Viggo Mortensen has long held a reputation for not holding back—a rarity for a star of his magnitude. The three-time Oscar nominee, who broke out in David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, has continued to turn in celebrated performances in big-ticket projects while also emerging as a rising director, with two well-received movies now under his belt. The first, Falling, a stark portrait of a dire father-son relationship, premiered at Sundance in 2020, finding admirers amid a tough COVID climate; his most recent, The Dead Don’t Hurt (now available on VOD and for digital purchase), earned strong reviews during a modest theatrical release. But both are firmly independent, a category that Mortensen recognizes as especially tenuous right now.
“There are less slots for these films to be shown in movie theaters,” Mortensen says on this week’s Little Gold Men. “Call me old-fashioned, but I like seeing movies in movie theaters—and I like people seeing my movies in theaters.”
That’s where our conversation begins, a launchpad in many ways for Mortensen to provide his frank assessment of the business. There are the bright spots—getting to see what Vicky Krieps can do as a feisty Western lead in The Dead Don’t Hurt, experiencing a triumphant Oscar campaign for Green Book despite the backlash—but also worrisome signs. Here Mortensen speaks out against the “appalling” treatment of Ron Howard’s Thirteen Lives by its streamer, the “poor” state of film criticism, the “precarious” nature of social media, and more. Read on or listen below.
Vanity Fair: As someone who’s transitioned to filmmaking in a more tumultuous time for theatrical movies, how have you observed the lives of your films?
Viggo Mortensen: For independent films—especially in Europe, but also in the US to a large extent—film festivals were necessary as a launchpad to either sell them and or get decent distribution, and hopefully reach some movie theaters.
You have to work harder than ever as a filmmaker to get it out there. You have to do a lot more Q&As. As hard as it was to make The Dead Don’t Hurt, that whole process was easier than it was to promote it. I mean, I’ve been on the road for months and months and months, and I’ve done 70 to 80 Q&As in different countries and cities and all over the map. I’ve done more press for this movie than I did for all of the Lord of the Rings as an actor.
What have you learned as a filmmaker behind the scenes, even beyond that promotional element, of packaging these kinds of indies?
Making any movie, no matter how well you prepare, how well thought out your plan is for shooting—it’s always about solving little and big problems every day. That’s just making movies. But financing, it’s difficult. With Falling, we had to do the typical thing for an independent film—we had to find it in lots of different places. With The Dead Don’t Hurt, we were unusually fortunate in that we found almost all the financing in one place, Regina Solórzano of Talipot Studio in Mexico. They had seen Falling and were interested in working with me as a director, and they read a couple of different scripts I had, and they liked this one a lot, and so they put their money where their mouth was. It’s not the norm these days. I don’t expect the next experience to be as smooth, but you never know. A lot of times people end up doing it with one of the big streaming companies and maybe they don’t even get their movie into a movie theater, ever. That’s just the landscape now.
Is that something you would consider? Or do you avoid streamers as a director?
Well, I feel the same as an actor and as a director—I feel like I’m part of a filmmaking team and I always want a movie to be seen in the theater, especially if I think it’s a good movie. A case in point was recently, the first time I’d worked on a huge budget movie in a long time—Ron Howard’s Thirteen Lives, which is a really good movie. One of his better movies. That was a movie that MGM made, and when they did their test screenings for that movie, they got the highest scores in the history of that studio, and they got really excited and decided that that year, that November, they were going to put it out worldwide in many, many, many thousands of theaters. Then Amazon bought MGM, initially promised to respect the deal that MGM had made with Ron Howard, and then they went back on that. Basically you saw that movie for a week in Chicago, New York and LA, London, and that was that. Then you had the streaming, which I thought was really sad. It’s a really well-shot movie. So it concerns me. If the only way I could, say, direct my next movie was for it to only be streaming, I would have to consider that because otherwise the movie just doesn’t get made.
I hear you on that film. You can see the way that reactions are different when it comes out on streaming. It doesn’t get to have a life with the public in the same way.