The beginning of The Road

After a significant delay and mounting expectations, The Road opens this week. The film is the second major adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel in two years (the first being the Academy Awards Best Picture-winning No Country For Old Men), and this time, it is based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning book about a father and son traveling south in post-apocalyptic America.

On their journey, they face the threat of roving bands of marauders and cannibals, hunger, cold and the ultimate futility of their actions in a world where nothing grows and each day is colder than the next. Director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) sat down with The Diamondback to discuss how he transformed a book he loved onto the big screen.

Those familiar with the book will probably doubt how anyone could cast the central character of the boy. The complex role requires a young actor capable of carrying a huge portion of the plot. Australian-born actor Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Adventures of Charlotte and Henry) was given the role, and his performance has received much acclaim. Hillcoat calls Smit-McPhee his “second gift,” after getting McCarthy’s book to film.

“Everyone turned to us and said, ‘Where did you get the kid?’” Hillcoat said. “He was mature beyond his years; he totally got it; he was very instinctual.”

The rest of the cast list is filled with big names. Viggo Mortensen (Good) stars as the father, and Charlize Theron (The Burning Plain) plays his wife, while Robert Duvall (Four Christmases) and Guy Pearce (The Hurt Locker) also make appearances. While talking with Hillcoat about production of the film, it became clear everyone involved had one thing in common: a love for the source material. 

“I had it before it was published, before No Country, before the Pulitzer, before any of this stuff,”  Hillcoat said. “It was an unpublished manuscript, and it affected me in a way I was hoping could somehow filter through.”

Hillcoat described the initial idea of adapting the book as intimidating but described McCarthy as a “great ally.”

“At first, I was completely intimidated by his legacy and that first discussion I had with the screenwriter who also was like ‘Oh my god, this is the great Cormac McCarthy, I don’t want to f--- with this and be to blame for taking apart the master’s work,’” he said.

“Then we realized, ‘Well hang a minute — we got to try and push all of that to one side’ because the more you think about that and get intimidated, the more it impinges upon making it translate into screen.” 

McCarthy, according to Hillcoat, understood there would be differences between his book and the screen version. The hands-off approach did not mean Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall (The Undertaker) were not eventually going to screen the finished film for the author.

“D-Day came when we had to show him the film,” Hillcoat said. “And that was the most nerve-racking moment of all — for me personally and also for the writer. We took it to New Mexico and screened it for him, just the three of us. And the lights came up, he disappeared; he mumbled something to his friend and disappeared for 20 minutes.

“You can imagine, I was ready to just jump out the window, and the writer was just shaking his head saying ‘That’s it. We are finished, we are f---ed.’”

Instead, Hillcoat says McCarthy “loved it” and added only a few specific notes on the film. 

Although their passion for the book motivated them to be faithful to its content, Hillcoat and the other filmmakers still had to decide where to draw the line with the book’s unflinchingly grisly violence. Fans of the book will remember the notorious “baby scene,” a sequence Hillcoat advocated before fighting to remove it from the film.

“We didn’t want to shy away from any of it,” Hillcoat said of the violence. “We shot the baby scene, and I said, ‘Hey guys, if we’re making this film, we cannot shy away from anything.

We got to take this head on,’ and I fought for that; we shot it, put it in the film. And then I ended up fighting like hell to get it out of the film because I realized that at the point in the film, it’s this weird balancing act that we need to distill it down.

“It’s weird, when you physicalize things you get it so much more. There’s a head space in the novel — the haunting-ness and the power of that particular scene not in images but as an idea. As soon as you physicalize some of this stuff, it just becomes too repetitive.”

Edits aside, The Road is a  shocking film. It is gruesome at times and sentimental at others. As Hillcoat explains, it comes from a group passionate about the book and passionate about translating it to the screen.

diversions@umdbk.com