Interview by Paul Salfen
The Dead Don’t Hurtis a story of star-crossed lovers that takes place 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 Danishimmigrant Holger Olsen (Viggo Mortensen). After meeting Olsen in San Francisco, she agrees to travel with himto 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 forherself in a place controlled by corrupt Mayor Rudolph Schiller (Danny Huston) and his unscrupulous businesspartner, powerful rancher Alfred Jeffries (Garret Dillahunt). Alfred’s violent, wayward son Weston (SollyMcLeod) aggressively pursues Vivienne, who is determined to resist his unwanted advances. When Olsen returnsfrom the war, he and Vivienne must confront and make peace with the person each has become. Both a tragiclove story and a nuanced depiction of the conflict between revenge and forgiveness, The Dead Don’t Hurtis a portrait of a passionate woman determined to standup for herself in an unforgiving world dominated by ruthless men.
With his 2020 feature screenplay and directorial debut Falling, Academy Award®-nominated actor Viggo Mortensen channeled some of his feelings about his late mother’s passing into a compelling family drama about the complexities of parent-child relationships—and the ways in which those bonds can become strained by there-opening of old psychological wounds, while offering opportunities for hard-won healing. With The Dead Don’t Hurt, his second outing as writer-director, he was again inspired by his mother—although this time developing a very different kind of film in the western genre.
“This was a story that arose from an image of my mother,” Mortensen says.“I have illustrated books from the 1930s that she used to read when she was a little girl, stories about knights, medieval adventure stories. She had been raised near maple forests in the northeast of the U.S., near the Canadian border, andI had the image of her as a child running around in those forests, imagining she was in one of the stories she had read in those old books. That was the initial image I had as I sat down to begin writing the screenplay for The Dead Don’t Hurtduring the COVID lockdown in the Spring of 2020.
”At that point, Mortensen asked himself what might have happened to the woman that the little girl becomes, and he admits that he was somewhat surprised by the path the story took. “I thought, Well, let’s begin the story when the girl has become a woman at the end of her life,” he says. “I’m not sure why, but I decided to make a journey as a writer to learn how that care-free little girl got there.”
The film’s central character is French-Canadian immigrant Vivienne Le Coudy (Vicky Krieps), a free-spirited woman who makes a living selling flowers in San Francisco. She impulsively chooses a new life-path when she meets Danish immigrant Holger Olsen (Viggo Mortensen), a man as uncompromisingly self-reliant as she is. Falling in love, they pursue an initially tranquil life together in Elk Flats, Nevada, the frontier community that Olsen calls home.
The Dead Don’t Hurt marks Mortensen’s second outing as writer-director after his highly acclaimed feature debut, 2020’s Falling. The film reunites Mortensen with key members of Falling’s creative team: cinematographer Marcel Zyskind (As in Heaven), production designers Carol Spier (Eastern Promises) and Jason Clarke (Black Mirror), and costume designer Anne Dixon (The Song of Names).
