Director David Cronenberg says he didn't consider anyone other than Viggo Mortensen for the starring role in "Eastern Promises," a graphic drama about a Russian crime organization based in London.

"I had always thought that Viggo had kind of a Slavic look to him," Cronenberg says. "He almost looked Russian. ... (And) I enjoyed working with him so much on 'History' that I thought this would be a perfect role for him and a perfect collaboration."

Mortensen's character is identified only as Nikolai, the driver for a powerful crime family, and the role required extensive work, including learning Russian.

"I'm pretty thorough and pretty meticulous about my research," Mortensen says. "I had never spoken Russian. ... I really enjoyed the process of learning that."

Mortensen says he also enjoyed working with Cronenberg a second time.

"I knew that we had that shorthand (developed in the first movie) and that we understood each other pretty well," he says. "It was great to work with him again ... we knew that we were both going to work hard during the story."

Cronenberg says he was drawn to the project by the Steven Knight screenplay and the global nature of the story.

"There were Russians rubbing shoulders with Albanians, Chechnians, Romanians, Turks, all sort of in an uneasy criminal alliance," he says. "Someone mentioned to me that it was kind of criminal globalization in a nutshell. I thought, 'Well, that's an interesting way of looking at it,' because of course they have to trust each other even when they don't trust each other to make it work. I found that really fascinating, and then it was embodied in some really lovely characters."

Even though Cronenberg liked Knight's screenplay, he says it was tweaked during the filmmaking process.

"You never get a script that's perfect," Cronenberg says. "This screenplay by Steve was a first draft. It had languished at BBC Films for quite some time, and like a lot of first drafts it sort of went off in five different directions at once and was very long. So we did some major, major re-writes that really were quite different in many ways from his original draft. But, once again, that was a lovely collaboration. ... He (Steve) doesn't protect things because of ego. He got very excited about new things that were brought to the screenplay."

"Eastern Promises" bares similarities to "A History of Violence" in that both movies focus on men who have violent backgrounds but still possess a moral compass. Still, Cronenberg dismisses the likenesses as coincidence.

"I can easily see why people think they're a matched pair, and they might well make a great double bill," Cronenberg says.