Viggo Mortensen Wore All The Hats While Making ‘The Dead Don’t Hurt’: Writer, Director, Actor, Composer … And Even Some Literal Cowboy Hats, Too

Viggo Mortensen has been a working actor since the 1980s, securing his first speaking role in the 1985 Harrison Ford film Witness , but he’s been a fan of westerns for most of his life, even securing his first on-camera appearance – a non-speaking role in the 1984 miniseries George Washington – because he knew how to ride a horse. As such, it should be no surprise that he’s continuing his directorial career by doing a western: The Dead Don’t Hurt .

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This is only Mortensen’s second film as a director, but perhaps because of his love of the genre, he offers a steady hand behind the camera while also serving as leading man, screenwriter, producer, and even the composer of the film’s score. DECIDER had the opportunity to chat with Mortensen about the many [cowboy] hats he wore on The Dead Don’t Hurt , and while we kept things mostly on the topic at hand, we did manage to veer into a couple of the other westerns in his filmography, including the first one in his filmography: Young Guns II .

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DECIDER: How long have you been a fan of Westerns? Is it a genre that you grew up with, or was it one that you came to later in life?

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Viggo Mortensen: Well, like most kids of my generation, I definitely grew up with them. There were several Western TV series that I could see on the TV at the time. This is the ‘60s we’re talking about, and you could still go see a Western at a movie theater once in a while, a new or newer Western. It hadn’t become what today, I guess, is considered sort of a retro genre, a specialty kind of event. It was just part of… You know, it was an important movie genre. I also grew up riding horses when I was very little, 3 or 4 years old, when I first started going to movies. So I’ve always liked westerns. But I didn’t start out trying to write one.

I started out writing a story about a little girl who becomes a woman named Vivienne. A strong, independent-minded, stubborn, somewhat mischievous person. Very much her own person. And I thought it would be interesting to put her in the classic Western period. You know, between 1860 and 1890. This is the 1860s, our movie, and on the western frontier, in the US. And because that’s a society that was relatively lawless, dominated by a few corrupt, powerful men, as we see in our story, who were not averse to using violence to achieve their goals, I thought that would just present a greater challenge for a woman like Vivienne.

I’m sure there were many women like Vivienne back then. We just haven’t been told their stories. They haven’t been of interest to writers, journalists, or filmmakers – even female filmmakers – by and large. It’s always the men’s stories, their adventures, the outlaws, the sheriffs, the cattle barons, with the fighting against First Nations peoples and, you know, the railroad, train robberies, etc.. The discovery and the opening of the frontier… You know, it’s all men stuff. And if you have a man go off to war, you always go with him and never stay with the woman.

And I thought, well, it’d be interesting to see what an ordinary woman was like back then. What does she do when someone goes away? Or what happens to little girls when their fathers go away? Maybe they don’t come back. What happens to women when their sons or brothers or partners go away? I was just curious about that, but told within a framework of what looks and sounds like a classic Western that respects the goal.

Well, it’s definitely a character study of two characters. As far as casting for Vivienne, I presume you did some sort of chemistry reads between yourself and the other actresses, but was there anything that particularly sparked between you and Vicky [Krieps] that you could nail down?

Well, when I wrote the screenplay, I wasn’t thinking of any actor for any role. I was just trying to make them as truthful as I could and differentiate them in terms of the way they spoke and behaved, and I’m trying to put myself as best as I could as, as a writer, in their shoes and, and write a good story. Once I had the screenplay in a state where I felt it was okay to share it with people… Yeah, so I thought of Vicky first. And obviously I did have some other actresses in mind. You never know if someone’s going to be available or if they’re going to want to play the role. Fortunately, she said “yes” right away and, you know, we were off to the races. I knew that with her, we’d have an actress who had this incredibly strong screen presence who could communicate a lot in silence, emotion, thought. And we wouldn’t be limited in any way in how we photographed her, and I knew she would bring a lot to the role. She surpassed anything I’d hoped the character could be. So once she said “yes,” we knew that we could make a good original Western with a strong woman at the center.

Well, as far as the rest of the casting goes, you definitely have an eye out for character actors. In fact, Garret Dillahunt, Ray McKinnon and W. Earl Brown all have one very distinct mutual cast credit between them.

Yeah, Deadwood .

Was that an intentional choice because of that?

No. I just thought they were great for the roles, and it just happened that they’d all worked on that series. I like their work a lot. Obviously, Earl is very different in this story than the character he plays in Deadwood , and so is Garrett and, you know, Ray McKinnon. But you also have actors who’ve done other Westerns, like Danny Huston, who’s in, presently, Horizon , Kevin Costner’s movie as well. He’s done lots of good work. Danny, also being the son of John Huston, the grandson of Walter Huston, you know, has quite a pedigree and a lot of experience also in Mexico, which he knows quite well. So that was a great addition and it was really wonderful that he joined us. And, you know, even like, Colin Morgan is great as Cartwright as well. You have a lot of really fun characters.

And I think that a really great discovery – we’re very lucky to get him – is Solly MacLeod, who plays Weston. You know, sort of both Olsen’s and Vivienne’s nemesis in the story. And he did a great job, he was 21 years old when we cast him, not very well known to anyone at the time. He’s starting to work more and more now, and I think he’ll have a long career, but he was a real discovery, and he did a wonderful job. And he went toe to toe with Vivienne in several scenes and really comes off well. I’m very happy. There isn’t a single actor in the story that I don’t think is perfect for their character, which is what you always hope when you’re making a movie.

