KINGS OF THE ROAD
Best known as the director of politically incorrect comedies, Peter Farrelly has defied expectations to make this year’s Oscar underdog – true story Green Book. TF goes under the hood with Farrelly and the film’s winning double act, Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali.
When Total Film meets Viggo Mortensen, the actor/poet/renaissance man hasn’t forgotten the wave of confusion that swept over him when the script for Green Book landed on the doormat of his northern Idaho cabin. “I was surprised. Pete Farrelly wrote this… and Pete Farrelly’s going to direct this?” Mortensen’s bemusement made sense. Farrelly, along with his brother Bobby, was the guy who gave Cameron Diaz a ‘seminal’ makeover in There’s Something About Mary. His juvenile sensibility seemed entirely at odds with a real life story that preaches tolerance, understanding and personal growth. But sometimes, the truth is much stranger than fiction.
It’s October 2018. Almost a month to the day since Green Book’s triumphant Toronto International Film Festival premiere – where it pipped A Star Is Born, Roma and First Man to the coveted People’s Choice Award – Farrelly, Mortensen and Mahershala Ali are holed up in London’s Corinthia hotel for a day of press duties ahead of a secret screening at the London Film Festival.
The experience is nothing new for Mortensen and Ali, who met in 2016 following the festival debuts of Captain Fantastic and Moonlight. But for Farrelly, the festival experience is uncharted territory. The same could be said of Green Book, the remarkable true story of a black virtuoso pianist, Dr. Donald Shirley (Ali), and his 1962 concert tour across the American Deep South. Despite performing for sold-out crowds of wealthy white folk, systemic racism in the southern states meant that not only would Shirley be treated as a second-class citizen, but his safety would be at risk, in light of Nat King Cole being attacked on stage, six years earlier, by six white men in Alabama. For his protection, Shirley’s record company hired Italian-American bodyguard/driver Tony ‘Lip’ Vallelonga (Mortensen), a street-smart “bullshit artist” to ensure he didn’t miss any dates on the eight-week tour. The problem? Vallelonga was racist.
Handling delicate social issues in a sensitive, smart and progressive way, you can scarcely believe the man who dreamt up a scene where Ben Stiller gets his scrotum stuck in a zipper could be behind Green Book. But even after 20 years of making comedies with his brother Bobby (who has temporarily stepped back from filmmaking for personal reasons), Farrelly wasn’t seeking dramatic material. “I let the universe control it. I probably shouldn’t have,” laughs Farrelly from behind a scruffy grey goatee.
THE ITALIAN JOB
The universe finally came knocking when bit-part actor and friend Brian Hayes Currie presented Farrelly with an idea for a screenplay he’d been working on with Nick Vallelonga, Tony Lip’s son. Declaring Currie’s elevator pitch a “fucking home run”, Farrelly proposed the three of them write the script together. “The first thing we did was watch the story,” Farrelly recalls. “[Nick] had videotaped his father telling everything for an hour and a half,
20 years ago. I was just thinking,
‘I can’t believe this.’” It proved an illuminating 90 minutes for Farrelly, who learnt about the ‘Green Book’ – a travel guide listing every black-friendly establishment in the segregation-era South. “I google it and find The Negro Motorist Green Book,” Farrelly recalls.
“It was all there in Tony’s story.”
With the script written, casting the central double act was the crucial next step. “We bounced around a few ideas while we were writing,” says Farrelly, revealing, “we could see Jon Favreau being this big brute.” But a viewing of Captain Fantastic, a film that Farrelly reluctantly watched on his wife’s insistence (“I thought it was a superhero movie. I’m not a superhero fan”) inspired a lightbulb moment. “I thought, ‘Viggo can do anything.’
I wrote him a letter and said, ‘Hey, this is a departure for me, but please look at this.’”
Mortensen was enamoured by the relationship between Vallelonga and Shirley, but there was just one problem. “I was aware,” says a softly spoken Mortensen, perched on the edge of a sofa in a v-neck jumper, “that there are a lot of great portrayals of Italian-Americans out there.” Farrelly eventually talked him round (“He’s very convincing,” Mortensen chuckles), but Mortensen wasn’t truly certain until he met the Vallelonga family. “When they started to share with me what Tony was like, recordings of him talking about Don Shirley, this wealth of information… I don’t think we would have had the relationship on screen without it. I’m certainly glad I didn’t chicken out!”
Mortensen’s preparation began months before production, the actor adding 45lb of flab to his trim frame to play 210lb bruiser Vallelonga, a man with a bottomless stomach. “He transformed his body, he transformed his mind,” says Farrelly. “He’d hang out with the Vallelonga family for weeks to get the accent down. He does what Viggo does.” It wasn’t long before Nick Vallelonga saw his own father come to life in front of his eyes. “The first time Viggo came and met the family, we go by this restaurant called Tony Lip’s in New Jersey,” Vallelonga
reminisces. “He ate for eight hours straight. I said, ‘He’s become my father.’”
