Viggo Mortensen on his return to directing with ‘The Dead Don’t Hurt’

Viggo Mortensen may have been thrust into stardom through his starring role in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but despite roguish good looks, he’s built his 40-year career on his in-depth approach as a searingly intense character actor.

But being an actor wasn’t enough for the Danish-American. After a first experience with Falling in 2020, Viggo Mortensen returns to the role of director with a second feature film, The Dead Don’t Hurt, which he also wrote, produced and composed the music for.

How have your many years in front of the camera influenced the way you work behind it?

“I’ve learnt from watching directors, men and women I’ve worked with for 40 years or more,” he tells Euronews. “Seeing how they communicate with the crew, the director of photography, the actors, how they prepare, how they tell the stories, that’s what I learnt. I started late in life, much later than I wanted to. But everything I learned from watching them work, I was able to use in the first film and now in the second. I hope I’ve avoided a lot of mistakes because I waited until I was older to start directing.”

Mortensen’s debut feature film role was in 1985’s Witness in his late 20s. Since then he’s worked with a huge range of directors. One of his most regular collaborators is David Cronenberg with whom he’s worked on seven films, the latest being Crimes of the Future. Other highlights of his filmography he points out are Jane Campion (Portrait of a Lady), and Argentinian Ana Piterbarg (Everybody Has a Plan).

As in your first feature, in The Dead Don’t Hurt you play the lead role. What’s it like working on both sides of the camera at the same time?

“Maybe it’s unfair for the actors we work with, because we have to stand back and talk to the sound and camera operators between shots. It’s more physically tiring at the end of each day. But as actors, when we’re also directing, we’re more efficient, because we don’t have time to doubt what we’re doing. So we’re more efficient, but we get more tired.”

The Dead Don’t Hurt is first and foremost a love story between two foreigners in an austere land. The film begins when Olsen, a Danish immigrant turned sheriff of a small town in the Old West, has just buried the great love of his life, Vivienne, a French-speaking Canadian. Too busy to deal with matters of the law, he lets the mayor put an innocent man on the gallows for a crime committed by the son of the local chief, the odious Weston Jeffries. Through flashbacks to the meeting between Olsen and Vivienne, the film depicts the idyll of their journey west. Olsen leaves to fight in the American Civil and War and Vivienne is left alone and vulnerable to Weston’s advances. If this is a film about love, hate is also an ever-present theme.

Olsen is played by Mortensen and Vivienne is played by Luxembourger Vicky Krieps, to whom the actor/director spares no praise. “She would be an excellent Oscar candidate, but I know she won’t be, because the Academy doesn’t care about independent cinema,” he says.

The western is a genre that cinema returns to regularly, decades after the genre’s golden age. Like many of his generation, Mortensen grew up watching westerns. Which ones influenced him the most? “The list would be too long to list here,” he says.

Video editor • Bruno Filipe Figueiredo Da Silva