According to director John Hillcoat, the message of “The Road” goes beyond its post-apocalyptic setting: “The story is a parable about human goodness and what makes a good man slide.”
The director, who sat down for an interview earlier this month, was attached to the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece before the book was even published.
Citing other works by Mcarthy, Hillcoat said, “I spoke to producers in Los Angeles about what kind of stories and genres I was looking to work with. I mentioned how much ‘Blood Meridian’ had influenced my film ‘The Proposition.’ ‘No Country for Old Men’ was, of course, already taken, so the next option was ‘The Road.’”
The film tells the story of a father and son struggling to survive after an unknown disaster has left the world ravaged and humankind ruthless. Throughout the book, the father struggles with the fact that he must eventually kill his own son before the cannibals that roam the land take him.
After obtaining the story, one of Hillcoat’s first duties was to find the actors that would play Man and Boy, the two characters essential to the emotional punch of the film. Luckily, Viggo Mortensen had the “credibility” and “intensity” to play a man struggling with a dire decision. “For the role, we were looking for an everyman with the authenticity and credibility for the physical struggles that the character goes through,” Hillcoat said. “Viggo has that range of emotion and the ability to throw himself wholeheartedly into his work.”
The filmmaker’s “greatest fear” was finding a child actor to play the part of Boy, a part that requires great maturity. “Kodi Smit-McPhee came late. His father had already read the entire book to him, and they gave us a videotape of them acting out all of these extra scenes. Kodi was mature beyond his years and very unaffected,” he said.
To emulate the realism of the book, Hillcoat steered clear of cinematic end-of-the-world clichés and instead drew inspiration from the lives of the homeless and from the destruction left by actual man-made and natural disasters. To create the bleak look of the road, Hillcoat’s production designer Chris Kennedy spent three weeks on Google Earth finding locations. These spots included an abandoned turnpike and an old theme park in Pennsylvania.
Hillcoat created a movie that accurately visualizes Cormac McCarthy’s work. However, the quiet inaction that works so well in a novel does not translate cinematically. Nothing much happens in the film, making it sometimes difficult for the audience to emotionally connect to the poor souls on screen. Nevertheless, “The Road” is a realistic portrayal of the end of the world.
“The point was to reference reality,” Hillcoat said. “Not to focus on the actual disaster that happened, but rather the day to day that the characters endure.”
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