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Viggo-Works Art Community Features the Work of Linda Van Der Koijk
16 July 2010 16:03:13
The Art Community Presents: Kiefers Creative Corner
We are pleased to present to you once again Kiefer's Creative Corner, a creative venture by the Dutch artist Linda Van Der Koijk. Below are some of her latest paintings for your viewing pleasure. If you would like to see more of her captivating art, please visit her homepage. You can also visit her discussion thread here.
For a full overview of the Viggo-Works Art Community artists, please visit our forum here. You are more than welcome to participate in the vibrant discussions in each of the threads! |
All Of Your Dead
Translation by: Ollie, Sage, & Zooey
16 July 2010 12:11:56
Source:
Perfil
With thanks to Ollie, Sage and Zooey for translating the Fabián Casas article about Cormac McCarthy featured in Perfil that Viggo recently posted at Perceval Press.
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© 2929/Dimension Films.
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The Argentinian poet and writer is one of the most avid readers of McCarthy's work. In this brief essay, he runs through his bibilography, with the excuse of the premiere in the theatres of the adaptation of The Road. For Casas, McCarthy, a writer of desperation, owes a lot to William Faulkner and somehow he tells us about the possible end of this long agony we know as human existence.
To keep in mind: if anyone gives you a book by Cormac McCarthy - on your birthday, Christmas or whenever - they are really giving you a chunk of pain. Broadly speaking , people could be divided between the inspired that domesticate emotions and reach nirvana and the slaves who, as Rodolfo Wilcock wrote, think only about sex and death. McCarthy writes for the latter. He´s got ten or twelve books and almost all of them are translated into Spanish. Although he became famous - and a bestseller - through an adaptation the Coen brothers made of his novel No Country For Old Men, the writer has been banging his Olivetti since his youth and writing with little selling success but with an impressive talent. It is easy to understand. It is not common to have a chunk of pain in your home, on your night table or in your library. But somehow McCarthy persists in always transmitting the same thing, varying, according to two great periods on his writing, the stylistic form, but not renouncing the central themes: there´s no possibility of a good ending, we are here to suffer, heaven is empty and the human race usually produces specimens that go too far in an abominal way.
Surrounding all this, as sole witness, the extreme beauty of nature, be that the lush forests of his native Tennessee or the imposing desert on the frontier between the United States and Mexico. A zone of cultural crossings that fascinates the writer who, in The Road, his last book up till now, imagined the end of the world as a place with a devastated sky, the sea black and tribes of cannibals eating the weak. Neither the country nor the world is for the weak. Nor are the books by Cormac McCarthy.
The truth about the species. The cliché surrounding Cormac McCarthy, its rhetoric, says he is one of the last cloister writers. Like J.D. Salinger, like Thomas Pynchon, the man likes neither cameras nor interviews and he´s only given a few, and very strategic, like the one he gave to Oprah Winfrey on the occasion of the release of The Road.Winfrey hosts the most viewed program in the United States. Each book she recommends becomes a gold ingot. It is said that Oprah had a shitty life and one thinks it is this past that made her a potential reader of the unsociable writer. But before Winfrey and the Coen´s Oscar, McCarthy wrote a very strange first novel: The Orchard Keeper [1961]. The story is simple, as if the narrative wasn´t the most important thing. The lives of three men - an old man, a kid and a bootlegger - cross in a spot anchored between the misery and the splendour of nature. As if he were a watercolor artist, the writer describes and turns the natural cycles of the earth, water and air into the central characters. The earth is too beautiful and implacable. And as much as we persist in stealing the spotlight from her, she will take revenge on us as if we were annoying mosquitoes.