With Mortensen on board, Farrelly had his pick of actors to play Shirley, but there was only ever one choice. “Mahershala was a no-brainer, because he was coming right off of Moonlight,” he smiles. Unbeknown to Farrelly, Ali and Mortensen had become fast friends on the 2017 awards circuit. “We’d talk about regular stuff and, before you know, a half hour’s gone by,” recalls Mortensen, who’s now shed Vallelonga’s bulging belly. “We’re actually having a real conversation, while everyone else is doing the ‘meet and greet’. So when Pete said, ‘I’m hoping it’s going to be Mahershala Ali,’ I said, ‘He would be great if he did it.’”
“And then it happened!” exclaims Ali, who (half-)jokingly credits Mortensen with his casting. Though Ali didn’t have the same wealth of information on Shirley – just the maestro’s exquisite recordings and 2011 documentary Lost Bohemia, about the musicians who lived above Carnegie Hall – he still considered his main responsibility to be to the man he was embodying on screen. “It’s not about either of us. It’s about them,” says Ali, looking as sharp as the fastidious Shirley in a pressed shirt and trousers. “You’re signing up to step into their shoes, so you’re pulling from all of the resources that you have available to you to tell a truthful story.”
One such truth is that Shirley had a self-destructive streak – drinking a bottle of Cutty Sark whisky a night, refusing to reconnect with his estranged family and frequently putting himself in harm’s way. So, was he brave to undertake his trailblazing tour, or simply reckless? “He would get himself into situations, and he would drink every night, which was the self-destructive part. But his whole reason for doing it was very brave,” reckons Farrelly. “His music was a little more highbrow form that would attract well-to-do white people. And he thought he could change their perception by showing that a black man could do this. So I did think it was heroic.”
If this is all starting to sound suspiciously like a dry message movie, here’s the kicker: Green Book is hilarious. Farrelly humbly puts that down to his leads, both of whom allow the comedy to come from character, most notably in Shirley’s wearied response to Vallelonga’s “worldly” ways. “It felt ‘smiley’ funny on the page,” admits Farrelly, who had to resist going for broad gags. “But when we were watching them do it, we were like, ‘This has got some real laughs.’”
Describing the day-to-day experience as identical to his comedies, Green Book was shot on location in New Orleans (which even doubles for New York in bookend sequences), in less than half the usual timeframe (35 days, as opposed to 100) and with the same collaborative approach Farrelly has always fostered on his sets. Ali doesn’t hesitate in calling Farrelly “the most collaborative director I’ve ever worked with”, after allowing himself and Mortensen to go through the script “with a fine-tooth comb” before filming. “Pete’s experience has told him it’s good to listen to the actors, the crew,” Mortensen says. “He’s like, ‘You never know where a good idea’s going to come from.’”
Mortensen, a stickler for detail, proved a particularly vocal collaborator. “He’s got thoughts about every single thing,” Farrelly says, with a wry smile. “Good ones, thank God.” A perfectionist example: he objected to Vallelonga’s packed lunch being wrapped in tin foil instead of period authentic wax paper. “There are so many stories, like him buying crucifixes,” Ali regales. “They’re going to be somewhere in the back on the wall, but Viggo picked them out. I kid you not.” Ali may not have contributed to the set decoration, but he did learn piano well enough to convince as a virtuoso musician. “I took lessons for about two months with a gentleman who is also the composer, Kris Bowers,” Ali explains. “We had our whole process as to how to make that feel as believable as possible, but I’m pretending to play!”
For everyone, keeping it real was of vital importance. Farrelly clarifies that “almost all of this is true, but it’s not in the right order”, the film compressing the year-long tour into the eight weeks leading up to Christmas Eve 1962. Even the romantic missives that Vallelonga sent to his beloved wife Dolores (Linda Cardellini), with a little help from the far more articulate Shirley, are only slightly tweaked. (Shirley’s family have spoken out to dispute elements of his portrayal in the film.) In fact, the real road trip ended on a note that would have been unbelievable on screen. “At the end of the trip Kennedy got assassinated,” Farrelly explains. “They cancelled their dates and went to the funeral in Washington. In our first draft, we had that in there. And then we were like, ‘No, this is a smaller story.’”
A smaller story it may be, but Green Book could be a big hitter during this year’s awards season. So how does Farrelly feel about being a major awards contender for the first time in his 20-year career? “It’s not nice – it’s great! But it’s also not something I ever thought about,” says Farrelly, before pausing. “It was fun to make something real. Something that meant more. Dumb And Dumber, as proud as I am of that movie, it could never bring you to tears. And this could.”
GREEN BOOK OPENS ON 1 FEBRUARY 2019.
'VIGGO MORTERNSEN HUNG OUT WITH THE FAMILY FOR WEEKS TO GET THE ACCENT DOWN. HE TRANSFORMED HIS BODY AND TRANSFORMED HIS MIND' Peter Farrelly