Read on for an exclusive interview with Viggo Mortensen, star of
The Road, in theaters November 25th.
Viggo Mortensen is intense, man.
Intense. Look at his track record:
The Lord of the Rings trilogy,
A History of Violence,
Eastern Promises and he even played the devil in
The Prophecy. Do not F with this man, or he will melt your brain. Thus, you are prepared for his latest venture, an adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel,
The Road. Hopefully, you're also prepared for what he has to say about the film, where he plays a father struggling to stay alive on a dying planet Earth while keeping his son out of cannibals' boiling pots.
Can you tell us about your first experience reading this book? Did you read it before or after you got the role?
I read it the same day as the script because I said “This is a really good script, tough story but beautiful and strangely kind of uplifting at the end.” There were a lot of things reading the script that I couldn’t believe, like how much emotion was condensed into it, and visually what it could be you know? So I ran out to the bookstore and I was happy to see that it was a very faithful adaptation of the book, so…
That’s a pretty intense day.
I was worthless by the end of the day. I was at my mother’s house visiting her and she said “What do you want to do for dinner?” and I’m like “How can I eat now?”
You were so physically emaciated, or so it appeared. How did you prepare?
You know it took a certain amount of discipline and fortunately I had enough time to get there.
How much time was that?
Well, I could have always used more. I don’t know…It was as I was traveling and doing other things, um, promoting “Eastern Promises” actually was that period. Even at the Oscars for example. That was like a day before shooting [The Road], our first day so…it was bizarre to go to this ceremony when we’d already been preparing and seeing this world and thinking that way and suddenly I leave the winter and Pittsburgh and this weird area of town we were in and then I’m suddenly on the red carpet in Hollywood. It was really weird, you know, and I was kind of, I felt strangely calm ‘cause I said, “Well how bad could it be? It's fine, this is nothing compared to what I'll be doing the next couple months. I can handle these photographers. They're not cannibals, as far as I can tell.”
So you have a really close relationship with the son in this movie. How much work were you able to do with before hand?
Well my first worry when I said yes, which is always what happens to some degree, you say yes--feel fortunate that you're offered this role--and then you think "Oh no, now I gotta do it. How am I gonna do this?" And in this case, more than usual, because in talking to the director, I knew he was going to in principle do things right as far as the look. Shoot in real places and not green screen. The places we were going to shoot in were going to look right. The people he hired as far as other actors and the crew were all really good, so if we had some luck with the weather and so forth, we might have a chance to make this look right. But I felt like I had a burden that I hadn't had before on an emotional level to constantly sort of have this turbulence under the surface, you know, and regret, all these things mixed together. How am I going to do that believably? Because you know once I saw landscapes, I thought well if this is so raw and so real, looking at it as a measuring stick, we can't be any less real in our feelings and how we do things. So I was worried about that. But then I was worried, even more worried because I was so dependent--gonna be--on whoever played the boy. I said to the director, you know if we don't find a genius kid to do this part, we can only do so much, the movie can only reach a certain level. Doesn't matter how well it's done and designed and how hard I work. I'm able to be honest emotionally and all that but it's preliminary. That relationship really has to work and we were really lucky that we found him cause he was able to give as good as he got.
What did you find most emotionally challenging about this shoot and most physically challenging?
Most physically challenging? Well, the fact that I was a lot thinner, you know that I had not much body fat at all meant that I got tired more quickly being out in the cold weather I guess. Just like Kodi who's naturally skinny. So that was just trying to stay focused and get through the day basically, but it wasn't as hard as the emotional things sometimes. Although that became easier as my relationship with him became stronger, because I trusted him more and he trusted me more and by the end we really felt we could do anything together. It's a great feeling to have with an acting partner like that.
Is there a part of this that's a rollicking adventure at all?
We had fun. I mean one great thing about him is that he's kind of a prankster and he's a kid. You know he's a well-adjusted kid, so as much as he can channel that I don't know where from this intense emotion and sadness and presence he had, that melancholy, he's a goofball, you know. He's running around all the time making fun of people and pulling jokes on people. That helped us a lot. Even though it was devastated, those landscapes like Mount St. Helen and the surrounding areas are incredibly beautiful and the coast of Oregon. Fortunately we had terrible weather and the water was freezing and the air was freezing, but it's beautiful. New Orleans, you know, that was very intense to be in those parts of the city that still haven't been touched. You see the waterline marks and the mold everywhere. That office where the boy is, where the deer head is, it's a recruiting office. There's still hanging askew a picture of George Bush, his first presidential portrait, where his hair wasn't gray and he had that crazed, demented smile. And then there's the briefcase of the recruiting officer on the desk that's sort of half open with papers, his passport. It's like [snap] everyone had been transported somewhere and everything was just as it was. Or the movie theater where he kicks the can of Coke when we're leaving, the marquee still has the movies that were playing that day. The clock is stopped at a certain time. It was weird, and those kind of ghosts...even that was kind of beautiful and affecting. Not beautiful, I guess that's the wrong word, but it meant something. And so all of that helped us as actors. And the fact that the crew was so into the story. You know it was more than a job. That doesn't happen that often on a movie. I remember that being the case with Lord of the Rings. There wer copies of the book around, they were like into it. But in this case they were really...they'd be excited knowning because it was so close to the book tomorrow Eli shows up, who Robert Duvall plays, it's gonna be interesting to see how that plays out. I wonder if it's gonna be like that, or like that and you know they got excited. You felt like it was playing on your home field, like a sports team. You know that there's unspoken support, which helps you do better.
