THE ROAD
An Interview with John Hillcoat
by Max Evry


November 22, 2009



Based on the wildly popular, Pulitzer Prize winning 2006 novel by Cormac McCarthy, “The Road” is an unflinching look at our world through the prism of a post-apocalyptic landscape where an unnamed man (Viggo Mortensen) and his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) fight not only for their lives but to maintain “the fire” of civilization within themselves as they travel amid the devastation. The movie shot on real sites of both manmade and natural catastrophes within the united states, and escalates the grimy, grunge aesthetic that director John Hillcoat used to great effect in his previous film, the Outback western “The Proposition”. Featuring Charlize Theron as the boy’s mother in flashbacks, as well as memorable cameos from Robert Duvall and Guy Pearce, this film is a harrowing journey that will shake audiences with its starkness and gravity.

Hillcoat spoke to us exlusively in New York about the challenges of adapting such a revered work of modern fiction.

Q: The producer stated that he saw “The Proposition” and knew your were the one to make “The Road”, but what made you personally want to take on the project?

JOHN HILLCOAT: Reading the book, reading the material before it was published, thankfully. It emotionally affected me so much, and that’s what the driving force was. It is an important story that’s about the very worst and the very best, and created new insight into that genre.

Q: I don’t have to tell you that this is a wildly popular piece of literature. How daunting was it making a movie that so many had already scene in their mind’s eye, so to speak? HILLCOAT: Of course it was daunting but I couldn’t focus on that. I was always referring back to that initial response and try to be as faithful to the spirit of the book as possible. It was great that it was getting that momentum. What was reassuring is that it was obviously having that effect on people. In one sense I can understand that people are invested in it personally so the expectations are enormous and I understand how that works. All I could do was focus on the task at hand. I had no control over Pulitzer Prizes… I had to be like a horse at a horserace that wears blinkers: if you turn to look at the audience you’ll trip up. I just had to keep focusing on the pragmatic, practical approaches. How do you succeed in translating this to get the emotional response through.

Q: In terms of the film’s look, what did you do to avoid the clichés of other post-apocalyptic films like “The Road Warrior” and the like?

HILLCOAT: It all came from the book in that it didn’t go on about the big event. It’s such a simple observation yet so truthful, but anyone who survives an event like 9/11 or Katrina or even a car accident you’re thinking about how you’re gonna get out of this or how you’re going to survive. You’re not actually analyzing how it all came about. That’s the role of media, to contextualize things, but when the pressure’s on in the here and now you’re thinking of how to get through. In that sense it’s a very insightful, truthful approach. The other thing it did was it felt very familiar. It felt like an America we’ve already had glimpses of. The homeless with the shopping trolleys. We’ve seen the power of Mount St. Helens and Katrina and 9/11, whether it’s manmade or natural it had an authenticity implied in the book. That’s what we went after, utilizing that instead of a CGI fantasy.

Q: Right, and you actually shot on those catastrophic locations. What was that like?

HILLCOAT: Yeah, we filmed in Mount St. Helens and a lot around Pennsylvania because of the weather in the wintertime. It’s overcast, the trees lose their leaves, but there’s also the leftover stripmines, ashpiles from the mining, the abandoned interstate there. It’s a place that’s stunningly beautiful in the summer, spring and fall, but in the winter it’s pretty desolate. We went to New Orleans. We went to Oregon for the grey beach and pieced it together that way, tried to get it all in-camera. When you’re visualizing these things we tried to avoid apocalyptic film clichés so we avoided the cities because that iconography is used so much, so we went to the suburbs and the countryside.

Q: It’s such a natural choice to have Viggo in this role and it’s also no surprise that he carries it with such grace, but how did the performance surprise you when it was all cut together in the finished film? HILLCOAT: There’s nowhere to hide, it’s so raw, and there’s an incredible physicality there. The way he was reacting off of Kodi is unbelievable. Also, the way he used and embraced the environment, the world he was in… there’s an intensity there. You can tell tha the is cold, he is wet, he is grubby. He has been sleeping in those clothes for days… well, forever. A lot of that was for real. He’s got that kind of fearless commitment, and all of that comes across. When your face and the details are 20-feet high on the big screen you really can read this stuff, particularly between the words. The haunted memories, the paranoia, all these things swimming around.

Q: Kodi’s incredible too. I read somewhere that when Stanley Kubrick made “The Shining” he shot it in such a way that the little boy never knew he was in a horror movie. Did you do something similar to shield Kodi from some of the more traumatic elements?

