Viggo Mortensen was always drawn to the old piano in his grandparents' house in Watertown, New York, 30 miles south of the Canadian border, the community where he lived after his parents divorced. Every time he went, he would sit and play. He would improvise melodies, usually imagining a scene or something visual.
“It was a comfortable place to be and you could travel with your imagination while you played,” says the actor, 65, via Zoom from his part-time home in Spain, as afternoon light streams in through the window behind him. he. while he lights a cigarette. “Even as a kid, I liked doing that. I always related music to images. I imagine being somewhere.”
In retrospect, it is very clear that Mortensen was, essentially, composing a film in his mind.
Now he's doing it for real. Mortensen has written and directed “The Dead Do n't Hurt,” a new Western opening Friday in which he also plays a Danish immigrant maintenance worker who leaves his bold new girlfriend (Vicky Krieps). to serve in the Civil War. As if that weren't enough, Mortensen composed the music, playing various instruments in the score.
Mortensen, who also scored his 2020 directorial debut, “Falling,” joins a very exclusive club of directors who have scored their own films, from Charlie Chaplin and Clint Eastwood to Samuel Jeymes. But one doesn't get the sense that this is an auteurist flex, or even simply a means to save on the musical budget (as was the case with his clubmate John Carpenter). For Mortensen, who also dabbles in painting and photography and runs a micro publishing house, making music has always been a vital part of telling the story of his life.
Viggo Mortensen, director of “The Dead Don't Hurt.”
(Justin Jun Lee / For The Times)
“He really is a total and complete artist,” says Elijah Wood, Mortensen’s “Lord of the Rings” co-star, on a Zoom call from his home in Highland Park. “There are certainly people who express themselves in different disciplines and have other interests, but he is very successful in everything he does. And he is very humble and silent about it. He just does it.”
When his acting career began to take off in the 1980s (his first big-screen role was as an Amish man in Peter Weir's “Witness”), Mortensen married punk singer Exene Cervenka of the Los Angeles band Angels after they played husband and wife in the 1987 film Televangelism satire “Salvation!” He wrote some lyrics with her, although her role in his career was mainly limited to making the cover photographs for her solo albums. Their union ended in 1992, but he had a son, Henry, who became a skilled musician and “knows a lot more about punk rock music than I do,” Mortensen says, “although I like it.”
Still, there was always something punk or bohemian about Mortensen on screen, even though he was often portrayed as a macho, working-class guy: a drug dealer, a hitman. He played difficult roles sensitively and straight roles sideways.
A fateful moment came in the mid-'90s, when the producers of a spoken word album about Greek and Roman myths approached Mortensen to contribute an article on Poseidon. He wrote and performed a poem about water and “crudely, with a small tape recorder, he recorded some water sounds to accompany it,” he says. “I mixed it halfway and sent it to the company.”
They returned it, completely mixed, with some interesting guitar parts from an enigmatic musician whose stage name was Buckethead. Brian Patrick Carroll is an Anaheim native who wears an upside-down KFC bucket as a hat over his long curly locks and a white “Halloween” mask. Mortensen asked Buckethead if he wanted to collaborate and they met at Travis Dickerson's Chatsworth studio.
Something emerged between Mortensen, with his improvisational, decidedly non-pop leanings and poetic musings, and Buckethead, with his virtuoso shredding and his duffle bag full of Japanese toys. Their first independent album was “One Less Thing to Worry About” in 1997 (long out of print), which featured a black-and-white photograph of Mortensen eating a shoe on its cover.
Viggo Mortensen in a scene from the movie “The Dead Don't Hurt.”
(Marcel Zyskind)
“We've made several records since then,” says Mortensen, “all with Travis recording and laughing and just enjoying our antics. I guess some things are really strange to hear. But every once in a while, we would come up with a melody that was really beautiful.”
The fast-paced, impromptu sessions involved Mortensen's son from the start. Afterwards, “I felt very calm, almost like some kind of really benevolent drug or something I had taken,” Mortensen says, laughing at himself. “I was driving home feeling great, and then when we finished the record, he would listen to it over and over again, especially while he was driving.”
Even when Mortensen found blockbuster fame as Aragorn in the “Rings” films, he continued making these strange albums of soundscapes. At the height of “Rings” fever, he convinced his new co-stars (Wood, Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd) to contribute to a strange record called “pandemoniumofamerica.”
Mortensen “invited us hobbits to play laser tag,” Wood recalls, and then they all went to Dickerson's studio, where Buckethead and a bunch of instruments were scattered around the room. “It was just a couple of friends hanging out and playing in the studio, and suddenly these things started taking shape out of the ether.”
On one song, “Half Fling,” Wood and Monaghan did “high-pitched Muppet call-and-response voices,” Wood says. “I realized instantly that for him musical expression is no different from painting or photography. I don't know if he even has an identifiable gender. I wouldn't know how to classify it. “It's a wonderfully undisciplined thing.”
“We actually did it ourselves,” says Mortensen. “That's how I look at creating art in general: doing it as a way to remember what I'm experiencing at that moment.”
That was the same drive that drove Mortensen to become a screenwriter and director. “Falling” was inspired by memories of his mother and his father, who divorced when he was young, and the dementia they both developed when they were older.
Director Viggo Mortensen on the set of “The Dead Don't Hurt.”
(Marcela Nava)
Based on his own original screenplay, “The Dead Don't Hurt” is a classic Western in many ways. Mortensen plays Danish Holger Olsen (his own father, Viggo Sr., was Danish and the actor still has family in Denmark) and Krieps plays Vivienne Le Coudy, a French-Canadian woman with clear echoes of Mortensen's mother, Grace Gamble, from Canadian ancestry. The story was born from her image of her running through the maple woods near the Canadian border as a child.
Mortensen says he wrote the score while he was writing the script, pointing out where he thought the music should go. He knew he wanted music from the era and approached violinist Scarlet Rivera, who played with Bob Dylan in the '70s, and cellist Cameron Stone to interpret his American folk ideas. They met at Chatsworth's studio and Mortensen joined on piano and also played bass, guitar and percussion.
When shooting the film, the score was as much a guide as the script.
“I played the music for the director of photography and for my first [assistant director] and some of the actors,” he says, “just to explain: this is the tone I'm going for and this will affect the length of the scene, the pace of the scene and even the shot selection. And since it's a non-linear story, I knew there would be transitions from one period to another, or ellipses. “I knew music would help.”
The high-pitched sound of clicking keys accompanies Mortensen's character in the present day, pursuing the man who took advantage of his wife during his military absence. Warm violin melodies and sweet harmonies underscore happier moments in his marriage. Mortensen's melodic score has a tactile, earthy feel that fits perfectly with the steep trails, canyons, and rustic production design. (Stunning places in Durango, Mexico, replaced Nevada.)
“I don't like it when the music in a movie tells you, 'Now you have to be afraid.' Now you must be sad. Now you should be happy,'” says the actor, director and composer, “just as I don't like it when dialogue, acting or cinematography does that. So the idea was to have all the music beforehand and know what we intended to convey, but that it accompanied and sometimes contrasted, at the right moment, with what was happening.”
Mortensen says he might hire a different composer for the next film he directs. He is aware of his own limitations. Anyway, he'll get them involved early.
But every time he comes across a piano — in a hotel, a restaurant or in a waiting area on the set of “Eastern Promises” — he sits down and plays it.
“Even if you play just two minutes,” he says, “it brings you back to the ground, puts your feet on the ground,” and lets Mortensen's imagination wander into a new world.
