Summary
Viggo Mortensen’slatest movieThe Dead Don’t Hurtshowcases the many talents of a creative who refuses to be defined by any singular role. This applies to his performances in Peter Jackson’s groundbreakingThe Lord of The Ringstrilogy, his Academy Award-nominated efforts inEastern Promises,Captain Fantastic,andGreen Book,and even his role as an actor altogether. Mortensen wrote, directed, and acted inThe Dead Don’t Hurt, a deliberate Western that tells the story of a doomed romance against the backdrop of the U.S. Civil War.
But Mortensen’s contributions toThe Dead Don’t Hurtdon’t end there. The actor also scored the film, making him a two-time film composer (he also wrote the music for his 2020 directorial debut,Falling). Over Zoom, Mortensen is quick to joke that his musical journey is “probably disturbing” and downplay the fact that he has been quietly releasing albums since 1994, with over 20 under his belt. The albums, often experimental, aren’t available on Spotify, but they put important context behind Mortensen’s recent turn to film composing. Though he isn’t a trained musician, Mortensen has a practiced and discerning ear, as can be heard in the sparse yet touching score forThe Dead Don’t Hurt.
Viggo Mortensen’s New Western Movie Continues Huge Rotten Tomatoes Streak That Has Lasted For 10 Years
Viggo Mortensen’s newest Western movie, The Dead Don’t Hurt, continues a huge Rotten Tomatoes streak that has lasted for 10 straight years.
Screen Rantinterviewed Viggo Mortensen about his work scoringThe Dead Don’t Hurt. The actor detailed his musical journey, composing process, and thoughts on what he wants in a score.
From His Grandmother’s House To Green Rooms
Mortensen didn’t study music theory or play in bands as a teenager. Maybe that’s why, despite having two film scores under his belt, he states,“Yes, I play the piano and I like music, but I don’t think of myself as an accomplished musician.”The piano that sparked it all was his grandmother’s, seemingly starting an appreciation for the instrument that carried through to the sets ofMortensen’s best movies:
Viggo Mortensen: There was a piano in my grandmother’s house, and I would sit and play that when we’d visit her. I liked it. It seemed like a soothing and relaxing thing to do, and usually I’d associate it with images I had in my head, and soundscapes. I always enjoyed that as a sort of meditative thing to do.
Later on, as an adult, even though I didn’t have a piano at home, when I’d be staying at a hotel or at a restaurant where there was a piano, if nobody was around, I might sit down and play for myself. Or, if I was in a green room somewhere, or in an actor holding area during a shoot, sometimes there would be a piano and I would play. I haven’t been steadily playing every day like you have to, but it’s something I’ve enjoyed doing.
Mortensen found himself drawn to collaborating with musicians and artists and reveals he has done spoken word performances in English and Spanish since the early ‘90s, sometimes even sharing a piano with someone at the events. It was through collaborations with musicians like Buckethead, however, that Mortensen delved into musical genre after musical genre in sessions that resulted in the release of 21 albums between 1994 and 2018. When asked about these albums, which feature everything from singing in Spanish to experimental jazz-influenced instrumental pieces, Mortensen says it’s about the process, not the result:
Viggo Mortensen: There’s some stuff that we didn’t put in records, and there’s a lot of stuff that we probably shouldn’t have put on records, but we were just doing it because we enjoy it. It’s just like filmmaking—it should be fun. What I like about movies and music is the collaborative aspect. The things that happen when two ideas meet, when two sounds meet, two instruments, two musicians, different actors… those things collide and something else happens that nobody expected to happen. That’s what you’re looking for. That hard-to-attain synchronicity, or that fusion. It’s just play, and when it’s fun you’re on the right track. Whether anybody even likes what you’ve done afterward or not, it’s the process that counts.
Film Financing Difficulties Turned Mortensen Into A Composer
The Dead Don’t Hurtmarks Mortensen’s second time scoring a movie he directed. The first wasFalling, a 2020 film that was his feature directorial debut. As Mortensen describes it, he fell into the role of composer during the movie’s long journey from script to screen:
Viggo Mortensen: In the case of the first movie I directed, I had to wait several years before I found the financing, even though I had the screenplay and the main actor already. I was just sort of restless, and started thinking, “Is there music in this movie? There could be. What should it be?”
I started composing certain themes and melodies, and I ended up recording quite a bit of it before we even started shooting, just sort of accidentally. That proved useful in terms of planning certain scenes, knowing what the mood of certain scenes would be, and in the editing room too. It was like, “I know what this is going to feel like,” and, “This scene should last this long,” and, “It should have this kind of rhythm,” and so forth. There was an interplay between the music and the images we’d shot. Since that had worked, I did it intentionally for The Dead Don’t Hurt. I ended up coming up with the music, and we recorded almost all of it well before we started shooting.
For Mortensen’srealistic Western movie, he again wrote and recorded the vast majority of the music before shooting. He even shared the music with the cinematographer and other filmmakers to convey the mood of that day’s scenes during production. As for actually writing the music, Mortensen employed a surprisingly straightforward, yet relatively unique, process:
Viggo Mortensen: I literally sat at a piano with the script and looked at scene one—“What would that be? Maybe there’s a transition piece here, a little short thing here, then here there would be full-on”—and then I would imagine the instruments and so forth. It was part of the writing.I felt like it was very much part of the screenplay, in a way. I’ve heard this from audiences in Q&A sessions after screenings—they’ll say, “The music just really fits. It feels right.” That’s the best thing you could hear, and I think that’s in part because of the process.
