Good

"I like the title. It's intelligent. It lets the audience think for itself a bit. If you wanted to be really obvious, it would be Good?, or "Good" in quotation marks. The movie doesn't steer you that much. It shows you some lives, parts of some lives, and I think it leaves a certain amount open to debate, I like that there's something to talk about afterwards."

Viggo Mortensen - For The Good Of The People
By Elliot V Kotek
Moving Pictures
Winter 2008-2009



"When I was on the set I realized that I was playing a German and that I did not have to judge him but to play him without comments. The problem with this sort of movie is that they are never told with objectivity but through the lenses of prejudices one can easily have. Good instead is the story of a man and his friend. It's not a movie about Hitler and Nazism; it's about the people living in Germany day by day."

Viggo Mortensen
In The Clothes Of A Nazi
By Gabriele Niola
My Movies
29 October 2008



"... this movie is not told with any kind of ideological intent. It's just a story about people, making little decisions and not-so-little decisions on a daily basis, just regular people with families."

Viggo Mortensen
Capone has a GOOD chat with Viggo Mortensen about politics, THE ROAD, APPALOOSA, and THE HOBBIT!!!
Ain't it Cool News
3 December 2008



"I call it an ethical thriller. It does it in a great storytelling fashion, so you're not quite sure what these people are going to do next. What they don't do, any of them, are any of the things I expect them to do. It's Viggo Mortensen, it's Aragorn for God's sake [laughs], surely he should be joining the partisans and hiding people in his attic and getting a machine gun. Maurice should be grateful and slide off somewhere and cower in the corner. None of the characters do what you expect them to."

Jason Issacs
Capone sits with Jason Issacs
by Harry Knowles
Ain't it Cool News
30 December 2008



"There's no big heroic moment at the end. There's no big tragic moment at the end. There's no real villain. It's not about Hitler in general. You don't know where John Halder's goin' to go. You don't know what's going to happen to his family. And you don't know what's going to happen at the end--you're not off the hook."

Viggo Mortensen's Good is Different, Dammit!
By Em Whitney
12 December 2008



"You can't say, "Oh, what a horrible villainous person who deserved to die," or "How great, he went down in a hail of bullets but he did save four-and-a-half people. This film is different. It's not over when it's over, which is the mark of a good story."

Viggo Mortensen
Viggo Mortensen and Jason Isaacs Address Good and Wax Philosophical about the Nazis
by Brad Balfour
Huffinton Post
13 January 2009



'...maybe there's an element of them having seen me in another movie and going, 'Oh, he's going to do something at some point'. And, it's not. He just keeps going down, down, down.'

Viggo Mortensen talking about reactions to 'Good'
Capone has a GOOD chat with Viggo Mortensen about politics, THE ROAD, APPALOOSA, and THE HOBBIT!!!
Ain't it Cool News
3 December 2008



"I think there's calm descent to the horror that doesn't happen all at once. It happens on a daily basis in a very normal, quiet way. That's more disturbing than the usual dramatic heroic gesture, tragic gesture, horror moment you usually see in Holocaust-related movies with the Nazis. The audience here can't have that distance to just judge it or say, "Wow. That thing is different than me." This is a lot like you, unfortunately, whether you wanna deal with it or not."

Viggo Mortensen - For The Good Of The People
By Elliot V Kotek
Moving Pictures
Winter 2008-2009



"...when we were shooting that scene at the end, the strangest thing was the quiet. We hear this music playing as I approach with the camera following me, and it [gets] louder and louder, but there wasn't much else. So people say, "It doesn't seem like concentration camp." No, it doesn't seem like a concentration camp in movies. But it's a place, and there are people there, and it's just another day. Unfortunately. I'm not saying I wasn't disturbed by it. It was even more disturbing. I brought things and covered them in dirt and placed them around... But it was more disturbing than fires and rain and screaming."

