“From the moment that I saw him onscreen, I thought, ‘Shit, he looks incredible. Here’s a character I don’t have to pretend to be in love with.’”
Miranda Otto on Viggo Mortensen
The McDonald’s french fry is unbelievable. When you bite into it, you think: It’s so tasty, it can’t be real. As soon as it gets cold, it turns to lard and flubble. I mean, have you ever tried to eat a McDonald’s french fry that’s gone cold? That’s one of the circles of hell. The gulf between the warm, fresh, lightly salted McDonald’s french fry and the cold McDonald’s french fry is as great a gulf as any I know. - Viggo Mortensen, Esquire magazine (x)
“ What is Jauja? Is it a place? A state of mind? It is a place and a state of mind that always remains just out of reach. It is an ideal of contentment, peace, perfection in all ways. It is what we regret having lost and what we hope to find.
Was it all a dream? Are you a dream? Am I dreaming you or your questions? Are you dreaming me?
Why do films with open endings appeal to you? Because they allow audiences to think for themselves, to ask the key question that arises when, in my opinion, a movie story has been told successfully: "now what?"
The best directors, including David Cronenberg and Lisandro Alonso, manage this not only because they are skilled technically and good at telling a story on film, but also because they are happy to provoke questions without feeling a need to give direct answers. This discrete approach, I feel, ultimately respects the audience member and allows the movie to live on and grow uniquely in his or her imagination.
What are you working on at the moment? I am finishing promotion of Jauja and Far From Men, preparing to promote a movie called Captain Fantastic, editing books for Perceval Press, writing, giving poetry readings, spending as much time as I can with family, and playing the piano when I can.” (x)
Viggo’s lack of physical vanity has become a recurring theme in his work. On film he’s been beaten up (Eastern Promises), starved (The Road) and kicked in the balls (A History of Violence), but he can’t imagine work being any other way. “What else would I do?” snorts the 56-year-old. “Those films where I’m the hero with a 20-year-old girlfriend? I go for what needs to be there. Often people are desperate or ridiculous rather than heroic, so I do what needs to be done.” (x)
luciecatrice-deactivated2019101
Viggo Mortensen by Yann Rabanier
A Walk On The Moon, 1999 (dir. Tony Goldwyn)
Anonymous asked:
What are your favorite movies with Viggo in thm?
"Eastern Promises" is probably my favorite Viggo performance, but I also love "A Walk on the Moon", "The Road", "The Reflecting Skin" and of course, the LOTR trilogy :)
JAUJA (Lisandro Alonso, 2014)
"Todas las familias desaparecen con el tiempo"
“Anybody who says they knew it was going to be the success it was, I don’t think it’s really true,” he says. “They didn’t have an inkling until they showed 20 minutes in Cannes, in May of 2001. They were in a lot of trouble, and Peter had spent a lot. Officially, he could say that he was finished in December 2000 – he’d shot all three films in the trilogy – but really the second and third ones were a mess. It was very sloppy – it just wasn’t done at all. It needed massive reshoots, which we did, year after year. But he would have never been given the extra money to do those if the first one hadn’t been a huge success. The second and third ones would have been straight to video.”
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Mortensen thinks – rightly – that The Fellowship of the Ring turned out the best of the three, perhaps largely because it was shot in one go. “It was very confusing, we were going at such a pace, and they had so many units shooting, it was really insane. But it’s true that the first script was better organised,” he says. “Also, Peter was always a geek in terms of technology but, once he had the means to do it, and the evolution of the technology really took off, he never looked back. In the first movie, yes, there’s Rivendell, and Mordor, but there’s sort of an organic quality to it, actors acting with each other, and real landscapes; it’s grittier. The second movie already started ballooning, for my taste, and then by the third one, there were a lot of special effects. It was grandiose, and all that, but whatever was subtle, in the first movie, gradually got lost in the second and third. Now with The Hobbit, one and two, it’s like that to the power of 10.
I love love love the trilogy, but I also absolutely agree with Viggo’s assessment here. Fellowship is the strongest of the three, and it is stronger than either of the Hobbit movies released so far. Viggo Mortensen interview in The Telegraph | Hobbit Movie News and Rumors | TheOneRing.net™ (via mimmilina)
Source: theonering.net
FYVM would like to wish Viggo a very happy 56th birthday (October 20th, 1958)!
We hope he has a wonderful day, and many more birthdays to come.
"I think eventually they get bored of pictures of me—just walking the dog, he’s got a doughnut in his mouth, he’s lost his keys, he’s sleeping on the curb…long story. I remember when Lord of the Rings came out there was a lot of that. They had pictures of me carrying my dog inside the vet’s office, coming out of 7-11 at three in the morning with a doughnut, not looking good.But I think eventually they got bored, he just goes in bars and watches soccer games."
-Viggo in an interview with Kirsten Dunst for BlackBook