This novel of McCarthy’s comes directly from William Faulkner’s County. The prose is complicated and carried to extremes. Atmospheres are created and little is said. The narrator quickly takes an ethical position. He writes without consulting the reader. He neither soothes him nor leads him. He uses the Faulknerian technique of quotation marks to emphasize a character’s thoughts, but one doesn’t know for certain who’s doing the thinking. I remember that Faulkner at one point suggested that The Sound and the Fury be edited with paragraphs in different colors in order to note the temporal progression of Benjy’s thoughts, that dear and unforgettable deaf and dumb fighter. But he decided to fuse everything into one single mass and in that lies his immortal greatness. McCarthy follows the master. In fact, one has to return to the book several times to know what it’s about. The brilliant thing is that it doesn’t matter, because our spirit is captured by the atavistic speech, in a prose that speaks the truth about the species.
The Orchard Keeper was published by Arthur Eskirne, from Random House. The same press house as Faulkner. This novel was followed up by Outer Darkness [1968] -about a girl looking for her stolen baby, the offspring of an incestuous night with her brother - and Child of God [1979] , about a necrophiliac serial killer called Lester Ballard. As you can see, it´s getting worse. After this comes Suttree - the closest to an autobiography - and, already in the eighties, his first masterpiece: Blood Meridian [1985]. Here he begins his period of study of the frontier between Mexico and the United States in the XIX century. The characters in Blood Meridian are gangs from the Army and pirate cowboys pursuing each other while killing indians and scalping them to get some pesos out of the current Law. The story starts with the ups and downs of a kid - who has no name - and tells of his initiation in this senseless war to his becoming a true rabid toy. Next to him, there´s one of the most macabre characters imagined by McCarthy, Judge Holden, a bald,cruel, murderer, child rapist, charismatic son of a bitch, a prefiguration of evil incarnated on earth, that preceeds - and surpasses - No Country for Old Men´s Chigurh.
I began reading McCarthy with the final book of his border trilogy: Cities of the Plain [1998]. When a writer is seriously good, it’s not necessary to take the books in order to get a complete feel for his universe. Here the end of the unique era of ranch cowboys who saw the first strides of modernity approaching was narrated. And also the end of the friendship between John Grady and Billy Parhan. One of those two is going to die clinging to the redeeming love of an “untouchable” prostitute. The trilogy begins with All the Pretty Horses [1992] - the first best-seller by this writer - and continues with The Crossing [1994] – another masterpiece at the level of Blood Meridian. How McCarthy was describing the daily life of these cowboys hit me. Their methodical meals, the long drifting, the taming, his obsession with horses and the long telegraphic chats that served to identify each character. Faulkner's prose at this stage gives way to a shorter syntax, precise, like a knife fight. But Faulkner still remains. In the first part of The Crossing, a boy takes a she-wolf that he has trapped up to the mountains of Mexico where she came from, to liberate her. With echoes of Faulkner's extraordinary story called The Bear, we receive a blow to the head following the fate of the youth and the animal in the midst of human evil.
In almost all McCarthy´s books the characters do senseless things: the kid and the she-wolf in a long almost religious pilgrimage, two very young orphan brothers try to get back their stolen horses, a young man tries to kill a sheriff, an old man takes care of a corpse that somebody dumped near his home, a secondary character always bursts in and begins to follow the main characters, apparently for no reason, as does the Italian young girl with Quentin Compson in the chapter in which he commits suicide in The Sound and the Fury. And isn´t it a bit like that? People get together, mingle, forget each other and, sometimes, reproduce in the midst of an absolute sloth. And when we look at one side, someone is following us and by only turning our heads we see ourselves following another. And this until death. In the Waste Land, T.S.Elliot wrote "Who is the third who walks always beside you?/ When I count, there are only you and I together/ But when I look ahead up the white road/ There is always another one walking beside you".
The Insulted and Humiliated. Now The Road has just premiered in theaters, starring Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron. The novel is a good gift for Father’s Day. Cormac dedicated it to his eight year old son Francis. It’s set in a dystopic future. With planet Earth devastated by something that went wrong – a nuclear explosion? A never-ending war? – that the writer never bothers to explain. The father and son have no names, either. They are only an aged father and a very small son fleeing from a city in ruins and surrounded by cannibals and other guys who try to survive. Throughout the whole book – as if they were characters from Beckett - the protagonists drag a shopping cart with a few belongings that they carry from one place to another. Sleeping rough under a gray drizzle, and at only one point does the narrator allow the father to have a whiskey and both of them to bathe in hot water and eat canned food.
