A Motion Picture Perfect Match

Sept. 24, 2007 — -- Actor Viggo Mortensen has a history of selecting violent roles for his movies.

Perhaps best known for his portrayal of the warrior king Aragorn in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and Tom Stall in "A History of Violence," Mortensen is now appearing as Russian mobster Nikolai Luzhin in "Eastern Promises."

He is joining forces again with "A History of Violence" director David Cronenberg for this new movie, which came in at No. 5 in the box office in its nationwide release this weekend. It also won the Toronto International Film Festival's Cadillac People's Choice Award earlier this month.

Mortensen and Cronenberg joined Rolling Stone's Peter Travers on ABC News Now's "Popcorn" to discuss their most recent project.

The director and actor have nothing but praise for each other.

Cronenberg is especially proud of the way the partnership turned out this time around.

"I'm very satisfied with the movie and there are so many surprises that happened as we were shooting it, because of the collaboration I had with Viggo," he said.

Mortensen defended the director who has been criticized for the violence in his movies."Some people say, 'I'm put off by the way [the violence is] so in your face, he seems to be getting off on doing that as a director,' and I feel that the opposite is true," Mortensen said of Cronenberg.

"I think he has more integrity than most directors and is more honest about showing violence because you take it seriously, you say, 'This is what [violence] really looks like,' Mortensen added. "It's not cameras doing this or that ... and that makes [him] more responsible than most directors."

One of those surprises Cronenberg mentioned may have been Mortensen's decision to film a fight scene in the nude.

"[The scene] was in the script, but [the writer] never talked about nakedness. He just said Nikolai is sitting there in the steam and two guys walk in and pull out their knives and then there's a fight. He never says the towel falls down or there is a towel or not, so if you read the script it wouldn't hit you that 'Oh, yeah, this guy is probably going to be naked,'" Cronenberg said of the scene. "Once we did the choreography ... Viggo just said, 'Well, it's obvious I'm just going to have to do this naked.'"