Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on November 20, 2009, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
When John Hillcoat, director of the post-apocalyptic saga The Road, sits down to talk to FANGORIA, he has just come from seeing off Cormac McCarthy, author of the source novel, who was in town for the film’s premiere. So it would seem McCarthy is happy with the screen adaptation.
“Oh yeah, he’s very pleased,” Hillcoat says, acknowledging the challenge of translating McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning prose into cinematic terms. “It’s such rich material; it’s very visual and dynamic. You’ll never get the poetry of the language, because it’s a different medium, but the story and the dialogue are brilliant, and the obstacles that the characters are up against is what makes it very special.”
There are plenty of obstacles for the movie’s hero, known only as The Man and played by The Lord of the Rings’ Viggo Mortensen, to surmount as he treks across a barren America with his young son (called The Boy, portrayed by Kodi Smit-McPhee). An undefined incident has decimated the Earth’s populace—not only people, but all forms of life—leaving the handful of human survivors to forage for the last remaining supplies of food. Some turn to cannibalism for sustenance, but despite such unpleasant trappings, The Road isn’t an explicit horror/science fiction film on the order of I Am Legend.
“In loose terms, it is,” Hillcoat acknowledges, “though there are a lot of other elements in it that stretch the genre. It’s in the postapocalyptic subgenre and it’s based on a projection of our worst fears, but this has elements of horror as well as elements of adventure, and it’s a love story too, so those are kind of different for this type of film.”
He’s referring not to romance, but to the paternal love and protectiveness the Man feels toward his son, helping the Boy survive not just physically but emotionally as they make their way from one brief shelter to the next. This bond, Hillcoat notes, is based on McCarthy’s relationship with his own son. “Cormac even credits him as the co-author of the book,” the director says, “and some of those conversations are literally what they’ve said to each other, word for word. When Cormac first saw the film, he didn’t miss anything from the book other than four lines of dialogue, which luckily we had filmed and put back in. Basically, the Boy says, ‘What would you do if I died?’ and the Man says, ‘I’d want to die too so you can be with me, so I could be with you.’ That’s a little exchange they had one night—kids are like that—and I believe that’s why the novel has become the most translated book of modern times. It’s because of that extra dimension.”
The novel first came to Hillcoat via producer Nick Wechsler, who was aware of the director’s enthusiasm for McCarthy’s work (the latter’s 1985 novel Blood Meridian was a key influence on Hillcoat’s previous film, the violent Western The Proposition). “Nick had actually tried to get No Country for Old Men [the McCarthy novel that inspired the Oscar-winning Coen Brothers feature] and didn’t succeed,” the director reveals. “Luckily, the studios that had first pick of The Road were not interested—they were horrified—and so that was the opening for Nick. He got in, independently set it up and showed Cormac The Proposition, and he could see the similar influences. One interest I believe we share is environments that are extreme—how people behave under pressure, where their surroundings are like another character.”
The next step was selecting an appropriate writer to tackle the script, and Hillcoat chose Joe Penhall, a British playwright and screenwriter who had previously translated Ian McEwan’s thriller novel Enduring Love for the big screen and contributed to The Last King of Scotland, among others. “He’s done a few adaptations of very tricky material,” Hillcoat points out. “He doesn’t get lost in the woods, and he’s done a mixture of different films, television, plays—all these varied mediums. They initially had a short list [of writers for The Road], and Joe and I talked, and he was so down to Earth and saw it clearly; as he said, it was all there, it was on the page.”
Hillcoat claims that “about 98 percent” of the dialogue and incidents in the film are directly derived from the novel, though not everything that’s in the book wound up on screen. Once he and Penhall had distilled the necessary material for the screenplay and the movie had been shot and wrapped, the director wound up with a first assembly cut that ran about four and a half hours long. Thus, another winnowing-down process was required (Hillcoat says that some of the deleted material will wind up on the DVD and Blu-ray), and he notes that both processes were exacting ones.
“It would be different if it was much more of an ensemble piece—a classic, tightly knit narrative—but because it’s this journey with very subtle nuances and a lot of repetition, it was a balancing act,” he notes. “Also, you get to know this world on a visceral level pretty quickly, so the longer it goes on, the more you’re kind of like, ‘OK, I get it.’ It was a matter of working out which bits to hone in on. It’s a brutal process, because I like to keep movies down to the exact length where you go away thinking about things and kind of wanting more, as opposed to just milking them. I’m a believer in ‘less is more,’ and yet it’s really tough, because you have to get rid of great stuff.”
He also had to bring the bleak landscapes described by McCarthy to visual life—or death—which led him and the rest of the Road team to locations across America. “We went to places like New Orleans, in the aftermath of Katrina that’s still going on,” he recalls. “We wanted to avoid the bigger cities, because there’s so much apocalyptic iconography of that type out there. I’m always trying to find a fresh look at things, because I love the experience of a world you’ve never seen before. So we went for the power of nature, like Mount St. Helens [in Oregon], and also to look at America’s many mini-apocalypses, like Pennsylvania with the strip mining. I have a brilliant production designer, Chris Kennedy, who has done all my films, and our costume designer, Margot Wilson, did The Proposition. Our references, again, came from the book, which feels familiar, not like some futuristic CGI fantasy. The simple image of the Man with a shopping cart and all his possessions is like the homeless in every city, so we took that cue with the wardrobe.”
Hillcoat reports that Mortensen took to the role with his customary commitment, going so far as to wear his unsightly garb at all times during production (getting thrown out of a store at one point as a result). The director recalls knowing “very quickly” that Mortensen was his Man, but that it was some time before he could pin him down. “He’d been going from film to film and doing press junkets,” Hillcoat says, “so it took him a while to read the material. But as soon as he did, he responded. He brought an incredible physicality and emotional investment; there was no holding back.”
Speaking of being held back, The Road was originally supposed to hit theaters this time in 2008, and some tongues wagged on-line when Dimension Films delayed its debut by a full year. But Hillcoat says, “It was an overambitious release date that was unfortunately announced. I always knew it was impossible to hit. And the thing everyone involved had in common, from the producers to the editors to myself, was that we wanted to get it right. And the movie wasn’t ready; we were still shooting. We had to go back to Mount St. Helens while we were editing, because it was under 20 feet of snow. And getting that balance I was talking about, streamlining it down, took time. We could’ve released it earlier this year, but it’s not a summer movie, so we sat on it and waited for Thanksgiving, which is the perfect time to release it.”
Now that audiences will have a chance to join Mortensen and Smit-McPhee on The Road, Hillcoat believes that the primal human drama beneath the movie’s bleak exterior will resonate with audiences. “The characters are up against immense obstacles,” he says, “seeing humanity at its absolute lowest, most base form, and yet it emotionally strikes a chord because of the Man’s relationship with his son. It works on other levels beyond the dark qualities. I actually agree with, I believe it was Roger Ebert who said this, that there’s no such thing as a movie that’s depressing if it’s good; the only depressing thing is a bad movie.”
