Parental control

For his intense directorial debut Falling, multihyphenate Viggo Mortensen has drawn inspiration from his own tough-love upbringing. He sits down with Total Film to get up close and personal…

- JAMIE GRAHAM

Given that three times, Oscar-nominated actor Viggo Mortensen is also a poet, a painter, a photographer, a musician, an author, and a producer, you might wonder why he waited to the age of 62 to add ‘director’ to the list. Truth is, he didn’t – Mortensen’s been trying to get a film financed for 24 years, and not even the stardom afforded by playing Aragorn in The Lord Of The Rings trilogy quite got him over the line.

“I had a screenplay that I wanted to direct in Scandinavia,” he says, turning his mind back to Before Middle-earth, to the land of the mid-’90s. He smokes as he talks, sitting comfortably in his home in Madrid. If anything, his Nordic features are even more handsome on Zoom than in the movies, and he could pass as a man in his early forties. “I raised some of the money in Denmark, but not enough. It didn’t happen. Over the years, I’ve tried several times with different screenplays, including Falling a couple of times.”