During the entire journey, that you follow step by step at the same time as the characters, the father transfers to the son, as his only testament, all his terror. When he finally dies, the scene is terrible. And whoever is a reader and has dead ones dear to them won´t be able to stop crying. We are the children of imperfect beings, Cormac seems to say, and we will be terrible parents. That´s what there is. But, when closing this intense novel, the Argentinian reader receives yet another blow. He realises that those beings - father and son - who were walking with their cart, starved to death, through the streets at the end of the world, seem very familiar to us. They are the displaced ones of our social system, coming out at night to gather the carrion left to them by those who have a roof. In McCarthy´s novel, the end of the world is more democratic - he implicates everybody; in our territory, the end of the world already began and is exclusive to thousands of poor people. This is no country for cynics.
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FIFA World Cup
11 July 2010 17:44:48
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'A Dangerous Method' - The Filming Continues
Translation by Athelin
10 July 2010 12:38:13
Source:
Schwäbische Zeitung Online
Found by: Dom
Many thanks to Dom for finding the original report and to Athelin for translating it.
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Nobody Is Supposed To Disturb The Stars While Filming
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© APA.
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by Dieter Kleibauer
Famous director David Cronenberg is currently shooting his new movie with stars like Keira Knightley and Viggo Mortensen at Upper Swabia and around Lake Constance. Last Wednesday, work on A Dangerous Method began at Überlingen.
Two men, in between them a woman – a classical combination. In A Dangerous Method (there is not yet an official German title), the protagonists are famous: Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, fathers of psychoanalysis. Between them young Russian hysteric Sabina Spielrein – this is the starting point of the new movie of director David Cronenberg. Shooting partly takes place at Lake Constance and in Upper Swabia.
They started at Überlingen – in optimal weather conditions -, next week they will move to the monastery of Inzigkofen, and Konstanz is on the schedule near the end of this month. Other locations are studios at Berlin-Babelsberg, Zurich, Vienna and in Hürth near Cologne, where filming started during June.
Mortensen replaces Waltz
There are simple financial reasons for the fact, that a Canadian director with an international cast is filming mostly in Germany: Cronenberg and his production company receive a considerable amount of German subsidies; the state of Baden-Württemberg participates by way of its media and film company MFG with 500.000 Euros alone. The total budget is supposed to amount to 15 Million Euros.
The cast of the movie is star studded. Freud is played by Viggo Mortensen, who filmed with Cronenberg already in his last two projects A History of Violence (2005) and Eastern Promises (2007). Originally though, this part had been cast with Austrian Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz, who cancelled at short notice due to another project. Viggo Mortensen is mainly known for his interpretation of Aragorn in the trilogy of Lord of the Rings; his latest movie The Road will be in cinemas in Germany this fall.
At his side: young Englishwoman Keira Knightley, successfully oscillating for years between blockbusters like the trilogy of Pirates of the Caribbean and demanding movies like Atonement or Pride and Prejudice; her breakthrough came in 2002 with the movie Bend it like Beckham. As Freud's pupil C. G. Jung is German-Irish actor Michael Fassbender, known last but not least for his role in Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds. Part of the crew are, besides script-writer Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons), Cronenberg's long-term staff members, director of photography Peter Suschitzky and score composer Howard Shore.
Shooting takes place under high secrecy, not to attract paparazzi or sightseers, who could disturb the crew. Lake Constance was chosen to "stand in" for Lake Zurich. Part of the plot takes place at the Swiss metropolis; but today's Lake Zurich can no longer be used for a set situated in 1914.
Production, including lengthy post-production, will demand all the rest of 2010; the producer's goal is to get the movie ready for Berlinale in February 2011 or at least for the Cannes Festival. German distributor will be Universal.