Weston definitely managed to come across as both charismatic and thoroughly despicable.

Yeah. It’s a hard combination to get right. He could have been very cardboard cutout, but there’s a lot going in his face and the way he behaves, he’s really good. And he worked very hard on the accent. He’s obviously not North American. He was born in Scotland. And then when he was 10 or 11 he moved to England. He hadn’t had much experience with horses. And you know, we gave him a tall order as far as an actor’s challenge, and we put him on the most difficult horse to ride, the strongest horse. And he managed to do that well. Took a while to get used to it, but he really did a great job. I thought he’s fantastic.

Well, as far as the various hats that you wear for this film, you also composed the music. I know that you had worked with Travis Dickerson on numerous occasions. But Scarlet Rivera in particular was notable, I thought, having worked with Bob Dylan numerous times.

Yes. And Cameron Stone, who plays the cello so beautifully, which is the heart of the soundtrack really, which is available on Spotify and other places, including longer versions of what you hear in the movie. Music from The Dead Don’t Hurt , it’s called. But Cameron’s extraordinary and you may know him from, you know, the opening music for the series, you know, the one with the dragons, Game of Thrones ?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

But, he’s, you know, an incredibly gifted classical player. And the instrument he used was beautiful. It’s like this one 300-and-something-year-old cello. He gets great sound from it, beautiful. And he was a pleasure to work with, we had a great time, putting together the music, which we made well ahead of the shoot. It’s something that I’ve worked well on, and doing the music most of it before, you know, that I just did because I was restless, took several years to find the money. So I was like, what else can we do? Maybe it was music. What would the music be?

So I just started recording it bit by bit and had most of it done before the shoot. And it turned out to be very useful as a guide, you know, for shooting and knowing what the mood of certain scenes would be. And it was very much part of the screen play. And then, since I had worked so well on the first movie I directed, I did it intentionally, and this soundtrack is more complex and more ambitious, and I wanted it to feel… It’s original music, obviously, but I wanted it to feel very much like music from the time, so that it would fit in with what we were trying to do, which is make a classic Western like the good classic Westerns I remember growing up to.

If you had had anyone do a vocal on there, I would have loved for it to have been Nick Cave.

He would have been great. Yeah, I’ve been lucky. I’ve been in a couple of movies, The Road and Far From Men . Did you ever see Far from Men ? That’s a really good one. And Nick and his partner, they did a really great job on those scores as well. You know, more minimalist than ours in a way. But yeah, if there had been vocals, yeah, maybe you’re right, that would have been cool. But, I don’t know, I didn’t want to do that. I wanted it to just be music.

As far as other westerns you’ve done, I have to just briefly ask if you have any recollections about working on Young Guns II , because I think that would have been your first Western, right?

Yeah, that was. What I remember about that was just the horses, just getting reacquainted with them. I’d grown up riding horses as a little boy. And then, you know, many years have gone by after leaving Argentina, where I grew up until I was 11. Young Guns was my first chance to be riding. Well, not my first. I was in a TV miniseries about George Washington , one of the first jobs I did in 1983, and I made a brief appearance in a couple of scenes as a French cavalry lieutenant, and I had to ride a horse there. They asked me, like they do to all actors, “Can you ride?” And all actors always lie and say, “Yeah.” [Laughs.] But I said, “Yeah, I can, I used to ride.” And they said, “Okay,” and they put me on my horse, and I really enjoyed it.

But then Young Guns , I really got to ride a lot and I really enjoyed that. I liked the locations. I liked working for Geoff Murphy, a really great New Zealand director, and yeah, it was a lot of fun. I got to be friends with the guy who would take care of the horses, and on my days off I would go and visit him and help him, you know, because he had to ride those horses every day and work them a little bit. And so, once he trusted me, he let me ride all the different horses. And that was the thing I most remember about that, getting to know him, getting back into the saddle.

I know we have to wrap up, but one other western that you did that I wanted to ask about was Appaloosa , particularly since it was a case of the lead actor [Ed Harris] also serving as writer/director on that film.

Yeah, I really enjoyed that. We shot half of Young Guns II near Santa Fe, and we did the same shot, all of it, near Santa Fe. Almos, except for a little bit in Texas, near Austin, Appaloosa. And, yeah, I liked working with Ed. It’s a good story, I really liked acting together with him. You know, a lot of things were communicated in silence between us. It was a very nice relationship between these two characters. And, yeah, I thoroughly enjoyed that. That one also had Rex Peterson as the horse master, the guy who was training the horses and doing the wagon work in charge of all that, the riders, everything.

Who was another Deadwood alumnus, actually.

Right! And he had retired when we were getting ready to make The Dead Don’t Hurt , but I invited him to join us. I said, I need some help, at least if you could come for a few weeks before we start shooting to train the riders who are less experienced and help me select the rest of the horses we hadn’t found yet. And he came down and then he decided to stay for the whole shoot, which was great. We actually put him in the movie. He’s in the movie several times, you’ll see him, and that was a good experience.

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Will Harris ( @NonStopPop ) has a longstanding history of doing long-form interviews with random pop culture figures for the A.V. Club, Vulture, and a variety of other outlets, including Variety. He’s currently working on a book with David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker. (And don’t call him Shirley.)

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