The Dead Don’t Hurt is both a traditional Western and a reinvention – one that puts the story of an ordinary woman front and centre.
And that, more or less, was the first thing Viggo Mortensen saw before setting out to write what would become his second film as director.
Vivienne and Olsen meet on the waterfront after she’s walked out on her blowhard wealthy lover, and in the blink of an eye they are in bed together. Soon after that, she’s riding off to a new life with him, only to find when she gets to his little patch of paradise that it’s a lot more hard-scrabble than she’d anticipated.
It is that. But it also looks fresh, in no small part because of where it was shot, in Durango, Mexico. Though the state had been used for Westerns back in the 1960s and ’70s, its landscapes are likely to strike most viewers as both fresh and remarkable. The movie’s climactic scene in particular looks like it could have been shot on another planet, so unusual are the rock formations that frame the action.
“Yeah, and that’s OK,” says Mortensen. “People read lots of things, some intended, some not, into what they see. And I think that’s great.“I make the movie I want to see, and then when you or someone else sees it, it’s a different movie, because they’re bringing their associations, their upbringing, their movie-going experience, everything that has happened in their lives to it, and it becomes a different story. It’s a strange alchemy, and I like that it becomes someone else’s movie.
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