SPOTLIGHT: THE DEAD DON’T HURT
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.’
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 unfo
