Viggo Mortensen, who will star alongside Vicky Krieps, is set to direct and star in the western love story. The Dead Don’t Hurt. Filming will begin in Canada on October 12.
The film is a Talipot Studio, Recorded Picture, and Perceval Pictures production, produced by Regina Solórzano (Los Reyes del Mundo), Academy Award® winner Jeremy Thomas (EOMortensen wrote the screenplay.
Talipot Studio has fully funded the film. It will shoot mainly in Durango Mexico where Talipot is the producer. The movie will also film in Ontario, British Columbia, Canada. HanWay Films will manage worldwide sales and distribution.
Film set in the 1860s. Krieps plays the role of Vivienne, a French Canadian woman who is fiercely independent and embarks on a romantic relationship with Holger Olsen. (Mortensen). Vivienne is able to meet Olsen at San Francisco and agrees that she will travel with him to Elk Flats where they begin a relationship. Vivienne is forced to live on her own in a place controlled and aided by corrupt Mayor Rudolph Schiller. Olsen’s eventual return challenges their relationship as they have to confront and make peace with the person each has become.
“My aim is to do justice to the story of a uniquely resilient woman living in a lawless and isolated part of the U.S. Southwest in the 1860s,”Mortensen commented on the film.
“Vivienne is a woman for all seasons; courageous, unfailingly honest, and direct, yet capable of great empathy. The idea is to not simply have a woman play the leading role in a Western but to have her lead the way in our story by virtue of her fiercely uncompromising nature. Vivienne is a real woman who stands alone in her time and place because of her principled behavior, forward-thinking, and passion for life. We are very fortunate to have the talented Vicky Krieps embody this role, and, with the help of the great team we have assembled thanks to Talipot Studio, we hope to do justice to her exemplary life.”
Together with Solly McLeod and Krieps, Mortensen stars in the film.House of the DragonDanny Huston (Worlds Apart), Garret Dillahunt (Blonde), Tom Bateman (Death on the Nile), Lance Henriksen (Falling), and W. Earl Brown (The Unforgivable).
Mortensen and Marcel Zyskind, the film’s cinematographer, will be reunited in the film.As in Heaven), production designer Carol Spier (Eastern Promises), art director Jason Clarke (Black Mirror), and costume designer Anne Dixon (The Song of Names) who worked together on 2020’s Falling. Mortensen also previously worked with Jeremy Thomas on David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method.
Solorzano added: “The Dead Don’t Hurt revolutionizes the codes of the Western genre, leaving the concept of the war of men aside to witness a love story free of archetypes, and the struggle and determination of a woman to win the most epic of battles: surviving abuse and extreme violence without ever betraying herself.”
Theresa Peters, UTA and Lynn Rawlins are Mortensen’s representatives. Krieps is represented by CAA, Agence Adéquat and Wasted Management.