TIFF 2023: For honorary Canadian Viggo Mortensen, a TIFF world premiere feels like a homecoming

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Don’t ask for details or qualifications, but there is a definitive short list of actors who seem Canadian, even if they are not. Alan Ruck, Amanda Seyfried, Michael McKean, and Brie Larson all fit the undefined bill. But atop the polite heap sits Canadian-ish king Viggo Mortensen.

The soft-spoken but intensely talkative actor, screenwriter, director and indie-lit mogul (check out Perceval Press, the arts-writing and poetry publisher founded by Mortensen two decades ago) has a certain Canadian air about him. Perhaps it is his quiet dedication to his craft or his delightfully unlikely career path, going from the blockbuster realm of Lord of the Rings to becoming the humble prince of indie cinema.

Or maybe it is the fact that Mortensen has spent a large part of the past decade either shooting in Canada, working with Canadians (including frequent collaborator David Cronenberg) or hiring them (such as production designer Carol Spier and costume designer Anne Dixon, who both worked on Mortensen’s directorial debut, the 2021 drama Falling). Then there is the man’s penchant for wearing a Habs jersey just about everywhere he goes.

However Canadian-esque Mortensen is or isn’t, his participation at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival feels like a homecoming. Ahead of presenting the world premiere of his new directorial effort, The Dead Don’t Hurt, Mortensen spends an interview balancing his love of the city – you will never hear another Hollywood player talk as much about the Scotiabank Cineplex 1 auditorium – with his deep appreciation for being able to make a living as a storyteller.

“I’m fried right now because every time I direct a movie, I leave it all on the field,” he says over the phone, a few days out from the premiere of the film, an independent production that received an interim agreement from the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists allowing its cast to participate in festival publicity despite the actors’ strike.

“If you direct a film right, though, you should be exhausted. It’s a good feeling, because by that point you know that you can’t do anything else to help this movie be the best that it can be.”

An elegantly rustic and explicitly feminist reworking of the western genre, The Dead Don’t Hurt stars Vicky Krieps as a French-Canadian (aha!) flower-seller named Vivienne struggling to adapt to life in a corrupt Nevada town in the 1860s while her carpenter husband Holger (Mortensen) is off fighting in the Civil War.

In its unconventional narrative structure – the film begins with its ending, working back to peel away the pain that frontier life can deliver – and its tender perspective on a brutal era, Mortensen’s film acts as a mirror of his own public persona: tightly drawn, deeply felt, refreshingly unconventional. Which also describes the film’s surprising background and inspiration: Mortensen’s own mother.

In flashbacks to Vivienne’s childhood, the film imagines a young girl encountering Medieval knights in the woods of Quebec – an image that Mortensen initially conjured while going through old children’s books that his mother read when she was a child in the 1930s, raised near the Canadian border (double aha).

“After my mom passed, I started looking at these picture books again, and just thinking about the things she had told me about growing up, which made me start to imagine her life back then,” Mortensen recalls. “She never told me she went out to the woods and saw a knight, but she had a rich imagination. Had she not been a woman of her time and a housewife and mother of three kids, maybe she would’ve been an actress. It was easy to imagine her as a little girl, and then the story grew from there.”

In Krieps, Mortensen found the ideal performer to inhabit his vision of that young girl turned into a fiercely independent woman – but also of a character firmly of her time and place, situated in an Old West untouched by contemporary flourishes.

“I wanted to make sure that everyone in the movie, there was no face, voice or behaviour that did not seem to be from the late 19th century, and I think our success there starts with Vicky,” Mortensen says of the German actress, who broke out internationally in 2017′s Phantom Thread. “She is completely real all the time, possessing an inner strength that’s palpable. You can feel it coming out of her eyes.”

Back when Mortensen was releasing Falling, an intense father-son drama similarly mined from his family history, he told The Globe that he only reluctantly agreed to co-star in order for the movie to get financed. While that situation turned out well – the tense chemistry that the actor shares with Falling star Lance Henriksen is singular – Mortensen was adamant about staying behind the camera this time around. As ever in the independent film world, things didn’t quite work out that way.

“The part was cast for a good half-year or so until the person doing it decided he was going to do something else and left us in a lurch,” Mortensen recalls. “It was late in the game and we were running out of time. I called Vicky to explain the situation and before I could say anything, she said, ‘Why don’t you do it?’ Well, if I had her blessing and my producers’, I had to.”

Doing double duty for the second time, though, was no easy feat.

“It was exhausting, but sometimes things work out the way they’re supposed to – I was an actor who we didn’t have to pay more than scale, I didn’t have to worry about directing someone else, and I was already comfortable riding horses,” the 64-year-old says with a laugh. “But the next one, no, absolutely not, I’m not acting.”

This pledge, though, assumes that Mortensen is in fact more interested in directing than performing going forward.

“As an actor, I’ve always been somewhat meddlesome, asking the cinematographer, ‘Why are you using that lens?’ and the costume designer, ‘Why that colour?’ I just like the collective effort of filmmaking,” he says. “While I’ll probably do more acting, if you told me that I can direct a movie every year for as long as I can stand on my own two feet and think clearly, I’d be happy.”

Spoken like a true Canadian.

The Dead Don’t Hurt screens at TIFF on Sept. 8, 6:15 p.m., Princess of Wales; Sept. 12, 9 p.m., Scotiabank; and Sept. 14, 1 p.m., Scotiabank (tiff.net).