[quote] And then the screenplay for A History of Violence landed on his desk. “It’s true, I was getting an awful lot of offers, mainly bad scripts. All of a sudden I had options. But now, more than ever, I was thinking I should do what I’d always done, which was to find a good story, something I wouldn’t be embarrassed to see in the cinema. Then [Josh Olson’s] script came from David Cronenberg. David Cronenberg! I read it and I was quite disappointed. It was 120-odd pages of just mayhem; kind of senseless, really. And I thought, 'Nah.’ A lot of crazy fighting stuff, bloodletting, for no apparent reason. I said, 'I love him, but I don’t want to waste his time, so no.’
[quote]“Anyway, he was coming to LA and wanted to have breakfast, just to talk about it. So we sat down. He was this Canadian gentleman, with a wry sense of humour. Not a crazy vampire. Very polite, soft-spoken. So I said, 'The thing with this script…’, and he said, 'Yeah, I hear you didn’t like it?’ And I said 'Well, it’s not a question of like or dislike, it’s just not my thing, really, it seems like straight exploitation, just gore; it’s a pulp novel.’ And he said, 'I agree.’ And we talked about political things, all the ramifications of telling a story like that. Everything I brought up, he had the same objections, and had already thought it through. And he said, 'Just trust me, I’m going to work on this.’ He should have actually taken a screenplay credit, because that 120-something pages ended up being about 72 pages, and that was him.”
I saw this when it came out and besides the two sex scenes with Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello and registering surprise at William Hurt's Oscar nomination, I promptly forgot about it.
I did remember the Oscar-nominated screenwriter Josh Olsen going off on social media about how he will not review scripts for aspiring writers any more because of the lack of gratitude he received (ie, a mere "thank for for your time, I appreciate it" in response to him decimating a screenplay and didn't connect him to this movie. So seeing this old article in which Viggo talks about how hit Olson's contribution was is quite funny.