As writer, director, producer, composer and co-star Viggo Mortensen delivers a personal take on the western genre with The Dead Don’t Hurt, Film Stories caught up with him to talk about its making.
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue 50.
Viggo Mortensen is tired.
Understandably so, given he’s still recovering from making The Dead Don’t Hurt – a western drama he wrote, directed, co-produced, composed the music for and starred in. Originally someone else was going to take on the lead as softly spoken sheriff Holger Olsen, but when they dropped out Mortensen rewrote the character and co-starred himself.
Mortensen has directed before – he previously made the 2020 drama, Falling [Film Stories, Issue 20], which fictionalised the story of his parents’ struggles with dementia. But The Dead Don’t Hurt, with its interweaving timelines, horse riding and period detail, was clearly a challenging project for the actor-turned-filmmaker.
“I really enjoyed it, but I was exhausted by the end of it,” Mortensen sighs over a video call one May evening. “This one took a lot out of me.”
Although The Dead Don’t Hurt contains plenty of the trappings associated with a western – a villain in a black hat, a virtuous sheriff, dingy saloons – Mortensen brings a lot of himself to the story. Olsen is of Danish extraction, as he is; the film’s dreamlike opening, in which a medieval knight rides through a forest, was inspired by the books his late mother read as a child.
Nor does Mortensen structure the film like a typical western, with events often shown out of sequence – it’s only a few minutes in that we begin to realise that this isn’t really Olsen’s story we’re watching, but rather his French-Canadian lover, Vivienne, brilliantly played by Vicky Krieps.
“For this particular story, I thought it was interesting to see the effect of things that happen in a person’s life – in this case Vivienne’s – before the cause,” Mortensen tells us. “Because of the structure, you get to know those characters as the movie goes on and understand [what happened to them].”
It’s an approach that gives the film a sense of inevitability and a background hum of suspense. It’s established early on that Weston – a spoiled, drunken landowner’s son played by Solly McLeod – has a capacity for violence, meaning the audience is constantly waiting to see what he’ll do next.
“When Weston goes to visit Vivienne, she’s alone and she’s working in her garden,” Mortensen says. “He rides up and he seems very friendly. But she keeps him at arm’s length, because she’s seen him a couple times in the saloon and he seems rather arrogant and full of himself. What she doesn’t know is what we know: that he’s a dangerous sociopath. So when she invites him in for tea, you’re thinking, ‘no, please don’t do that.’”
That Mortensen places Vivienne front and centre, and remains with her as Olsen rides off to fight for the Unionists in the American Civil War, also distinguishes The Dead Don’t Hurt from other westerns. Says Mortensen: “You have an ordinary woman – not some kind of superhero, but absolutely the main character in the story. When her male companion goes off to war, you stay with her, which is quite unusual. In any movie that involves war or mention of a war, you usually see that war and leave [the female character] behind.”
Away from his film and TV work, Mortensen is also a published writer, poet, photographer and musician. The Dead Don’t Hurt, seemingly, allowed him to infuse most of these creative interests in one project, from the poetic dialogue (sample line: “It is a huckleberry above my persimmon to decipher how you turned out so ornery”) to the film’s murmuring score, which he composed on the piano.
“I wouldn’t say I’m the greatest piano player in the world,” he says, “but I like to play when I see one in a hotel or around someone’s house. It probably sounds counterintuitive because it’s usually done the other way around – you shoot the movie first and then you score it. But both on Falling and this one, I composed and recorded almost all the music well before we started shooting.”
Mortensen’s score – a low-key sonic backdrop which takes in classical and Celtic influences – then helped him work out the film’s rhythm and pace, particularly in its transitions between time periods.
“I don’t like music to manipulate you, or tell you what to think or feel,” he says. “It’s your company in this movie, certainly, because it’s nonlinear – there are transitions from one time period to another, or ellipses where you’re jumping forward in time. I knew those transitions would be helped a great deal by the music.”
