The three-time Oscar nominee in a partnership with a Spanish actress confirmed that he is preparing his second film as director
Viggo Mortensen, 63, at the premiere of “Crimes of the Future” at the Cannes Film Festival (Reuters)
A New Yorker by birth, though of Danish descent,Viggo Mortensen spent much of his childhood living in Argentina. At that time he became a great fan of soccer and especially of the San Lorenzo club. The protagonist of “A violent history” is the kind of man who defines himself as a “citizen of the world”. An expression widely used these days but in his case it is literal. He was born in New York, grew up in Chaco (north of Argentina) and, after spending his adolescence in a town on the border with Canada, moved to Denmark. There he worked as a flour distributor, flower seller, truck driver or unloading merchandise at the port. Today he lives in Spain for the love of an actress.
Taking advantage of the media attention of the 75th Cannes Film Festival for “Crimes of the Future ” by David Cronenberg, a title that is part of the Official Selection that will compete for the Palme d’Or, Mortensen announced that he is now immersed in what will be his second job as a director, a film about love and revenge, with a script -written during confinement-, direction and own production, a project that, he has admitted, would be easier to sell to a platform, but that he aspires to release in theaters.
“I think I have a healthy attitude towards Hollywood. But on the other hand, if I had a really healthy attitude I wouldn’t work in that industry at all. So I guess I’m a bit contaminated ”he reflected in The Guardian. This attitude has not prevented him from getting three Oscar nominations, for “Eastern Promises”, “Captain Fantastic” and “Green Book”.
In his opinion, the pandemic that the planet is suffering “forcefully makes us think and be aware that we can get infected, without knowing what is going to happen, because life is uncertain and, to a certain extent, it is healthy to accept it, and try to take advantage of it. to the maximum every day, it may sound cheesy, but it is so”. “We know that we can get sick and die at any time; a truck can hit us, that is, anything can happen on a day-to-day basis, although we don’t go through life thinking about that because we would go crazy,” said the interpreter.
“I still think about death when I wake up. It’s the first thing that comes to my mind”, he confessed to The New York Times,adding, “But I think that’s what makes me want to try things.” This preoccupation with the dark side of life led to his fascination with cinema. As he reflected, movies offer a break from a bleak world. “Movies are light and time. Before the movie starts, it’s dark and nothing happens”, he reflected.
Peter Jackson’s scare in “The Lord of the Rings”< /b>
Mortensen at the 2017 Oscars ceremony (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
Filming a memorable scene for “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King”, Viggo Mortensen narrowly escaped being killed in an explosion. As the author details Ian Nathan in the book “Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-Earth”, Aragorn’s momentous speech to his soldiers at the foot of the Black Gate of Mordor was filmed in a New Zealand desert used for military training, which meant Mortensen was surrounded by unexploded ordnance.
Before filming, a military team had designated a safe area so that the film crew could do their work without worry, away from the bombs. The actors and hundreds of extras will settle into their places. What nobody expected is that Viggo would leave the safe place when he went out on horseback to improvise a little. He went out of bounds, where at any moment he could explode with one of the artillery pieces.
Nathan writes that Jackson was nervous about filming the shocking scene. “Jackson remembers waiting for the explosion”, wrote the author grimly. Fortunately, Mortensen avoided this chilling fate unscathed, albeit narrowly.
Jackson fired Stuart Townsend after two weeks of shooting “The Lord of the Rings,” so he called Mortensen to offer him the role. The filmmaker gave the actor 24 hours to decide if he wanted to fly to New Zealand the next day and spend 18 months there shooting three consecutive movies. It was his son Henry (the product of his relationship with the punk singer Exene Cervenka), who was then 11 years old, who encouraged him to embark on the adventure.
Mortensen acknowledged that he doubted his ability to lead that mega production. “It felt like a challenge,” he explained to The Independent. “They had hired me because they thought I could do it but inside I wasn’t so sure.”
During the filming, Mortensen slept outdoors in the New Zealand forests, went everywhere with his sword and shot almost all his action scenes to the point that when his tooth was broken he asked for glue to put it on so he could continue filming .
The phenomenon of the trilogy turned Mortensen into a sex symbol, a label that does not celebrate at all. “For a lot of people being an erotic fantasy is cool, it’s half the reason they get into this job. But for me it’s not exciting, because people look at you but they don’t see who you are. You become a possession”, lamented the actor in dialogue with Esquire.
Viggo Mortensen in “The Lord of the Rings”
Mortensen rose to stardom thanks to his role as Aragorn, but this did not prevent him from happily dispatching Peter Jackson for his abuse of digital effects and his “chaotic” direction in an interview with The Telegraph.
“Peter was always a fan of technology but once he had the means to do it and the technology really took off, he never looked back,” Mortensen said. “In the first film, the special effects were on point, the actors interacted on real sets. Instead, in the second and third parts, for my taste, they began to be excessive.”
And his criticism of Jackson did not end here. The actor described the filming as “chaos”. “It was necessary to roll again, and we did, year after year. But Jackson never would have gotten the extra money if the first movie hadn’t been a huge success. Anyone who says they knew it would be so successful, I don’t think they’re telling the truth, “he said.
