TORONTO -- Lawmen and outlaws alike have a history of violence in "Appaloosa," Ed Harris' adaptation of the Robert B. Parker novel.It was the history of friendship, however, that convinced Viggo Mortensen to star alongside Harris in the movie set in the Old West territory of New Mexico in 1882."There's been a lot of them made, so the percentage of good to bad is pretty low, but I think most Westerns are pretty terrible ...," Mortensen told a news conference during the Toronto International Film Festival.When they're good, he said, they're very good, as with "High Noon," "Man of the West," "The Missouri Breaks" and "Open Range.""Like this one, at the heart of it, there's a relationship between two men, and other characters enter into the relationship, and that's what Kevin Costner and Robert Duvall played in 'Open Range.' "Mortensen liked the sparseness of the "Appaloosa" script, the polite sensibility of the language, the mannerly way in which people addressed each other and the relationship between the itinerant lawmen.Harris is a marshal named Virgil Cole and Mortensen is his deputy and partner, Everett Hitch, and their motto could be: Have guns and badges, will travel and tame the Wild West."I liked the fact and I understood that they had been friends so long and had worked so well together, that there was so much trust," said Mortensen, sitting with "A History of Violence" co-star Harris to his left and Renee Zellweger to his right."I felt that the reason ... they had been friends so long and had such a successful law-enforcement business was 'cause I mind my business and he minds his business, and we allow each other to do that."But in "Appaloosa," Cole falls for a fetching newcomer and both men contend with a murderous rancher. Zellweger plays the woman, Allie French, and Jeremy Irons is the dapper, black-hatted villain.Although known for playing fellow Brits, Irons said, "I was, like many kids, brought up watching Westerns -- spaghetti Westerns, John Ford Westerns, John Wayne Westerns. I never thought that I'd be in one, but I never thought I'd be in a movie."Life for me has been a constant surprise, day by day. One of the joys of this business is one gets surprised by requests, and when Ed asked me to do this, it was a pleasurable surprise."When someone asked Zellweger what prompted her to take the role, Irons interjected, "It was the money." And then she quietly joked about "that cold (naked) dip in the river in winter," before recounting how Harris called when she was working on "Leatherheads.""It was such a nice surprise, exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for, a very raw and quiet experience, is what it was. It was pretty intense, and the environment was gorgeous and challenging. ..."It wasn't very hard to imagine being this woman and living at that time. I mean, these guys are kind of fun sometimes to hang out with, especially when they ride about on horses with chaps," she said with a girlish laugh.Zellweger's hair is no longer the wavy red of the movie but is back to its glamorous blond color. Mortensen looks like a youthful descendant of his character, who sports a mustache, an angular goatee, short hair parted in the center and an 11-pound, 8-gauge shotgun.The marshal, meanwhile, often wears a Prince Albert-style jacket in charcoal-gray with black pants and striped shirt. Although he is the director, co-writer and one of the leads, Harris tells the story from the deputy's point of view, as in the book."You never see Cole and Allie alone together, without Hitch seeing them. The only time you see Cole alone is one night when he's on the porch for about 20 seconds," Harris said. "It leaves this relationship between Allie and Cole really up to the imagination."Allie is something of a mystery, even to the Oscar winner. She's not a schoolmarm or whore or faithful wife, the usual Western choices, and arrives with a dollar in her pocket (she claims) and piano-playing skills.Harris had read the Parker novel when it came out in 2005 and turned to friend Robert Knott, who played one of Jackson Pollock's brothers in his biopic about the painter, to help adapt it. In 2006, they started "winnowing it down to the guts of the story," Harris said.They read all the lines, with Harris and Knott taking turns as Allie, and Knott confessing, "I read Katie the whore, for sure," and then quoting her dialogue, complete with accent. "Out here, love's pretty hard for a woman. Mostly it's the men that worry about love."A bespectacled Harris, who took pains to make sure that executive producer Michael London and writer Knott got a chance to speak, also made the point that Mortensen lived up to a promise to appear as Hitch."I wanted a guy who I could ride next to on a horse for 10 hours and never say a word and feel totally comfortable, and I figured he'd be the guy," Harris said. "He's the only man I wanted to play the role."Mortensen gave his word he would co-star. "He was extremely busy. ... It would have been a lot easier for him in his life not to have done this film, but he said he'd do it and he did, and he did a great job, and I applaud him for that. As well as my other compatriots."(Pittsburgh Post-Gazette movie editor Barbara Vancheri can be reached at bvancheri(at)post-gazette.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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