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The Road

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : A father (Viggo Mortensen) and his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) try to keep the dream of civilization alive as they wander through a post-apocalyptic landscape.

Opened November 25, 2009

Runtime:1 hr. 59 min.

Q&A with director John Hillcoat

Q: One of the fascinating things about this film was that it didn't explain how they got to the apocalyptic stage. Was that written in Cormac Mccarthy's book or you did work it out with your screenwriter Joe Penhall?

Director John Hillcoat: Yeah, pretty much in the book. There's two points to that, one is that anyone--whether you survived 9/11 or Katrina or even Hiroshima, any of these major apocalypses--if you survived those disasters, you are not thinking about how it is all happening, you are thinking about how do I get out of this, so how do I survive. You're in the moment. It actually became relevant, because you're just dealing with the aftermath. So one is the realistic response to all the situations.

And then two, it also puts the spotlight on that human dimension, your human response. So the characters, man and boy--you follow their story in a more immediate way, [whereas] the other approach to apocalyptic films is, you just talk about the big event. It becomes all about the big event, and there's not more of a human story left. So it becomes overwhelming and distracting. And I forgot, another thing is that, in many ways, it's just? a projection of your worst fears. So in many ways, you can only see it as projection of fears and keep that leading into it, because that's what the book does: the man has no name and the boy has no name, you lead into it. So we didn't want to spell it out.

Q: So How much survived in a script and how much was taken out?

Director John Hillcoat: Screenwriter Joe Penhall was very faithful to the book. The conversation was 90% from the book. It was actually not to get bamboozled by the poetic prose that is very specific to literature. The book is very much the inside of the man's head at times. Then you would have to use other tools or other specific cinema-like flashbacks and voiceovers, devices like that.

Q: Could you talk about the casting of Viggo Mortensen? And how did he immerse himself into that role?

Director John Hillcoat: Well, he's very committed to the material, he throws himself into it 110%, and he's also got an incredible physicality. But it was the process of his research--he did his own research. He talked a lot to homeless people who lived day-to-day survival, with shopping bags full of their possessions. Then we talked through the script with Joe Penhall. And he was very concerned with who the boy would be, Kodi. That was who he was going to react to in every scene, so that was critical.

He spent time a lot of with Kodi before the production. What he had to do, of course, was get that emotional rawness in authentic ways by reacting off Kodi. [He accomplished this] by doing all that preparation, but he kind of put that to one side, and he tried to be in the elements, reacting off the location in an incredible way. He would be sleeping with clothes and stepping out into the rain. He was starving himself; he was already exhausted from doing one film after another, and wanted a break. So he utilizes his own fatigue as part of it. When you are that tired, you are more on the edge and are more vulnerable.

Q: How's your visual aesthetic approach to the film? There are a lot of desaturated color elements that sort of keep reminding us that there's no sign of hope.

Director John Hillcoat: It's not that much manipulation. It's more about finding the real location, the production design, the wardrobe having certain colors, and being aged, because it's ten years after the event. We pulled the film two stops, so it was a low contrast, because we had to create a world without a sun, and the sun is all about contrast--you know, big shadows. So we tried to soften it; that was just a subtle thing though, and we had to block out the sun. The sunny days were the worst; when it's overcast that was great, because so much of it was exterior. We were filming in winter, and we filmed in fifty locations. We shot in four different states, mostly in and around Pennsylvania. We also went to New Orleans where they were still cleaning up after Katrina. And we went to Mount St. Helens in Washington state, which is the whole opening of the film.

Q. What was the toughest location to shoot?

Director John Hillcoat: Probably the coldest and most brutal were the ash-pile shots in Pennsylvania in the middle of winter.

Q. The theme is obviously a father-and-son relationship where they are living in very minimal circumstances, discarding unnecessary things. The father is teaching his kid in an uncompromising way to survive. As a director, how did you create that dynamic with those two actors?

Director John Hillcoat: Well, the key thing is that they are reacting. It's about survival; they are reacting to threats that are in this world. You know, always the biggest threat to mankind is man himself. Of course, nature is bigger than ourselves. But in this world, they're contending with the death of the actual environment and the breakdown of civilization, and humans are resorting to cannibalism and tribalism.

So father is protecting the son, but because he's necessarily so protective, he also shuts out the possibilities. But he's a good man and it's a beautiful love story: he loves his boy, he's loving the son in a totally unconditional and profound way, and yet he sees that under pressure he is slowly losing his own humanity. And the boy actually gives that back to the man--hands it back to him, and confronts him.

So the boy is the one who actually takes that leap... You know fear can be a very distractive force, and yet it's understandable. So the real dynamic is that the child ends up teaching the man--not the other way around. I think that's the moral of the story, and that's why Cormac says that, "This book is about human goodness, because the boys senses other people like them--you know, other people hanging onto humanity. It's about trying to connect and find those people, yet the father is too fearful to allow that to happen. I think that is kind of the point.

Q. There are interesting scenes of cannibalism in this film? Did you get those elements from the old Aborigine story in Australia?

Director John Hillcoat: Well, they never resorted to cannibalism: those Papua New Guineas did. That was tribal, but that also was completely different because that was the ritualistic thing to do--the sacrifice. Actually, more relevant to that are the Irish convicts that try to escape but couldn't survive and started eating each other. So there was the reference to that, but it's all in the book.

Q: I recently interviewed the director of the film "Not Quite Hollywood." He told me that it's really hard to get financing in Australia. Was that part of the reason, because you usually took some time to make the film, and this time decided to work in the US?

Director John Hillcoat: Well, actually that's all changed. It's a lot easier to get financing in Australia than it is in Hollywood. Everything has changed in Hollywood because the perfect storm has hit in the industry. It'll get out more and more, but basically in 50% of all the studios, all the top people have been replaced in the last few months. Of course, it's got to do with the global downturn.

The studios don't have money any more. Well, they do, but not the degree to what they used to have. But more to the point, speaking of fear, there was also the reality of the technologies. It's all going to wet-based digital; you can now touch a button and get a $100 million film for nothing. That's what everyone is doing. So they are in a major crisis. Unless you make a franchise film or just a digital low-budget film; otherwise everything in between is finished.

Q. But do you still want to continue working in the US?

Director John Hillcoat: I don't know what I'm gonna do now. I'd like to find the material here, but certainly everything is moving back to Europe and Australia and that'll change again. So I'm looking around. I'm hoping to do another film in here.

Q: So what's your next project? Are you reading any scripts that you might want to get a crack at?

Director John Hillcoat: Well, lots of stuff I'd like to do. I think it'll change in 18 months. but for the moment, it's bad news. More films are going under like never before. And I had to refinance the films four times to come through or not. I doubted it would come though. But it's a commercial film, it's a gangster film, it's got an A-list cast, and incredible script and they can't get made--not now.

End.