John Hillcoat at the end of The Road
For Australian director John Hillcoat, adapting Cormac McCarthy’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road to the screen came with expectations from all corners. He told Paul Hayes that this is the end of the world as you don’t know it.
Filming a beloved novel is a tricky situation at the best of times. It is one of popular culture’s more perplexing ironies that cinema audiences are far more upset at the idea of a filmmaker changing the plot or character details of a well-known book than they do about changing events from real history.
Hillcoat had to deal with the millions of literary fans who had read the book and loved it enough to make it an international bestseller, who would no doubt be wary of any changes made for the screen.
Then there were film audiences from all over the world, who had taken very keen notice of McCarthy’s work after the Coen brothers delivered one of the last decade’s most acclaimed films, 2007’s No Country for Old Men, based on another of his novels.
But for Hillcoat, those expectations ultimately paled next to the most important of all; that of the author himself.
“The legacy of McCarthy was very high on my mind,” he admitted to Encore from his home in London.
When it came to adapting the novel, Hillcoat and Australian screenwriter Joe Penhall took what was perhaps the only approach they could.
“We agreed that we can’t be intimidated by that legacy. We have to just roll up our sleeves and be quite pragmatic about it,” he said. “In a way you have to keep your blinkers on otherwise you will get tripped up. That was the attitude that we kept along the way.”
Regardless of the novel’s critical and commercial success, The Road was always going to be a tough story to bring to the screen.
Set against a post-apocalyptic wasteland after a devastating and unexplained catastrophic event, the story centres on a father and son (Viggo Mortensen and Australia’s Kodi Smit-McPhee) as they attempt to survive the horrors of a dying world with little more than each other what they can carry in their shopping trolley.
FAMILIAR COLLABORATORS CREATING A FAMILIAR WORLD
In order to make that transition to the screen, Hillcoat relied on many of the same Australian crew members who have worked with him on such films as The Proposition and Ghosts… of the Civil Dead.
The Road’s production designer Chris Kennedy, screenwriter Joe Penhall costume designer Margot Wilson and musicians Nick Cave and Warren Ellis are all Aussies who have worked with the director before.
According to Hillcoat, it is in establishing these types of lasting working relationships that you are able to work through potential problems.
“It’s when you hit upon people that you really click with and there is great collaboration, that’s the kind of gold that you go on with,” he said.
“When you find a great collaborator where it works and it’s a really positive situation and you fire off each other, that’s what makes all of this bearable.”
It was that collaborative relationship with his crew that enabled the creative team to bring what they believe is a fresh take on the well tread post-apocalyptic genre.
Hillcoat and his crew worked hard to give The Road a sense of immediacy and familiarity. They wanted audiences to see something in these barren wastelands that they could recognise in their own world.
“I think the main thing the film does is bring it into the here and now. There is something very familiar about this apocalyptic world,” Hillcoat said. “For instance, people using a shopping cart for there possessions is something we have all seen with the homeless.”
The director turned to his trusted collaborators to help him create this feeling of familiarity.
“My production designer, Chris Kennedy, and the wardrobe designer, Margot Wilson, and I all looked at lots of pictures of the homeless,” Hillcoat said. “And Chris found all of these incredible real locations in America.”
It is in creating a look and feel of a world that is both alien and real at the same time that Hillcoat and his crew have put their own stamp and the genre.
It is about the people and how they attempt to remain human, rather than any cataclysmic events that got that to that point in the first place.
“What that is all getting to is that it is a story, a human story,” he said. “It’s that human dimension that is quite fresh.”
UNSPOILED TALENT
Beyond any creative team behind the film, The Road most fundamentally hinges on the relationship between the father and son.
Casting Viggo Mortensen, one of the most intense actors in today’s Hollywood, seems like a no brainer for such grim subject matter. Casting the pre-teen child was a far more delicate proposition.
“That was my single greatest fear in undertaking this whole thing,” Hillcoat said. “I realised that this kid is in every single scene and it doesn’t matter how great the visuals or any other aspect are, or even if the rest of the cast are great, it could all fall over.”
After and extensive and ultimately unsuccessful search of North America, Hillcoat finally turned his casting eyes to Australia, where he found Kodi Smit-McPhee, who is best known for his AFI winning turn in 2007’s Romulus, My Father.
In casting the young Australian, Hillcoat got exactly what he was looking for.
“For me the two great gifts were getting this material, this quality of material, and then finding a boy like Kodi,” he said. “He is just a beautiful kid and really just incredibly subtle and nuanced and sophisticated beyond his years.”
The reason for Hillcoat’s initial reluctance to consider an Australian child for the part was his desire to not add the burden of doing an accent to the gravity of the material. But according to the director, an American accent is less of a problem for Australian actors that he remembered.
“A lot of Aussies are really good with the American accent because they have so much exposure to it, and I had forgotten that,” he said. “We had one of the top dialogue coaches in America booked in for the whole shoot, and he spent one hour with Kodi and told us we were wasting our money.
“So we didn’t have anyone (to help Kodi) for the whole shoot or post-production.”
In addition, in having an Australian rather than American boy, Hillcoat said the advantages went beyond his ability to act.
“Kodi doesn’t have that affected showbiz thing that a lot of LA child actors have,” the director laughs.
The Road is in cinemas from today.
The full version of this interview will appear in the February issue of Encore.