Where most editors work to a temporary soundtrack, then, Ronald Sanders had Mortensen’s finished score to work with.
“It was really thinking about the rhythm, the timing,” Mortensen says. “What I learned on Falling when I was editing was that it was similar to editing music, which I’d been doing for years. With music, it’ll tell you if there’s too many notes or when you should make a transition or go to another instrument. It’s the same with images – if you study them enough in the cutting room, you start to realise that the shot will tell you when it needs to end.”
Mortensen’s keen eye for historical detail extended from the period-accurate score to the range of characters and languages we encounter throughout the film.
“It was as important to me as it was to get the saddles right, the lamps, the clothing – it had to be historically accurate in terms of the language and the dialects,” he says. “It was important to show you how the country was back then, which is as it is now – we’re a melting pot. People were from all parts of the world, which is something you don’t normally see even in the best, classic westerns. Normally the main characters are Anglo-Saxons.
“In this case, the two main characters, English isn’t their first language. There are other characters, like Claudio the piano player [played by Rafel Plana], and other characters who aren’t Anglo-Saxons. I thought that social diversity was important.”
Over a career that stretches back almost 40 years, Mortensen has worked with such filmmakers as Peter Jackson, Brian De Palma and Tony Scott. The director who’s had the most impact on Mortensen creatively, perhaps, is David Cronenberg. The pair first collaborated on A History Of Violence in 2005, and went on to make four films together, with Mortensen nominated for an Oscar for his performance as Russian gangster Nikolai in 2007’s Eastern Promises.
Their most recent collaboration was 2022’s typically uncompromising body horror, Crimes Of The Future, in which Mortensen played an ageing performance artist. Cronenberg then returned the favour by making a cameo appearance as a proctologist in Mortensen’s directorial debut, Falling, while The Dead Don’t Die was co- produced by Jeremy Thomas, who made Naked Lunch, Crash and A Dangerous Method with Cronenberg. The Dead Don’t Hurt’s production designer is Carol Spier, who’s worked with Cronenberg in the same role since The Dead Zone in 1983.
“What’s great about him is how well prepared he is when he shows up to shoot,” Mortensen says when we ask about Cronenberg’s influence. “He doesn’t rehearse with actors, but he works out everything he wants to do and he’s also welcoming to ideas or suggestions… He makes the team feel like their opinions matter to him, which they do. If there’s something you come up with and it’s a better idea than what he had, he’ll use it – he has no problem with that.
“I’ve been lucky. I’ve worked with several directors, women and men, who had that approach. Maybe their shooting style is different or their personalities are different – people like Jane Campion or Ron Howard or Matt Ross, or David [Cronenberg], they’re similar in that sense. They’re extremely well prepared and they’re open to input. It’s a team sport, ideally, and the best movies are the result of good collaboration.”
The Dead Don’t Hurt was shot over a brisk two months, in Durango, Mexico, and then Ontario and British Columbia, Canada. While that shoot, and the promotional tour that came after it, was “exhausting” according to Mortensen, the response he’s received has made it worthwhile. “It seems like I’ve been doing this my entire life, it’s been going on for so long,” Mortensen says, wearily. “But then someone says something in an audience Q&A, and I can see they’re getting something out of it. It moves them. That lifts your spirits and makes you feel like it was worthwhile, that team effort. It was a life-changing experience in many ways.”
Nor has that experience put Mortensen off filmmaking; he has other screenplays that he’d like to make, assuming he can find the financing to put them together.
“If you had the money you could give to me, I could shoot one of the four, five scripts I have tomorrow,” he jokes. “But there’s a couple that I think have the best chance to maybe get made. I’m imagining them a little bit in terms of casting and other things; I’m far from having the money to do them, but I hope to do a third movie. It took me three and a half years before I was able to find the money [for The Dead Don’t Hurt], so I hope the next one takes less time.”