Viggo Mortensen
Viggo Mortensen and Jason Isaacs Address Good and Wax Philosophical about the Nazis
by Brad Balfour
Huffinton Post
13 January 2009



"When we put the frog in hot water, it will jump out of it; but if we put it in cold water and heat it up slowly, the frog will be cooked before it notices. This is what happens to Halder; and it could happen to all of us if we don't pay attention,"

Viggo Mortensen
Kulturpart
17 December 2008



"Halder, good father, caring husband, son nursing his mother, friend to the Jewish Maurice, chokes his former human contacts to death without seemingly knowing about what he is doing. The audience might be able to identify with him up to a point, but when they see him in his SS uniform on Crystal Night, they reject him immediately: this is not me, this cannot happen to me! This is what Halder does, too, by the way. He is shocked when he looks into the mirror but he doesn't stop; he thinks he'll have time to think things through later,"

Viggo Mortensen
Kulturpart
17 December 2008



"....why I think it works so well and why I wanted to do the movie, because, unlike almost all movies that are made about that period--most of them are about the early '40s, but this is about the '30s, going into 1941-2--they're always told, somewhat, in the same way in that they're told with the benefit of hindsight. There's a little comfortable barrier there, a little sort of transparent curtain that allows you as an audience to sit back, gives you a comfort zone, where you can say, "Yeah, those Germans, they're crazy, man...those crazy Germans" or, "I'm not like that. That couldn't happen now." There's always that comfort area, and that doesn't exist in this movie."

Viggo Mortensen
Capone has a GOOD chat with Viggo Mortensen about politics, THE ROAD, APPALOOSA, and THE HOBBIT!!!
Ain't it Cool News
3 December 2008



"... it's really, in some sense, you could say it's not really about Germans or Germany or even the '30s. It's about people making these decisions and these compromises...and ordinary people, and kind of ending up where they didn't expect to."

Viggo Mortensen
Capone has a GOOD chat with Viggo Mortensen about politics, THE ROAD, APPALOOSA, and THE HOBBIT!!!
Ain't it Cool News
3 December 2008



"Every time you think you're good at something or you have something figured out, that's when you'll probably screw up. So I think it's good to realise that life is a work in progress, no matter what. And I think in a way, that's what this movie talks about."

Viggo Mortensen
Good premier, TIFF red carpet interview
Metro
9 September 2008



"It's about trying to make the right choices, but then you go along a little, then a little more, and then you try to justify what you've gone along with," Mortensen said. "Just like what happens in any country. Even now, I'm sure over the past eight years there are people that kind of go, `I voted for that guy twice,' or as a legislator, `I can't believe I allowed that law to compromise on another piece of legislation.' It all adds up to changes where you say, `If I had known eight years ago what all these little choices would have added up to, then I wouldn't have made so many of them.'"

Viggo Mortensen
Mortensen Packs a Big Gun
By David Germain
Associated Press
17 September 2008



"All the decisions you make today, just because you call it a country, that's just an idea, a nation. A nation is made out of the little decisions that individuals make. That's what a democracy is, that's what a government is, that's what a relationship between two people is. You call it a marriage, but it's an idea."

Viggo Mortensen
Good premier, TIFF red carpet interview
Metro
9 September 2008



"I guess the main thing I felt, making the movie, just like I did in watching the play 25 years earlier, was that it's worthwhile paying attention. You don't need to be some kind of bookworm or political activist; little and big decisions that individuals make in society on a daily basis are what any country is."

Viggo Mortensen's history lessons
Michael Ordoña
LA Times
31 October 2008



'It doesn't mean you have to be aware of everything and solve every problem, .... It doesn't mean you should do everything, or can, as a citizen, or a family person, or a friend, or whatever. But, just do something.'

Viggo Mortensen
Capone has a GOOD chat with Viggo Mortensen about politics, THE ROAD, APPALOOSA, and THE HOBBIT!!!
Ain't it Cool News
3 December 2008



'If there's anything that this movie maybe says it's "Pay attention. Pay attention."'

Viggo Mortensen
Capone has a GOOD chat with Viggo Mortensen about politics, THE ROAD, APPALOOSA, and THE HOBBIT!!!
Ain't it Cool News
3 December 2008