Originally appeared in Los Angeles Magazine December, 2009

BY: Amy Wallace

He has been nominated for an Oscar (for the 2007 mystery Eastern Promises) and was declared a bona fide sex symbol (after his turn in the 2005 crime drama A History of Violence). He’s starred in three of the biggest-grossing movies of all time (The Lord of the Rings trilogy in 2001, 2002, and 2003). But Viggo Mortensen has always been motivated more by collaboration than celebrity. His new film, The Road, is an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about survival in a postapocalyptic world of cannibalism and other unimaginable horrors. As “The Man,” Mortensen navigates this devastated landscape with his son (played by 11-year-old newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee). We exchanged e-mails with the actor, poet, publisher (of the L.A.-based Perceval Press), and polyglot (he speaks Danish and Spanish, among other languages) on the subjects of hope, endurance, and human nature.

Hi Viggo,

The Road is true to McCarthy’s novel in that the nature of the cataclysmic event that has ruined the planet is never explained. As you constructed your character of “The Man,” though, you must have filled in that blank for yourself. Was it a comet, or did humankind bring the end of the world upon itself?

It does not really matter, because the character cannot do anything about it. I think that numerous things happened—fires, floods, drought, earthquakes (which the book and movie refer to) as well as fighting that led to the destruction of the power grids. Once things went wrong, there was no more Internet, phone, TV, radio, so it was not possible to know what really had happened and was continuing to happen all over the place. As when we have had blackouts, big snowstorms, fires, floods like those following Hurricane Katrina, or even as a reaction to events like those of 11 September, 2001, in New York and Washington, D.C., many people tend to isolate. General ignorance and wild, paranoid speculation tend to take over.

You’ve had a lot of physically demanding roles, from sword fighting in the LOTR trilogy to horseback riding in Hidalgo to wrestling naked in Eastern Promises. But The Road seems to be in a class by itself. How much weight did you lose to play a man starving to death?

I am not exactly sure. Enough to be credible as the character. Maybe 30 pounds or so. It was a basic requirement of the story that I not look well fed, so I simply ate less. That was not the hardest part, though. Nor was the hardest part the physical endurance test Kodi and I took part in by working in the cold, wet environments. The hardest part for both of us was the emotional journey, being exposed on the inside.

How did you prepare yourself emotionally to imagine the end of the world?

I’ve always thought that the end of the world, the end of me, of anything, can happen at any time, just as the sun always goes down at some point each day. It is natural, and not something to fear so much as be aware of and, when possible and appropriate, struggle against.

This may sound odd, but The Road had unexpected echoes of WALL-E, last year’s animated movie about an Earth used up and left behind by humans. Though WALL-E was clearly aimed at a different audience, both movies highlight the tenacity of love and the importance of even small gestures of kindness. Did you see WALL-E?

Yes, I did. I get your point. Had not thought of that. Thanks!

Were there any other movies you thought about as you prepared for this role?

For inspiration with regard to my understanding of Kodi’s character and regarding the environment, I looked at some of Tarkovsky’s work—Ivan’s Childhood and Stalker, for example. I also had another look at Sokurov’s Mother and Son and Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc for the emotional truth of the performances and cinematography. I listened to certain music, looked at photographs, read certain kinds of poems. I also spoke with people who live in the street in different cities, when they were willing to speak with me.

What I’ve Learned

Originally published in Esquire,  January 1, 2006

Jerry Lewis: Comedian, 79, Las Vegas

INTERVIEWED BY: Amy Wallace

Hey, Penny! Forty-three years, Penny’s been in my office. She’s something else. She doesn’t let me get away with anything. Penny, bring me an orange soda, honey. You haven’t done a goddamn thing all day.

I will tell you about interviews: I’ve had them run from two and a half minutes to nine hours. Rarely anything in between. If I get to an interview and I can see they’re not that interested, I tell them, “Since the surgery, I get these heart spasms.” And they’re gone.

Everybody is nine years old. Starting with me.

You know what I’m going to be, don’t ya? The big eighty! Jesus Christ, that’s depressing.

I remember the night I first talked to Dean about wearing tuxedos in our act. He said, “Why a tux?” I said, “If you’re on the Bowery and see a guy in a street suit, if he falls down, you’d just say he’s drunk. But when you’re in a $1,500 tux and you hit the floor and come up with the dirt off the dance floor — that’s funny.” We never, either of us, performed again – ever — without a tux.

If you’re not nervous, you’re either a liar or a fool. But you’re not a professional.

I performed for six presidents. I met nine. One of my most prized possessions is a plaque Jack Kennedy gave me that says, “There are three things that are real: God, human folly, and laughter. Since the first two are beyond our comprehension, we must do the best we can with the third.”

I have some very personal feelings about politics, but I don’t get into it because I do comedy already.

Don’t come telling anybody they’re wrong until you can tell them how they can be right.

Adrenaline is wonderful. It covers pain. It covers dementia. It covers everything.

I used to fall because the fall worked. Because it paid off. And I had the best time. If you had told me that I would suffer from it years later, I would not have changed a thing.

Want a list? Diabetes. Pulmonary fibrosis. Bypass surgery — double. I had three surgeries on my spine. My spine is a joke. Every time I took a fall, my dad would say, “You’re going to pay for that one.” And he was right. So every time I get a new diagnosis, I think, Where did I get that one from?