HILLCOAT: Certainly that was going to be my approach as well. I was thinking of always protecting the boy. I had more conversations with Viggo about that than anything else. Likewise with the crew. There were many conversations. By complete surprise and not by design… I gave a very neutral scene to all the kids I auditioned on tape first, just to get a sense of them. Kodi came from left of field from Australia, the only one from Australia, and he came up very late in the day. His father is an actor, he’s one of the cannibals in the road gang. Scary guy, six-foot-six, covered in tattoos, handlebar mustache. Anyway, his father did the audition for real with him, playing the father in the tape, and they did all these extra scenes, including some of the most challenging, provocative ones that I always thought of breaking up so the kid would never be aware of what the scene was. He was sending a message to me that his boy could actually handle it. By the time he came to the audition for real, as in we got it down to a short list and had every kid work with Viggo, the father reveals he had read him the entire book. Kodi is the key to it all, a lovely beautiful kid, totally unaffected, never had any nightmares. He had an emotional maturity way beyond his years. He totally understood it was a story, understood it from a dramatic point-of-view, then somehow he accessed all those emotions in a very intuitive, instinctive way. Viggo was just amazed at his professionalism, his ability. We didn’t have to hide anything from him. We did relieve him. When we weren’t filming Viggo would teach him all the “Lord of the Rings” sword moves, and the crew was like a big family. They joked with him all the time, he joked with them. We were very conscious of not sharing the stresses of making the film with Kodi. We kept as much pressure off of him as possible so he could focus and deal with what he had to deal with. On top of that he happened to look just like Charlize, so it was incredible luck. It was a great gift finding him.

Q: This is a fairly modestly budgeted film by industry standards…

HILLCOAT: Yeah, $20 million.

Q: It’s still a major leap forward for you compared to your last one. How did you adjust to the demands of doing a big production with major stars? HILLCOAT: There was a lot of black humor on the set. It was a total inverse reality. We were the most miserable was when it was beautiful, sunny blue skies. If it was overcast and raining sideways we’d be on top of the world. There was an incredible commitment to the material. I’ve never worked on a set where so many of the crew were really excited about it. They all had copies of the book. That really helped push things through. For the actors, particularly with Viggo and Kodi, the really emotional stuff we had to get in a couple of takes, and some of it we got in one take, shooting with two cameras. We had very short days because of Kodi’s availability. He was fully protected, as he needed to be. We had nine-hour shoot days, and three of those were for schooling, and he had breaks within the day. We had very short days. Also, we had the world right there in front of us. To do that in CGI would be even harder and cost a hundred-times more. The fact that the book went on to do what it did was actually an asset and focused everyone. It was tricky to get that balance of which scenes to have in, how much cannibalism versus the relationship stuff.

Q: Were there any scenes from the book you regretted not being able to put into the film?

HILLCOAT: You have to be quite brutal. The biggest relief and greatest reward was when Cormac saw the film and didn’t miss a thing. He’d never seen a script, had never asked for one. The only thing he missed were four lines of dialogue, which we had luckily shot and put back in.

Q: Which lines were those?

HILLCOAT: It was just this beautiful exchange between the father and son. The son says, “What would you do if I died?” and the father says, “I’d want to die too.” “So you could be with me?” “So I could be with you.” Which was great, and also prefigures what’s to come. I’m pleased with the balance of everything in the end result, and Cormac was enormously helpful in that process.

Q: You’ve worked with musician Nick Cave on many projects over the years, but how was his score for this movie a special and unique collaboration? HILLCOAT: We both had revered Cormac’s writing for many years. “Blood Meridian” was a big influence on “The Proposition”, and to have material drawn from the master himself was a real treat. He loved the world we created and the cast. We spoke at a very early stage, as the script was being written, about the music. We love collaborating together. He works in an unusual way with Warren Ellis. It’s not rigid. It’s like actors, he does a lot of preparation and discussions but leaves a lot open for when he sees the film. He and Warren then have a more intuitive response to the material.

Q: So there is planning but it’s also free-form?

HILLCOAT: Yeah. The way they work has developed this way. It was different earlier, but it seems to work well. After they get some ground talking about instruments and ideas in the approach. Once they see it they go into a studio together and just come up with this stuff and try things out and do a lot of recording. We had six-hours of material. Then we shape it down into the actual film itself. There’s a lot of back and forth with the editor, but the music editor is more critical here than normal.

“The Road” opens on November 25th.