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A History of Violence Official Site Movie Bios: Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris, William Hurt Movies
A History of Violence Movie Production Notes
When Producer JC Spink read John Wagner and Vince Locke's graphic novel A History of Violence, he immediately recognized its film potential. Spink and his producing partner Chris Bender were inspired by the internal struggle the main character faces. The team, who has a first look deal with New Line Cinema, presented the project to the studio, which responded with enthusiasm and secured the rights. Josh Olson wrote the screenplay, which he extrapolated from the novel, published six years previously by Paradox Press, which also published Road to Perdition.
'The title was Intriguing,' says Olson. it sparked a lot of ideas. What would happen to real people in this situation was my approach.' Olson developed the characters using the book as a launching pad. it's a wrong-man scenario. A man must prove his Innocence to a group of bad men.' Director David Cronenberg, who joined the project in the winter of 2003, found the screenplay compelling. 'Loosely based on the graphic novel, Josh's script is a Midwest American small town story' says Cronenberg. 'There was something dank about it without being imitative.'
Although he doesn't normally undertake family dramas, Cronenberg felt for the characters and the Stall family. 'It does have a powerful emotional resonance.
A married couple with two kids are trying to live an open, straightforward honest life, and finding it difficult to do that. So I fell for that classical element.' It's mainstream to a certain extent, but it has some very disturbing and interesting undercurrents/' continues the diector, whose unique body of work has been acclaimed around the world. I thought it was an interesting kind of thriller, because ft's not a normal kind of thriller. It's like a Hitchcock thriller where an innocent man is mistaken by some very scary people for someone else and drawn into a world that he'd rather not know anything about. His life and the lives of his family are endangered because of this mistaken identity. The film clicks into several intriguing things, but then derails in a very interesting way,' observes Cronenberg, who collaborated on revisions with Olson, changing the organized crime members' names from Italian to Irish in order to distance them from the mafia, among other alterations. Once New Line Cinema gave the project a green light, the production set up offices in Toronto, Canada Cronenberg's home town where he remains loyal to his 'family of collaborators' - key crew members who have worked with him over the years.
Among them is Director of Photography, Peter Suschitzky (Spider, eXistenZ), working on his seventh film with Cronenberg who notes, 'When I first read the script, I knew it was quite different and more narrative-driven than anything that David had tackled before. To encourage him to take it, I asked him to think about the movies of Fritz Lang because one of the main themes running through Lang's movies was that of a character who cant escape his fate -an interesting link.'
CASTING THE FILM
Cronenberg enlisted Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello to join the cast, his first choices to play the married Stall couple. Ed Harris and William Hurt are among his favorite American actors with whom he'd wanted to work for years.
The director initially met Mortensen at a party for The Lord of the Rings at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival where they both agreed that they should work together. Cronenberg thought that the script of A History of Violence would be really right for Mortensen. Subsequently, the two met in Los Angeles to discuss it in detail: the character, what changes Cronenberg wanted to make and what worried or didn't worry Mortensen or didn't make sense to him. 'We found that we were very much in sync,' says the director. 'Viggo does his homework and thinks about things a lot. He helped to create his character. I always go through a script after I've brought in the cast to make it feel more natural for them. It's very collaborative.' Responds Mortenson, I don't think I've ever felt more like I was on the same wavelength with a director as I am with David. I like his way of telling a story. He not only shows a wholly original knack for entertaining audiences with a good psychological drama, but he also allows an audience to ask itself difficult questions about the nature of violence and confusion of identity.'
'David has found more layers or allowed us to find more than I thought were there in the script. In this story you really see the complicated effects an incidence of violence has on a lot of characters in this small community and beyond it,' says the charismatic actor.
When Cronenberg first met Maria Bello in Toronto, she didn't knew about the film. 'We were meeting about something else, but all the time I was thinking she would be really good for this story. She and Viggo make a very believable married couple - the age and the tone were right.'
'Maria was a real discovery for me. When I saw her in The Cooler, the movie showed what she could do in terms of subtlety, a kind of really vulnerable sexuality that was very real. I thought she could play this very complex, and yet at the same time, simple character, who is a smalltown lawyer who embraces the energy, closeness and comfort of a small town with a lot of energy and enthusiasm not brow-beaten by that but rather empowered by it I thought she could bring all of those qualities to this character, who, as things unfold in the movie, undergoes some profound changes and discovers hidden aspects of herself. In some ways, it's a mirror image of what Tom Stall's character goes through,' explains Cronenberg. Bello muses, 'Nothing is ever the way that we think it is. There's always a dimension that's hidden, whether it's in ourselves, and in another person, or happening in the world. There's always this underlying something that we don't control and understand. And David has a way of presenting that which is entertaining, and at the sometime, enlightening.