I never got a formal education. So my intellect is my common sense. I don’t have anything else going for me. And my common sense opens the door to instinct.

Ego is necessary.

Penny! Do we have a photograph of the Ladies Man set?

I’ve never paid a lady for her services. Even at sixteen years old, and a pretty horny kid, I just never could do that. It had nothing to do with morals. It had to do with: That lady’s somebody’s daughter.

I’m about to tell you something I have never, ever told anybody: I never read anything that’s written about me. Ever.

Tom Shales in The Washington Post wrote about the telethon in 2003. He said, “The Jerry Lewis telethon is one of the greatest shows on earth, and one of America’s greatest showmen is the guy behind it.” I read that twice.

In 1954, a child diagnosed with muscular dystrophy was given a death sentence. He was gone in a year. A child today diagnosed with any of the neuromuscular diseases can go for twenty years. So you want to talk to me about using pity? I don’t care what I have to use. I used to say, If there’s a guy in a bar, and you tell me that if I become a transvestite I can get a hundred bucks out of him, I’ll dress up and get it if it’s for my kids.

You don’t have to be terribly funny to dress in drag. It’s no challenge.

That said, I’m ashamed to tell you that I turned down Some Like It Hot. See how smart I am? I felt I couldn’t bring anything funny to it. The outfit was funny. I don’t need to compete with the wardrobe. So whenever Billy Wilder saw me, he said, “Good afternoon, schmuck, how’s it going?” And, of course, Jack Lemmon sent me candy and roses every holiday, and the card always read: THANKS FOR BEING AN IDIOT.

INTERVIEWED BY: Amy Wallace

Jodie Foster sums it up: she’s focused, she’s critical, she’s downright mathematical. After so many movies, she knows how things work and why they don’t.

THERE’S A MOMENT IN DIRECTOR David Fincher’s upcoming thriller, Panic Room, that shows why Jodie Foster got the lead role. Playing a newly divorced woman with a young daughter, Foster has just rented a huge Manhattan brownstone that has one unique feature: a hidden chamber built as a sanctuary in the event of a break-in. You know from the movie’s title that something or someone will soon cause Foster and her daughter to take refuge there. Once they do, a breathless, freaked-out Foster looks straight into the camera, and you can see it, there in her alert blue eyes: a formidable intelligence that will save the day.

It’s the same intelligence Foster applies to her own life. Few people have seen the filmmaking enterprise from as many angles as she has. An actor since the age of four, she has appeared in more than 30 films and has won two Academy Awards (for The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs). The 39-year-old has worked with many of America’s most celebrated directors, has directed two of her own movies — Little Man Tate and Home for the Holidays — and has produced the latter and several others. Weeks before the March release of Panic Room, Foster agreed to sit down and talk about what she calls the “mathematics” and social dynamics of film production — a topic that fascinates her so much, it turns out, that she once considered writing a book about it.

Foster arrives exactly on time at the Four Seasons’ Gardens restaurant. She is alone, sans handlers. Fine boned and startlingly pretty, she is a master at blending in. Dressed in jeans and loafers, she wears nerdy tortoiseshell glasses and no makeup. She admits to being exhausted: Her second son, Kit, was born September 29, and she hasn’t had ten free minutes since — a point that is driven home later when she suddenly grabs the right armpit of her brown suede shirt with alarm. “Oh, man, how great is this? Look what I found,” she says, laughing as she reveals a bulky plastic security tag she is noticing for the first time.

Foster has stuck with the same editor, composer, costume designer, and first assistant director in both films she’s directed, and she has strong views about the collaborative nature of filmmaking. “Can you tell this is my obsession?” she asks at one point. “I could talk about this forever.” Now, as she attempts to simplify her life to make more time for acting and directing (she closed her 12-year-old production company, Egg Pictures, on January 1), Foster talks about the importance of ceding control, the appeal of opinionated people, and the realization that, over time, she has become less of a pain in the ass.

FOSTER: I’ve made a lot of movies with first-time directors and a lot of movies with directors who have made scores of films. You absolutely never know who’s going to be great and who isn’t. Some directors don’t do a great interview, and you’re like, “Whoa, this guy doesn’t have much to say.” And he comes on and brings so much to the process and is so observant. Then you’ll get a first-time director who seems like he’s got it down. And by the first week, everybody’s ready to kill him. He procrastinates. He doesn’t come up with anything. He’s one of those cocktail party directors who talks about it well but has nothing to deliver once you start shooting.

What I’ve learned also is that what’s wrong in your shrink’s office is what’s wrong on the set. Nine times out often, the thing that makes a film suffer is the thing that the director really needs to deal with psychologically. It’s usually issues of authority — not only how you handle other people’s authority but how you are as a leader. How you feel about yourself and how you project that onto other people or just the environment you set into play.

So now when I start a film with David Fincher or Robert Zemeckis or Andy Tennant, that first week I’m basically just sitting them on the couch. I’m doing the whole Freud thing on them so that I can figure out where their weak areas are and how to serve them. I really believe that the actor’s job is to serve the director. Even if he’s a schmuck, and even if by week one you realize he doesn’t know what he wants or you don’t respect what he’s going for or you don’t like his style, you still have to serve him. So you have to swallow any dissident thought. Not just because it will hurt the movie but because once a lead actor or anybody in a high position dissents, the rest of the crew no longer respects the director, and it’s down the toilet. He’ll never be able to take control.