Viggo Mortensen has been a legendary screen presence across his acting career – leading armies in the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, playing hardmen for David Cronenberg in A History Of Violence and Eastern Promises, and channelling an unconventional family man in Captain Fantastic. And now, he’s made his directorial debut with Falling – a family drama spanning generational divides, different time periods, and big, difficult emotions.
The film not only sees Mortensen direct, but write and star too – and it’s an immensely personal project, a fictionalised tale ripped from very real emotions – and for the new The Suicide Squad issue of Empire, he wrote exclusively for the magazine about his experiences making the film. In this extract, he talks about how the film came together in his head when he wasn’t really looking for it, and how it gathered steam before production. Take a read below, and enjoy the full piece in the new issue – on sale Thursday 29 October, and available to order online here.
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Falling is, for me, an unexpected story.
Looking at the finished movie now, it seems natural that my debut as a writer-director is with a screenplay that has its roots in memories of my upbringing. “Tell a story about what you know” is the advice often given to first-time directors. Although most of the events, dialogue, and characterisations in Falling are fictitious, the urge to write the story did indeed spring from a desire to explore personal recollections and feelings for my mother and father, and what I’ve learned from each of them, for better or for worse.
When I say the story is unexpected, I mean that I had been attempting for quite a long time to raise financing to make another, quite different movie. I had come close to putting together that particular production, as well as a couple of others based on different screenplays I’d written over the years, but had not yet succeeded in attracting sufficient investment for any of them. This is not uncommon. Getting independent movie projects produced is a mysterious and often frustrating endeavour.
For some reason, creating a fictional family allowed me to somehow get closer to my feelings about my mother.
It was not initially convenient or practical to start working on a new screenplay while I was in the middle of looking for the remaining financing needed for the project at hand, but I nonetheless felt compelled to work on Falling in the evenings. The idea for it had come to me after my mother’s funeral. I was flying back across the Atlantic on an overnight flight, and could not sleep, so I just kept writing down all I could remember being told that day by family members and an assortment of my mother’s old friends. Eventually, the fragments of conversation and tales I’d heard about my mother as a young woman, as well as her experiences as a wife and mother, took the form of a short story about an invented family over the course of some 50 years. For some reason, creating a fictional family allowed me to somehow get closer to my feelings about my mother. Although she had been the original impetus for the story, its primary focus ended up being the father figure and his contentious relationship with his son. Even so, ‘Gwen’, the mother figure, remained the moral fulcrum of the story, its conscience if you will.
When I reread the story a few days after returning home, it seemed to me to have the makings of a screenplay, so I set to work on it in my free time, mostly at night. Previous scripts had taken me many months to write, but Falling, which was the title of the original story, only took me a couple of weeks to complete. I liked the way the script had turned out, but I certainly did not imagine then that it would be the material for my directorial debut. I put the new screenplay aside and returned my full attention to my day job, the “real” movie project. Eventually, however, financing prospects and efforts on that one languished, and I decided to give Falling a go. After a couple of failed attempts to raise the money for it over a three-year period, we were finally able to put together a Canada-UK co-production, and officially started principal photography in early March, 2019, in rural Ontario Province.
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Read more about the making of Falling – the process of shooting, and releasing it in a post-Covid world – in the new issue of Empire. Falling comes to UK cinemas from 4 December.