. So it was nice for someone to be, as you say, stubborn, having been to the war already – it changed the whole story. Otherwise, it will be someone who – like Vivienne – would be lost. And in that way, it's suddenly critical that he's done all the things that he did, it says so much about the man."
As for what's next for Mortensen in his directing career, he said that there are a number of projects he has ready to go if funding can be secured.
"I've written a few different stories and they're all quite different I would say," he revealed. "But I don't have... it's which one I find the money for. I like them all. And there's one I like the most of all, but it's very difficult."
He expanded: "The one I really want to tell is difficult. It's all indigenous people, so there's no English spoken and you can't put a known actor in it. But I said 'families can see this in any country and they would understand this story' and they're like 'yeah...' So it's difficult."
The Dead Don't Hurt is now showing in UK cinemas.
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