Viggo Mortensen: Grilled

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The last time I interviewed Viggo Mortensen, we got thrown out of a bar. That was more than a decade ago, when he was promoting a mediocre movie and I was writing for a mediocre magazine. Viggo got on the wrong side of an aging bartender (the only other person in the Sunset Boulevard joint) by asking if he could turn down the volume on the soap opera blaring from a TV in the corner. The guy flipped out, told us to leave, and threatened to call the cops. Since I lived a block away from the bar, we got a couple of beers from my refrigerator and finished the interview on my front porch.

Now he’s promoting a good movie, “The Road,” an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s devastating novel about a father and son trudging through the remains of a world that has been almost destroyed by an unnamed cataclysm. And this time he’s in the hunt for a best actor Oscar nomination, after a stretch of terrific work that has found him following the commercial breakthrough of the “Lord of the Rings” movies not by taking parts in potential blockbusters, but by doing some of his best work in small, serious films, such as “A History of Violence” and “Eastern Promises.”

The voice you use for the narration in “The Road” is very different from your voice in the rest of the movie -- it’s flat, unemotional, calm. How did you hit upon that tone?
Well, I wanted it to be somewhat neutral, mostly out of respect for Cormac McCarthy. They wanted to do even more voiceover, which I didn’t think was necessary. And they wanted to do variations on what he wrote, and I thought, no, let’s just use exactly what’s in the book. 

I love the last one, the sort of coda, which has to do with acceptance. It starts with, “If I were God, I would make the world just so, and no different.” I think that’s beautiful. I really liked the words, and I think that they carry the weight. And you don’t want to impose a performance on them.

For most of the movie, the character is fighting, not looking for acceptance.
There’s so much emotion. Sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes it bubbles to the surface, but it’s always there. There’s lot of tension, and you can hear that in our voices. 

But the voice that you hear in the voiceover is obviously the voice in the guy’s head. So even if I’m so weak that I can barely talk, or if I’m upset, it isn’t a real voice. So I thought, well, it’s not a real voice – so how does it sound? It’s just matter-of-fact. It’s really just what McCarthy wrote.

Did you feel a responsibility to the book?

Sure. I always do. I think this movie, out of any adaptation I’ve done, and I include “Lord of the Rings,” is the most faithful adaptation in spirit and in letter. A lot of times when that happens, it falls flat because it’s too slavishly respectful to the source material. But not in this case, because we concentrated on the emotional journey. It’s about the unspoken things.

All the beautiful prose descriptions in McCarthy’s book of landscape, and of the inner life going on in the characters’ heads, we had to do that somehow.

 

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