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Iolanthe's Quotable Viggo
10 July 2010 11:38:18
A couple of weeks ago I looked at how Directors choose actors, but there is a lot of serendipity involved in matching an actor to a role and sometimes getting picked doesn’t mean you end up on screen, especially at the start of a career. You are lucky if you even make it past the auditioning stage as we saw this week in a great quote found by Dom, about the casting for Blood Red. Even when everything comes together a role can be turned down or an actor asked to leave, leaving the gate open for another. Viggo himself very nearly didn’t take The Road and he’s currently playing Freud because Fate has played an unexpected hand. So this week’s quotes are a whole bunch of ‘might have beens’ and ‘nearly nots’.
The early days of Viggo's film career were marked by an epidemic of raised hopes and false starts. He was flown to England to screen-test for the lead role of Tarzan in Greystroke, "in a loincloth, sitting up on the tree branch, pretending to be a monkey," and flew home believing that he had the part. He didn't.
He was cast, however, in Jonathan Demme's Swing Shift, playing a brash young sailor trying to pick up an emotionally fragile Goldie Hawn in a movie theatre. He felt it went well, but when he saw the movie he discovered that they had reshot the scene with Goldie Hawn in the movie theatre alone.
The Rebel King
By Chris Heath
GQ magazine
April 2004
'What happened with The Purple Rose of Cairo, by Woody Allen, was worse as he cut all the scenes I was in. That was frustrating! I looked a real fool, ashamed, especially with my family and friends as I had announced my participation in the films to them. My parents thought I was lying and would say: “Son, tell us the truth! What do you do in New York?” [Great laughter]"'
Viggo Mortensen
A Multi-talented Hero
Dominical, by J. A. - translated for V-W by NacidaLibre
27 August 2006
'The "Blood Red" auditions at the Actors Studio were notable for one other reason: Viggo Mortensen came by every day—barefoot, with long, dirty blond hair—wanting to audition in the worst way for one of my Italian immigrants. His dirty feet and hair scared me just as much as his blue-eyed blondness wasn't right for the cast I was building. After days of just being rude to him, I finally threw him out of the studio and told him never to darken my casting door again. I have since apologized to him for my lack of artistic vision and behavior. It's the one truly bad casting mistake I ever made. He's such a talented actor; he could have played Italian or anything else he made up his mind to do. I often use him as an example of how one-pointed, dedicated, and willing to be rejected an actor has to be.'
Pamela Guess
Backstage.com
July 2010
Viggo Mortensen: I tried out for a lot of parts where looks were necessary and I didn't get them. I've probably done two dozen on-camera tests for those roles and I've never gotten anything that way. It's scary to think of all my audition tapes out there somewhere.
Q: Any tapes you wouldn't mind seeing?
A: One. The test for the part Patrick Swayze got in To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar.
Q: What was your drag queen outfit like?
A: I think it was Chanel, like a Jackie O. thing with Ann-Margaret hair. Before the audition, I wanted to practice a little so I called up a friend of mine, [actress] Valeria Golino, and she helped me to get all dressed up. Then I walked on Broadway in New York in the middle of the day. Nobody even blinked an eye, and some guys whistled.
Q: How did the screen test go?
A: I asked if I could sing 'When I Fall in Love' a cappella, figuring if I could make that much of an ass of myself I'd be less embarrassed saying the dialogue.
The Hot New 39-Year-Old
By Dennis Hensley
Movieline magazine
August 1998
'I was visiting a friend in Los Angeles and he had a part in the third. "We need a man. Wasn't that something for you?', he asked. Why not? I had seen the original 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre', and I thought there was something about it - in spite of everything. I hoped the third would contain the same. But the movie company got cold feet and cut away the most terrifying and gruesome scenes, and it ended up being a rather incoherent movie.'
