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An Interview with John Hillcoat and his colleagues who are adapting the Pulitzer winning work The Road written by Cormac McCarthy. The screenwriter Joe Penhall found it hard to make sure that the film was more hopeful than what it was written in the book. The film stars Viggo Mortenson and Charlize Theron.

An Excerpt from the script:

COLUMBIA RIVER GORGE NATIONAL SCENIC AREA, ORE. — THE FATHER and son struggling to stay alive in “The Road” understand that everything they know is coming to an end.

Ext. ROAD — DAY

In the burnt, barren landscape, through swirls of soft ash and smoggy air the MAN appears dressed as if homeless, a filthy old parka with the hood up, a knapsack on his back, pushing a rusted shopping cart with a bicycle mirror clamped to the handle and a blue tarp now covering its load. The little BOY, similarly dressed with a knapsack on his back, shuffles through the ash at his side.

The film opens with two survivors of some unspoken catastrophe with almost cataclysmic activities just in couple of pages of the book. Nobody really knows what fate will claim these two drifters. The story is about a man stumbling along near blindness, his flesh charred and running from a pack of cannibals.

The world seems to be dying but this father and son keeps going, they don’t what will happen to them if they stop. They have mirror on their shopping cart just to find out if someone is gaining on them. Simple comforts like food, clean water and a blanket brings abundant joy to the duo. This has made the scene that The Road director John Hillcoat was filming on a spring day even more difficult to execute.

With a little more than a week of principal photography left on production of the film, the Man (Viggo Mortensen) and the Boy (”Romulus, My Father’s” 11-year-old Kodi Smit-McPhee) had reached Horsetail Falls, a cataract thundering into a verdant gulch an hour east of Portland. It was really early in the morning for the Oregon standards and the weather was warm. As Penhall and Hillcoat try to imagine the first quarter of the screenplay where the two actors would wade into the waterfall’s icy pool and for a moment pretend as if nothing is wrong suddenly the young boy points “Look Colors.”

But as Hillcoat saw it, the Oregon setting was proving to be too picturesque. “It’s a beautiful day,” the Australian-born filmmaker said somewhat dejectedly. “I hope it clouds up.”

This is a declaration of the tone they had to balance throughout the film. There is a lot to weigh in this film like the chance of faith over hopelessness and the worst of humanity to the possibility of civilization. But to some distributors the film is too bleak to appeal to moviegoers.
The filmmakers are trying to bring some sort of hope to the film. They are trying to emphasize more on the intrinsic Father and Son relationship and giving notion that the son is some sort of messiah echoing of a film that came out two years back Children of Men.

Viggo Mortensen had this to say about the filmmakers trying hard make the story more uplifting “The fact that my character keeps going is inherently hopeful and optimistic.”

The Road is known to be a departure and more personal from the author’s early works. On the Oprah show where his book and made it to the prestigious club he said “”I like to think it’s just about the boy and the man on the road, but obviously you can draw conclusions about all sorts of things from reading the book, depending on your taste,” McCarthy said on the talk show. Tellingly, the 75-year-old author dedicated the book to his elementary-school-age son, John.

The book filled with images of brutality and depressions making many people not even take up the book to read. So for a project to go forward it is surely going to be one hell of a task. But for director John Hillcoat whose last movie The Proposition was homage to the author’s work Blood Meridian. It really entered the tone of Cormac’s Border Trilogy.

Producer Nick Wechsler (”The Player,” “Drugstore Cowboy”) appreciated how troubling the book was but understood that underneath all of its desolation lay a story of hope and courage. “It’s kind of ingrained in all fathers to protect their children,” Wechsler said. “I wasn’t afraid of the bleakness of the book, the darkness of the book.”

But still given the end of the world plot of the movie many producers shied away from the movie. Finally The Weinstein Co took up the project with no qualms and will release the film in the fall this year.

Hillcoat also has made the planet more of an active character, adding a scene where two massive trees nearly crush father and son. “It just builds on the story that we are creating of the revenge of nature,” Hillcoat said. “We are certainly heightening the environmental threat.”

Indeed, the visual references for the film are far closer to the eruption of Mt. St. Helens (whose swath of fallen trees may open the film) than the rubble of the World Trade Center.

“We will create a post-apocalyptic world that is boldly original and present a vision that will captivate and haunt precisely because of its strange echoes of familiarity,” Hillcoat wrote in his style notes for the film. Hillcoat hoped that one of the film’s most distressing images would be a field of snow covered with blood and bloody footprints, inspired by a picture the director saw from a Bosnian Serb slaughter of Muslims.

The abundance of death in the film will make the audiences thirst for some life too , and that is where the relationship between the Father and Son will be critical.

Hillcoat hoped that his movie’s closing image will be an extreme close-up of the Boy’s face, filled not with dread but optimism. “It’s like first contact,” Hillcoat says. “You can literally see the wheels of his mind spinning. The human story is what has to be the most intense.”

Source LA Times