When I sat down with the musicians to record, I would tell them what the scene was about. We were thinking about the screenplay when making the music, and when we shot the movie, we were listening to the music. The writing, filming, acting, and music are intertwined from the beginning.
Mortensen also reflected on how he wanted his score to fit his movie’s naturalistic look and feel, even as he broke ground in other areas. This included enlisting violinist and Bob Dylan collaborator Scarlet Rivera, among others.
Viggo Mortensen: It’s a different kind of Western in that you have a female character as the lead character, and you stay with her throughout the story no matter what adventures he gets up to. And your lead couple of characters, instead of being Anglo-Saxon and U.S. born, don’t have English as their first language.
But I wanted the look and feel of the movie to be like the westerns I grew up watching—the classic westerns where you’re not thinking much about how the camera’s looking at things. You’re just showing landscapes and people in them in a simple, elegant way, ideally, which I think Marcel Zyskind did a great job with.
It’s the same with the music. It’s original music, but I wanted it to feel like music from that time with the influences that, as far as I know from my research, came to bear back then, whether it’s Celtic influences, some classical influences, or even the Appalachian sound. We did that with the violin a little bit, with Scarlet Rivera.
Importantly for Mortensen, he didn’t want music that felt emotionally manipulative:
Viggo Mortensen: It’s just personal taste, but I like soundtrack music that helps tell the story, that compliments it, and that is useful in telling the story. I don’t like music in movies that’s wall-to-wall. No matter how good the music is, it’s essentially manipulative. It’s telling you, “Now you have to be happy,” or sad, or rejoice, or, “This is a meditative moment.”
The moment has to work without the music, and then the music can help it along. Let’s say it transitions from one time period to another or, if you’re advancing rapidly through ellipses in storytelling, sometimes the music can support that and add a layer and a feeling to it without trying to dictate how you should feel. That’s what we did, and that was very useful.
The Future Of Viggo Mortensen, Film Composer
Given that Mortensen has composed the scores for his two feature directorial efforts, it’s easy to assume this will be his approach on every project moving forward. But as smoothly as he fell into composing, the filmmaker is willing to fall out. For him, it’s all about the needs of the project:
Viggo Mortensen: I just did it because it felt like right. The next movie I direct, I don’t think I will do the music for. I don’t think I would be the best person for that, whatever that music might be. In this case, I knew what I wanted to hear and I had an idea of how to get it done and who to play with to make it work.
When asked if he would score a project he didn’t direct, Mortensen cites a 2014 calledJaujafor which he teamed up with Buckethead to contribute music. In terms of the future:
Viggo Mortensen: Yeah, why not? I don’t know if they’d want me because I’m not your normal composer. If they liked what I did for this and thought, instinctively, that I’d be the right person to come up with stuff for them, sure, it’d be fun.
The Dead Don’t Hurt is a story of star-crossed lovers on the western U.S. frontier in the 1860s. Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps) is a fiercely independent woman who embarks on a relationship with Danish immigrant Holger Olsen (Viggo Mortensen). The outbreak of the civil war separates them when Olsen makes a fateful decision to fight for the Union. This leaves Vivienne to fend for herself in a place controlled by corrupt Mayor Rudolph Schiller (Danny Huston) and his unscrupulous business partner, powerful rancher Alfred Jeffries (Garrett Dillahunt). Alfred’s violent, wayward son Weston (Solly McLeod) aggressively pursues Vivienne, who is determined to resist his unwanted advances. When Olsen returns from the war, he and Vivienne must confront and make peace with the person each has become.
Check out our otherDead Don’t Hurtinterviews with the following:
Viggo Mortensen’s soundtrack forThe Dead Don’t Hurtis on digital platforms now, courtesy of Milan Records.
The Dead Don’t Hurt
Cast
The Dead Don’t Hurt is a story of star-crossed lovers on the western U.S. frontier in the 1860s. Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps) is a fiercely independent woman who embarks on a relationship with Danish immigrant Holger Olsen (Viggo Mortensen). After meeting Olsen in San Francisco, she agrees to travel with him to his home near the quiet town of Elk Flats, Nevada, where they start a life together. The outbreak of the civil war separates them when Olsen makes a fateful decision to fight for the Union. This leaves Vivienne to fend for herself in a place controlled by corrupt Mayor Rudolph Schiller (Danny Huston) and his unscrupulous business partner, powerful rancher Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt). Alfred’s violent, wayward son Weston (Solly McLeod) aggressively pursues Vivienne, who is determined to resist his unwanted advances. When Olsen returns from the war, he and Vivienne must confront and make peace with the person each has become. Both a tragic love story and a nuanced depiction of the conflict between revenge and forgiveness, The Dead Don’t Hurt is a portrait of a passionate woman determined to stand up for herself in an unforgiving world dominated by ruthless men.
