“The Dead Don’t Hurt” – Viggo Mortensen’s unintentional Western

Viggo Mortensen plays Holger Olsen in “The Dead Don’t Hurt”. (Photo: Marcel Zyskind)

Viggo Mortensen writes, produces, directs, scores and stars in Friday’s The Dead Don’t Hurt – but he never intended it to be a Western.

“It just happened that way,” said the 65-year-old Mortensen by phone about his classic equestrian saga, in which free spirit Vivienne (Vicky Krieps) meets and marries rancher Holger (Mortensen). He enlists in the civil war and leaves her and her son behind to look after their remote property. Bad men are around and doing very bad things.

“Instead of writing a western, I started writing a story about a woman who was independent and strong. A free-thinking person. I decided to set it in the 19th century – to create the greatest possible tension for her as an independent woman. The West in the 19th century is a place where society was quite lawless and ruled by some relatively unscrupulous men who were not averse to violence.

“I thought that would be a bigger obstacle for them. And so it ended up being Western.”

“I like westerns,” Mortensen added. “I grew up riding horses and have acted in a few westerns. I really enjoyed the research and preparation with my team.”

There are all kinds of westerns, but “our story is different in that it centers on a relatively normal woman of flesh and blood who is independent and strong-willed. That’s different.”

“I wanted to make a film that looked and felt like the best classic western. Not paying so much attention to how the camera sees the characters in the landscape. Just something clean, elegant, simple. And historically accurate in terms of the language and the details we see on screen.”

Another unusual feature of “Dead Don’t Hurt” is the time-shifted narrative. Without any indication, a scene, such as tending a flower garden, switches to an incident that happened years ago. “Basically, that’s how I wrote it.”

As for Mortensen’s influences: “I’ve been lucky enough to work for some really good directors over decades, Jane Campion, Ron Howard, David Cronenberg. No matter how different they may be as people or their films, they all have a few things in common.

“I learned three things from them over and over again: You can never prepare enough for a shoot. You can never communicate enough with the cast and crew.

“And it’s really important to make it clear to everyone on your team that their ideas are welcome. That you don’t feel threatened by them. No matter how well thought out your plan of attack is, a good idea can come from anywhere. It’s smart to take that into account and not feel threatened in any way.”

“The Dead Don’t Hurt” starts on May 31