He later clarified his comments, insisting that he did not hate movies or Jackson. The actor explained that much of his success was due to the New Zealand filmmaker. He said that he felt that big-budget blockbusters stifled creativity: “It’s just an opinion. I feel the same way about the Batman movies.”
His love for the big screen
Viggo Mortensen was in Cannes for the film “Crimes of the Future” by David Cronenberg, a title that is part of the Official Selection that will compete for the Palme d’Or (Reuters)
The massive irruption of platforms to watch movies on digital devices will not end traditional cinemas, Mortensen trial. “I am old at that, I love going to the movies and getting lost in the movies, in the dark, close to other people I don’t know, to inspire us and surprise us with what we are going to see“, said the actor in a recent interview with the EFE agency.
Mortensen also stated that without perseverance and a sense of humor he would not have succeeded in the seventh art. This is what he confessed at the Lumière Film Festival in Lyon (France), where he admitted that to break through in this industry “you have to be stubborn” .
The interpreter said that, when he settled in New York in the early 1980s, he unsuccessfully presented himself to “some 25 or 26 castings” to make films. “In most of them I became part of the two or three finalists and he told me: that’s it, I’m going to make it. And nothing, they ended up offering me minor roles. But I showed up thinking that if it didn’t work, nothing would happen,’” Mortensen said. ”You have to be stubborn and not lose your sense of humor. If you really want to do it you will get it ”, he added.
In addition to the frustrating castings, he also recalled with large doses of humor several films in which he shot scenes that were not part of the final montage as they were cut in the edition: “The Purple Rose of Cairo” (1985), by Woody Allen, and ” Girls on the Warpath” (1984), by Jonathan Demme.
”My agent told me that Woody Allen loved my performance and was still laughing thinking about one of the scenes. Six months later I told my mother not to miss the premiere and when she saw it it was neither in the film nor in the credits”, Mortensen explained.
Demme He also told her that he was impressed by one of the scenes he shot. However, it did not survive the final edition either and he found out directly when he saw it in theaters. ”My mother even told me if I smoked crack in New York because it did not appear in the movies I told her to go see /b>”, he told making the whole audience laugh.
The American actor, Viggo Mortensen, during the Donostia Award ceremony during the 68th edition of the San Sebastián International Film Festival (EFE)
Mortensen, who received the Donostia Award at the San Sebastian Festival Sebastián for his career as an actor, he premiered at 61 as a director with “Falling” (2020), a father-son drama about senile dementia that, he explained, his parents and grandparents suffered from.
”I wanted to show what they made me feel and what I learned from them. We think that they are disoriented, but in reality we are the ones who are. They live in a different present, in another year, in a different moment from the past, simply”, pointed out the artist of Danish descent who currently resides in Spain. Regarding his role in that film, he acknowledged that he still carried a little of the overweight he had accumulated for ‘Green Book’, filming during which, he said, his partner, the Spanish actress Ariadna Gil, nicknamed him “Gordensen”. b>
In 2015, the actor’s mother died. He said that seeing her disappear from her dementia was painful, though he tried to focus on all the pleasant memories he had of her before her death. Two years before his death, he spoke to The Telegraph about the difficulties of seeing his mother’s cognitive decline. “She knows who I am, but she mixes things up,” Mortensen said, sharing that she thought he was in the old Hollywood movies she enjoyed watching in her later days.
A year later, her father was also dying and she took time off from work to care for him. As he pointed out to Esquire magazine, he slept in the room next to his father, watching him with a baby monitor. His father died in 2017.
A careful private life
Viggo Mortensen with his son and his partner, Ariadna Gil (Reuters)
In 1987, Viggo marriedpunk singer Christene ‘Exene’ Cervenka, whom he had met on the set of the comedy “Salvation!’”. A year later, her only child, Henry, was born. They split in 1998. The actor maintains a very close relationship with his son, but has admitted that the job often means he doesn’t get to see him as much as he would like. Speaking with Esquire in 2006, he recalled missing his son’s poetry reading due to work commitments, which was a particularly harrowing experience for him. “It just killed me that I didn’t make it,” he said, adding: “It was his damn day.”
According to< i>Vanity Fair, briefly dated Lola Schnabel after divorcing Cervenka, but his hopes of finding true love again were slim. “It could happen,” she said. “What happens is always what you think will not happen.”
In Spain, where he starred in “Alatriste” under the orders of Agustín Díaz Yanes, he He fell in love with his co-star Ariadna Gil. “There have been difficult moments,” Gil would acknowledge, “there have been paparazzi sleeping on the porch of my house. And in the end, what? They can take a picture of Viggo and me walking the dog and he’s done, because we don’t give any more. There is no news. There is nothing more to teach.”
In an interview for Esquire, the actor explained that he decided to move to Madrid in 2009 “because I fell in love of a woman and she lives there.” Living more than 10,000 kilometers from Los Angeles might seem like a declaration of intent from a star who has never been duped by Hollywood.