Do you think that propulsion comes from the fact that the story is about one of the most important relationships that you can have in your life?
Yeah, I remember talking with crew members a lot about that. They would talk about their dads often, or their grandparents. It was men and women talking about that stuff.
Did it resonate with you?
Totally. I mean, you don't have to be a parent to understand or care about the story or to play the part of the father, but it certainly helped me to begin with that I have a son.
If you were in the same situation, what would you do?
Well you never know, which is what makes it dramatically interesting. It's what makes life interesting, and I think something that reaffirmed my belief in the preciousness of life and the value of making the most of life. I just think that the extreme physical and emotional tests that our characters go through in this story forced us to, not just as characters but actually as ourselves too, to come face to face with, to acknowledge our personal weaknesses and strengths. And by the end of the story I think to recognize that potential everybody has no matter how dire the circumstances might be, to be loving. Just because it's the right thing, not because it's useful. When everything's taken away, which is why the wife says, "Well, what's the point?" it's a learning thing. This is what the movie teaches in a way, if anything, that it's worthwhile for its own sake. To treat other people and hence yourself kindly. It sounds silly in a way, not silly but yeah it's a simple, nice idea, concept, but you see the movie and you know what that means. It's something that's hard to do to earn that journey, but when you get there in the end, that's why it's strangely uplifting. Because you believe that, I think, potentially. I'm not saying you all do, but I do. In a profound way, you understand that no matter what, it's always better to be nice. It just is. It's not always the easy thing, you think "I've got a lot of reasons to be annoyed" but still it's better not to be if you can avoid it or to recognize when you do things wrong, which is also what it's about and what the son teaches the man, which is done really well, I think.
Because the dialogue is so sparse, how were the rehearsals different compared to other movies?
What we did, which was clever, first because it was shooting in winter, outside so we had limited hours, we were dependent on crappy looking skies and whether they're gray, we weren't going to have much time to talk about stuff, and because we were often going to have to be in certain physical and mental and emotional extreme states, if you're always analyzing, you gotta stay focused. So the director did something, which I think all directors should do. We sat down for a week or two before and we would talk every day, starting with the beginning of the script. We talked for two, three hours about a scene, with Kodi. His dad was there, who's an actor. It was really cool. It's his first film. He wanted to see how it was going to be with this director and this actor playing his dad. So it was useful for his father to see how that was going to be. It was also useful for Kodi to get his feet wet without any pressure, as far as thinking through what we were about to do. It was great for the director to be sure that we were all on the same page, which ought to happen more. A lot of times you find half way through the shoot an actor a director says, "Well that's not what I thought this scene was about." It happens too often. And the writer was there, so any questions we had, he can tweak it, make it closer to the book. It was great. And for me I got to see that Kodi had the ability I'd seen in his final audition, which I did with him and the other three finalists, but that he also had an intelligence, not just this gift and this emotional availability, and this presence. He knew, he understood the book really well, really well. He'd often be the first to say, "Yeah but in the scene before, that's why." That was a great process. It saved us a lot of time and work and worry. You're never going to be completely ready, but we were about as ready as you could be by the time we started shooting because of that.
When you finish a film like that do you just appreciate food so much more?
I did, I did. An interesting thing that happened was that, part of it is what you prepare and then because the toll of the movie just was taking on us physically and mentally, and because I think there's that thing that's magical in movies which can't be explained technically, that's why certain shots stay in your mind years later after seeing the movie, there's something that's inexplicable. There is something mysterious in movie storytelling. [complete tangent] And in this movie it happened, it happened quite a bit. It happened physically too. It's beyond physical. There's something that happened in my face or his face. We were in a place that I'm not going to be in now. We were committed, that leap of faith is what does it. But the last few days on the shoot Charlize showed up to do all those flashback scenes and I was saying to the director it would be great if I had a week where I could just eat and gain some weight because I'm supposed to look healthier and then gradually less as you see the evolution of our relationship. He said no, I'm sorry, and so I just started cheating. Days before I just started and I couldn't eat. My stomach just didn't want that much food the days before, but the day she showed up I was just wolfing down food. I was really like, "Wow, so that's what that is!" Not that I wasn't eating before but I wasn't over eating. Lots of Italian food and sweets, a lot of sweets. Mostly black chocolate. I indulged myself tremendously, to the point where I had to lie down because my body couldn't take it. And it did work, because I could see in the scenes and towards the end in the scene with the horse, I looked healthier.