'It's so rare to work with a director who is open to ideas and experience. David's scripts are really lean, because he is interested In the actors filling things out, and he's really let us go on that.'
'You really believe Maria as a small-town prom queen who then becomes quite a strong character within that town where she is a highly respected lawyer,' says Cronenberg. 'I needed all of that, and I needed her also to be a very sexual presence because that is a key element in this story as well. For a role like this, you need to find an actor who is unafraid. It was obvious from The Cooler that Maria is not afraid, which was one of the things that attracted me to her as an actress.'
Ed Harris joined the cast as the threatening and mysterious Irish Mob figure. 'Landing Ed was one of our casting triumphs,' says producer Chris Bender. 'He's perfect in the role.'
Ed is someone I've admired for years,' says Cronenberg. 'I thought he had the toughness, the presence and the charisma to carry off this character. I wanted him to be very real, very intense. He thinks he has a history of violence with the main character, which is why he appears in Stall's diner. And that is a critical moment in the movie. Is this a mistaken identity?'
LIke the majority of the actors, Harris came aboard the film to work with Cronenberg. Says Harris, 'The reason I wanted to work with David is because he's a filmmaker, he knows what he's doing, he has his own vision, and it's just fun to work with people that care about what they're doing. You just know somebody is in command there. Not that you can't come up with stuff, not that he doesn't listen to new ideas, not that he isn't a collaborator, but ultimately, it's his film. Everybody understands that and I like working that way.'
'I was kind of interested in why exactly David wanted to tell this story, a pretty simple story on a certain level. David said he was 'really interested in people's reality, and what is real and what isn't. How people play roles, what that's all about.' And he said 'I just felt this story encompassed a certain dynamic of that'.'
'William Hurt as the crime boss was another casting coup,' states Bender. 'We didn't want to play into the cliche mob figure, but cast someone who could make the antagonist more complex. William Hurt brings something so different to playing a gangster, so untypical. His voice as an actor is so unusual, I call what he brings to his part 'Hurtisms.' 'Richie is certainly a departure for me as a character. He is a criminal. I've never done any character anywhere close to that. But I don't choose the character, I choose the play, in this instance, the screenplay,' says Hurt.
Hurt prepared for his part by working on his Philadelphia accent. 'It changes how you enter into a different character physically. My preference is to transform physically, entirely.'
THE NATURE OF VIOLENCE IN THE FILM
'In this film, I wanted the violence to be very realistic, brutal and tight,' Cronenberg says. it was about real brutality and the kind of violence that you would actually see on a street fight, for example, ungainly and not too graceful, very bloody and not very pretty - the opposite of balletic slow-motion choreographed sequences seen in other pictures. 'The way the violence is structured in this movie narratively, the violence that the main character commits, is all justifiable. So the Tom Stall character is forced into violence when there was really not much of an alternative for him. At the same time, we don't cover up the fact that the violence that he commits now has very nasty consequences for the people who are the subject of the violence. I think you come away with thinking that violence is an unfortunate but very real and unavoidable part of human existence. And we don't turn away from it, and you can't really say that it's never justified. You can say that it's never very attractive, though, and that is the approach we've taken,' explains Cronenberg.
Mortensen notes, 'I think David shows the roots and the consequences of violence, but he doesn't really dwell on the violence itself. He doesn't linger on it or glamorize it in any way, which somehow makes it more disturbing. I think he's saying that violence is never OK. But he's not saying violence can be avoided completely. In that sense, he's just showing you life as we humans make it an this planet'
Mortensen presents another view. 'It deals not only with violence and confusion or identity in society within a nuclear family, but it also deals with problems of celebrity culture. You see Tom Stall having this situation thrust upon him, to which he reacts instinctively. Violence ensues. He becomes a small town hero congratulated for committing these acts of violence. His son thinks he should be on Larry King. In that sense, David is dealing with a universal problem that's particularly prevalent in the United States. People are very excited by violence connected to celebrity.'
Remarks screenwriter Josh Olson, 'David is able to tap into very primal ideas and emotions. He goes into something much darker and much deeper, showing us scary things that you can't just walk away from. He gets very deep inside our darkest psychology and shows it to us without washing it off first. And that can be very frightening.'
Cronenberg responds, 'I think a lot of artists are drawn to the dark side of human nature because it's hidden, it's unexplored, and you have a desire to shine light in the dark corners. You feel like a detective, and you also feel like someone who is not satisfied with what is presented as normal or a status quo.'
He continues, 'I think the desire of an artist, like a scientist, is to not accept at face value what most people accept, but to dig deep underneath the surface of things to see where things originate and what goes on there. So that often leads you to scary, negative or forbidden stuff. But I don't think the desire is only to know what's negative, Its to know what is real, and there are many layers to reality.'
A History of Violence David Cronenberg Movie Official Site
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A History of Violence Official Site: Movie production notes
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