Viggo Mortensen
Viggo from Hollywood
by Poul Hoi
M/S (Danish magazine), 2001
Oliver Stone cast Viggo as a sergeant in a war movie that he was making. Platoon. Then the financing fell through but Viggo knew that Oliver Stone would get the movie made in the end, and he would be ready as an actor had ever been. For the next year, Viggo read every book on Vietnam he could lay his hands on. "I researched that part as thoroughly as I f****** could," he remembers. "Mentally and in every way. Physically."
One day he heard that the film was going into production and that Oliver Stone had recast his role, giving it to Willem Dafoe.
The Rebel King
By Chris Heath
GQ magazine
April 2004
“I landed in The Prophecy the same way I did in The Lord Of The Rings, that is, at the last minute. I read the script on the plane taking me to the location.”
The King Is Mortensen, Long Live The King!
By Marc Toullec
Cine Live #71
September 2003
'Basically, I got a call: "Do you want to go to New Zealand for fourteen months to film The Lord of the Rings?" Just, you know, this famous epic trilogy! And my first reaction was "No!" Obviously I'd heard of Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings, but I hadn't read the book, and I certainly hadn't read the script; I usually like to have a lot more time to prepare for a major role; and I really didn't want to be away from my family for that long. I have to say, it didn't sound like a very wise move to me at all!
My son said I was crazy and that I had to do it, even if I was going to be gone a long time. So there I am on the plane for New Zealand, reading that enormous, telephone directory-sized book and then the scripts, and a couple of days later I'm filming. I continued to feel unprepared, but at least I didn't have much time to get nervous, which was probably good!'
Viggo Mortensen on joining the LotR cast
Official Movie Guide
'I felt a little funny about it,' the softly spoken Mortensen says. 'It was really an error on the filmmakers' part. As right as he is for that character, Stuart was simply too young. He looked like he was the same age as the hobbits.
'I think he and the filmmakers realised they would have spent half or more of their time trying to make him look older and more experienced than he was. There was enough work to be done without having that added burden, so I think the change was mutually agreed on.
'But I still felt funny about it. As soon as I got the role, I wrote to him and said I was sorry about what had gone down. I said 'it's probably difficult to look at it this way, but you have many more years than I to play roles like that - rest assured I'll do the best I can to honour the role'. And I guess indirectly honour him. I basically wished him luck and said, without saying it, that I wasn't taking any pleasure in replacing anyone.'
Viggocentric
By Claire Sutherland
Herald Sun
9 March 2006
"I guess in the end I did it because I would feel that I had been chicken shit really. I had to leave the next day, so I'm on the plane reading, looking at this gigantic book and thinking, 'What the hell have I done?"
Viggo Mortensen
The Man Who Would Be King
by Nick Dent
Black & White magazine 2001
‘When we ended up with Viggo, fate was dealing us a very kind hand.’
Peter Jackson
The Lord of the Rings: The Untold Story
By Ian Nathan
Empire
December 2004
Is it true that you almost turned down The Road?
Yes, I was very tired, and I did not want to accept the role unless I felt I was capable of giving it my best. But then I changed my mind because the story was really good and the topic is one everybody can relate to. Besides, my being exhausted fit the role perfectly. It is about a man who, in some sense, is dying of exhaustion, so the result was very interesting.
Viggo Mortensen Under The Spotlight
Selecciones Magazine
March 2009
Translated for V-W by Graciela
VC: Viggo and I will be reunited in this movie, is that down to chance?
DC: It’s a matter of perfect casting. As you say, there’s a strange similarity in the relationships between your two characters in these two movies. In Dangerous Method, you play Otto Gross, a very crazy psychoanalyst, a kid of antisocial agitator. And the master, the controller, is Freud, sure enough, played by Viggo. In the beginning we were thinking of someone else to play Freud, so it could have been not between you and Viggo. But fate decreed otherwise. When luck is with you, you end up with the people you need to have. But it wasn't that I felt any obligation to re-unite you. If the role did not suit you, it would not have been a service to you to offer it.
Vincent Cassel talking to David Cronenberg
Première France
May 2010
As always, you will find all previous Quotables here in our Webpages :D.
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