Viggo Mortensen on directing Falling, his coming Aussie movie and 20 years of Lord of the Rings

Two decades after a fantasy epic made him a star, Viggo Mortensen tells how Middle Earth changed his life.

It was 20 years ago this week that Viggo Mortensen’s star went supernova.

Since making his film debut in Peter Weir’s acclaimed 1986 drama Witness, the American actor had carved out a solid career in the 1990s, with eye-catching appearances in films including The Indian Runner, Crimson Tide, GI Jane and Portrait of a Lady.

But when Peter Jackson’s first Lord Of the Rings film, The Fellowship Of the Ring, had its world premiere in London on December 10, 2001, suddenly the whole world wanted to know just who the smouldering warrior and would-be king Aragon was in real life.

After the billion-dollar success of that film and its two even more successful sequels, The Two Towers and The Return of the King, Mortensen’s acting future was assured, but rather than courting blockbusters and A-list status, he chose to pursue comparatively smaller films, earning Oscar nominations in the process for Eastern Promises, Captain Fantastic and the 2019 Best Picture Oscar-winner Green Book.

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“It’s gone quickly – but a lot has happened too,” says Mortensen of the intervening decades. “If I think about just the movies I have worked on and the things I have learned in movie-making and in life.

“It’s a long time but I have very, very fond memories of that period. I learned so much in so many ways during that shoot and I loved being in New Zealand.”

Mortensen and his LOTR co-stars formed a very tight knit bond during the trailblazing, intense, years-long shoot in New Zealand, travelling together to remote locations, working extended hours and even getting tattoos to mark the “fellowship”.

The camaraderie and friendship continues to this day, with many of the core members coming together for virtual reunions during Covid lockdowns, first for actor Josh Gad’s Together Apart charity fundraiser and then with mega fan Stephen Colbert for a special cinema re-release to mark the milestone and encourage audiences to get back to the movies.

“The friendships are there,” he says. “I haven’t watched them for a little while but over the years I have enjoyed watching them with young kids and maybe it’s the first time they are seeing it. I love watching them watch it and then I get sucked in.”

Mortensen says whenever he sees the LOTR movies now, he remembers what was happening off the screen as Jackson scrambled to wrangle the enormous shoot, overseeing every part of Tolkien’s richly drawn world. Already a photographer and writer, with aspirations to direct himself, Mortensen marvelled at Jackson’s ingenuity, stamina and Kiwi can-do attitude and made mental notes the entire time.

Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

“It was watching Peter Jackson and his team solve problems. This was largely a crew made up of Kiwi personnel who didn’t have that much experience prior to shooting Lord of the Rings, so it was a learn-as-you-go kind of experience.

“And it was an incredible paid film school – just watching them come up with ways of solving problems on a daily basis – big problems, little problems – and just getting it done.”

Mortensen’s debut feature as a director, Falling, could hardly be further away from the big battles, CGI monsters and fantasy worlds of LOTR.

While he would “never say never” to directing a big-budget blockbuster one day, he is more naturally drawn to smaller, more personal stories and in an environment where he gets to exercise a degree of control free from studio constraints.

Mortensen’s story of John a gay man, whose homophobic and rage-filled, farmer father Willis comes to live with him in LA after showing signs of dementia, is dedicated to his two brothers and inspired by elements of his own life. Both of his parents suffered from the heartbreaking and incurable condition, as well as three of his four grandparents and various aunts and uncles.

“It’s something that I am familiar with,” he says. “My mother had just passed away, which is why I started writing it because I was wanting to remember how I felt about her and the dynamic between my parents. It’s not strictly autobiographical but there are a lot elements that my brothers, for example, would recognise and be familiar with in terms of the family dynamic.”

Director and star Viggo Mortensen and Lance Henrikson as father and son in Falling.

Mortensen hadn’t originally planned to star as John, but realised that the years-long task of raising the money to shoot would be quicker and easier if he appeared in it too.

He’d already settled on Lance Henriksen, with whom he’d starred in the Western Appaloosa, as the forthright, unpredictable and sometimes downright monstrous Willis.

Henriksen, who has appeared in literally hundreds of films but is best known for his role as the android Bishop in Aliens and the sci-fi horror TV show Millennium, also had a stranger-than-fiction real-life story that found its way into the character.

He was kicked out of home at an early age by his alcoholic mother, beaten by family members, rode the railways, worked dangerous jobs and was jailed for vagrancy before belatedly finding a sense of purpose and family as an actor.

“In those few years when we were trying to put it together we would meet every once in a while and work all day long on the script and read scenes aloud and think about it and he would punctuate things we were reading with stories from his childhood,” Mortensen says.

“It would make Dickens look like a Hallmark story, it was really brutal. But his attitude about it, he had a sense of humour, even a certain forgiveness towards his parents and I said, ‘That’s remarkable that you have that attitude’.”

Despite positive reviews, Falling was one of many films of the past two years to suffer due to the coronavirus pandemic. After being invited to compete at Cannes and securing some early buzz at the Sundance and various other film festivals, cinema closures meant it was mostly released to streaming and robbed of much-needed publicity opportunities.

Mortensen is disappointed but philosophical, particularly given how the last awards season panned out for a similarly themed movie.

“A movie like The Father, with a good central performance by Anthony Hopkins, I would put Lance’s performance up against his and our movie up against it any day of the week,” he says. “I’m not saying that in a competitive way, I’m just saying it deserved as much attention but we didn’t have the marketing behind it and Oscar-winners in it and all of that stuff. That movie got a big push and we just couldn’t compete with that sort of thing. But it will hold up over time.”

Mortensen is already lining up his next film to direct, but for now he’s back in front of the camera. He spent several months on the Gold Coast this year filming 13 Lives, Oscar-winning director Ron Howard’s take on the Thai cave rescue. He plays British diver Richard Stanton opposite Colin Farrell and Joel Edgerton and is full of praise for Howard, the film and his time in Australia.

“It’s a very intense story, with a lot of Thai actors in it and a lot of Thai spoken, so it’s going to feel truly international, which is great because that’s what the story is,” he says.

“It’s not a story about British cave divers saving the world or Australians or Americans saving the world, it’s a very unusual thing about a selfless, collective, truly international effort for an unquestionable, apolitical, common good.”

Falling is available on digital from December 15

Originally published as Viggo Mortensen on directing Falling, his coming Aussie movie and 20 years of Lord of the Rings