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Despite having never shot a movie, even a short film, Green Book star Viggo Mortensen recalled first pitching his directorial debut, Falling, to poker-faced international distributors.
“It’s one thing to know me as an actor, but I hadn’t directed anything,” Mortensen recounted while appearing virtually at the Toronto Film Festival as part of a co-production panel.
Early on, Mortensen and production designer Carol Spier and cinematographer Marcel Zyskind had shot and edited some footage set around a farm in Ontario to give potential investors confidence around the Hollywood actor finally getting into the director’s chair.
And in October 2018, Mortensen and HanWay Films, which was handling international sales and distribution, launched sales at the American Film Market with the edited footage to be shown as part of the pitch.
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Falling portrays John Petersen (Mortensen) who lives with his partner, Eric, and their adopted daughter, Monica, in Southern California. His father, Willis, played by Lance Henriksen, is a farmer whose attitudes and behavior belong to a far more traditional era and family model. When Willis travels to Los Angeles for an indefinite stay with John’s family in order to search for a place to retire, these two very different worlds collide.
Mortensen, who also wrote the screenplay for Falling, said the impenetrable faces of distributors taking his pitch at AFM at first glance was unsettling. “They really keep their cards close to the vest. They don’t want to give away that they’re interested because they don’t want to pay more, so they just sit there,” he recounted.
After the first pitch, Mortensen said he turned to one of the Hanway sales agents and ventured his sales spiel had failed. “No, it’s going really well,” the sales agent responded.
Mortensen also remembered one Brazilian distributor appearing startled by the farm-set video as it played. “I said, ‘are you okay, what happened?’ And he goes: ‘No, my mom and my dad had a tractor, just the same model.'”
In the end, the AFM pitches sparked a host of international territory deals for Hanway.
“Based on the pitch and based on the screenplay and this video showing visually how I was going to execute, that did help. It gave us a leg up,” Mortensen told the co-production panel at TIFF.
Falling is produced by Daniel Bekerman, Mortensen and Chris Curling.
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