Viggo Mortensen on the scripts, “The Lord of the Rings”: KVIFF 2024

Viggo Mortensen

Courtesy of Karlovy Vary Film Servis Festival

Viggo Mortensen seems indefatigable. On Friday night, he opened the 58th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) in the Czech Republic with his feminist western Dead people don’t hurt Mortensen received the festival’s President’s Award. On Saturday, he spoke about the film at a press conference and presented another screening in the Czech spa town. On Sunday, Mortensen met with the press for roundtable interviews.

Accepting his KVIFF award, Mortensen said that “all films are difficult to make. But I was lucky to be able to count on a wonderful group of actors” for Deaths don’t hurtHe particularly praised stars Vicky Krieps, who plays Vivienne, a strong woman who falls in love with Mortensen’s Olsen, who leaves her behind for a while to join a war, and Solly McLeod, who plays antagonist Weston Jeffries.

In an interview on Sunday, the star discussed his inspirations behind the film, feminism and how he didn’t set out to make a film with a political message, how Westerns have sometimes promoted a certain “mythology” of the United States, why he cast The dead do no harm in Ukraine and those planned for new ones the Lord of the Rings movies.

Read highlights from the interview below.

The dead don’t hurt shows the cultural diversity of life in the Old West. Your character is Danish, Vivienne is French-Canadian. I don’t remember any other Westerns showing this diversity.

There are westerns in which we see these kinds of characters, and they are generally clichés, or villains, or secondary, very secondary characters – a Chinese, an Irishman or a Native American. It’s true. The main roles, the main characters are almost always born in the United States or Canada. They may be English, but their first language is English. And they are usually white. Having a woman as the main character in a western is unusual. There were women, whether it was Barbara Stanwyck, Claudia Cardinale or Marlene Dietrich, but they played remarkable characters. They are generally extraordinary women. They are very rich, they are so beautiful that we are amazed, they are special. Having an ordinary woman like Vivienne as the main character is unusual. And staying with her when a man goes to war is totally unusual.

The dead don’t hurt has been described as a feminist western. What is your attitude towards feminism in general?

For this film, I did, with journalists, but also with the public, Q&As, I think there are about 80 of them around the world at the moment. People have a lot of different things to say, especially about feminism. I didn’t set out to make a film from a political point of view, ideological or anything. I just wanted to tell a good story about a strong, independent woman (Vivienne, played by Vicky Krieps). I’m sure there were many, maybe most, women like Vivienne at that time. It’s just that their stories hadn’t been told. Journalists or novelists weren’t interested in those stories. They were interested in the battles against the indigenous people or the arrival of the railroad or the outlaws and the sheriffs and the ranchers fighting the sheep ranchers or something like that. The push west, the settlement of the country and the promotion of this mythology of the United States, you know, “God wanted them to go west and take it all.” Those are the kinds of stories that seemed interesting, even when they started making Western movies in the early 20th century. Up until now, really, even female Western filmmakers haven’t really focused on a woman as a main character, unless she’s extraordinary – super-powered, or maybe a vigilante type who acts like a violent man herself and has a gun and shoots. It’s kind of exploitative to the point of an instant gratification story. I just wanted to tell the story of an ordinary, relatively ordinary woman. I asked myself a question: What is she doing in this situation?

At first, I didn’t know it was a western. I thought of my mother and knew where she grew up, near a forest. And I have books that she had when she was a child: those hardcover books with beautiful color pictures on the cover of knights and things like Joan of Arc or fairy tales with lots of illustrations. She is very curious about other people and cultures and has an adventurous spirit who knows herself, what she wants, what she thinks. Even though she is a woman of her times, mother of three children, housewife, she has always been interested in films, books, languages ​​and everything. And I thought, “Imagine what she was like as a little girl, based on these books and the landscapes she grew up in.” »And if she grows up to be a woman, Vivienne should be like that. That was really my inspiration, and everything else is obviously fiction.

You said this in your film Fallyou used a lot of references to your father. Do you feel the need to include personal things and stories in your films?

Any role that I play as an actor, or any story that I tell, is always going to be from a personal perspective, just like the audience, when they see the movie that we made. They see a different movie than what I see. I like to respect the audience. I think sometimes directors, producers, studios, whatever, don’t trust the audience completely. And the bigger the budget, the less risk they want to take. They want to make sure that everybody understands and everybody goes to see it. And so they overexplain things. I like to give just enough information so that the audience can participate. If they like what they’ve seen enough in the first 10 or 15 minutes, then they’ll say, “What’s going on? Okay, who is this?” OK?” And at the end, I like when you’re like, “What are these people going to do now?” So it doesn’t really end, like life. Those are the kinds of stories that I love as an audience. So I made the kind of movie that I want to see.

Your acting work also continues after this film. Could we perhaps see you in one of the new ones? the Lord of the Rings movies?

I haven’t read a script. So I do not know. The storyline is the most important thing to me, unless I’m broke and I have no money and I’m lucky to get a job. So it depends.

How often does this happen?

Lately I’ve been lucky and that hasn’t been the case for a while.

Dead people don’t hurt has been described as a dramatic romantic story set in dangerous times. But I also see it as a father-son road trip.

It’s also a father-daughter and mother-daughter story. You see the effect this has on Vivienne when her father decides to leave. And what she’s thinking, as a little girl, is, “Wow, that’s cool.” He goes because he has moral reasons to do something. And the girl said: “Why does mom say he shouldn’t go?” And then the dad says, “I have to go because my friends are counting on me to go,” and the daughter says, “Yeah, that’s cool.” I want to be like him.” But then we also see the relationship with the mother, and Vivienne remembers this relationship when the mother tries to answer difficult questions. “Why do people go to war? Do men do the same thing with women? And when the mother thinks she’s answered the questions enough, well, she says, “Well, I want to fight like that.”

But that’s our most complicated thing. It’s not an unrealistic movie in that she’s literally going to be Joan of Arc and take up arms and kill people. Psychologically, her journey is more complex and she’s psychologically the strongest person in the movie. She’s stronger than (my character) Olsen. She’s stronger than Weston (played by Solly McLead). She’s stronger than Weston’s father (played by Garret Dillahunt) and everyone else. But she’s limited by her situation, physically, environmentally, everything. And that’s what I wanted to explore.

Why did you decide to filter? The dead do no harm in Ukraine at the Mykolaichuk Open film festival?

I was invited and I thought it was going to be difficult to accommodate my schedule and I don’t know how I would get to this place. And it was a bit complicated. There were several different planes to Romania, and I drive for six, seven hours. But we got there and I definitely knew it was the right thing when I was there. I really enjoyed being there. Because for them, it was very immediate. In the audience, there were people who said: “I’m alone, my husband died last month” or: “My husband, I don’t know when he will come back.” Or my boyfriend or my dad or whatever. And: “I have a little Vincent (like Krieps’ character with his baby in the film). He doesn’t have a father now either. So it was very immediate.

And they talked about it in a different way. It wasn’t like, “Well, imagine if there was a war.” It was like, “There’s a war and we’re in this situation.” And it’s mostly women who stay, as always, when men go away to do this – it’s mostly men, but women are going away now too. Historically, women have been keeping the house together, keeping society together, feeding and schooling children and so on, keeping society functioning, while men have been trying to destroy each other and destroy the landscape. That’s been the history of human beings in general. And so it was very immediate and it’s something different. I was very glad I went and I also thought there was this international film festival with films from the United States and different places in Europe and Asia, but no directors or actors were going. I…