Taking the road less travelled (From The Argus)

Taking the road less travelled

6:00am Saturday 2nd January 2010

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As Cormac McCarthy’s stark, post-apocalyptic masterpiece The Road makes a long-awaited transition to the big screen, its Hove director says Hollywood is itself in the grip of a cataclysmic meltdown.

Bringing the cherished, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the cinema has been the most satisfying experience of John Hillcoat’s career so far, he says. But the gently-spoken, Australian-born director is genuinely considering his future in an industry brought to its knees by digital piracy and determined to play it safe with blockbuster franchise movies.

“The film business is in the worst crisis since it began, and I’m not being melodramatic,” he says.

“Being able to press a button to download a hundred million dollar product for nothing has finally kicked in. Marketing costs are outstripping production costs and, as things stand, films such as The Proposition [Hillcoat’s savagely brilliant 2005 outback western] and The Road are history.”

He hopes a radical overhaul of the business will turn the situation around, but has good reason for cynicism; he’s just seen a Nick Cave-scripted gangster film with Shia LeBoeuf and Amy Adams evaporate into the ether as the industry tightens its belt.

There is now “zero chance of an amazing project” being realised, despite the critical acclaim that has met The Road. Hillcoat’s remarkably assured, beautiful film is already being tipped for Oscar glory in March, but when it emerged this survival story of a man and his young son – “each the other’s world entire” – would be committed to celluloid, there was a sharp, collective intake of breath from its many fans.

Would it be too harrowing an experience for a Saturday night at the cinema? Would its roving cannibals and post-apocalyptic setting see McCarthy’s treasured, economical prose blown up into conventional Hollywood disaster flick?

Hillcoat’s answer is a sensitive reading of McCarthy’s novel that more than justifies the faith placed in him by its producers. His best-known film to date had been The Proposition – written by fellow Hove-ite and friend Nick Cave – when he was asked to take on the as-yet-unpublished McCarthy novel.

Producers thought Hillcoat’s eye for human drama made him the perfect choice for the manuscript they’d optioned, but as the machinations of the film industry ground into motion, few could have predicted the published book would be hailed as one of the finest of the new century. The director admits a bigger name would have been behind the camera if anyone had.

“I wouldn’t be sat here talking to you if they’d involved a director after it had been published and gone on to do what it did,” he says over a coffee at the Duke Of York’s Picturehouse.

“There’d be a whole queue in front me, and that’s just being pragmatic. But it also meant I was able to approach this as fresh material that wasn’t exposed everywhere.”

Hillcoat – long convinced the world of cinema would be beyond his reach – was born in Queensland, but left his native Australia as a child, living in Connecticut, USA, and Ontaria, Canada, as a teenager.

He got his grounding in film directing videos for the likes of the Manic Street Preachers and Depeche Mode before reaching wider acclaim with The Proposition. He and his wife, photographer Polly Borland, moved to Hove nine years ago when London became too oppressive.

“I just love the old Regency architecture, and it’s a really eclectic mix of people, particularly in the summer. And of course, Nick [Cave] came down a year or two after we did so I guess the Australians have gravitated towards the sea.”

Hillcoat says there are advantages to being an outsider looking in on the distinctly American fable that lies at the heart of The Road; for both this film and The Proposition – set in Australia – he’s used European directors of photography.

“It’s something I’m quite conscious of; I think there are ways of representing your national identity that become very ingrained, and I try to add a fresh perspective to things. We’re very familiar with American culture, so it’s about bringing something new to that.”

The result is a brooding, sunless take on the American landscape, filmed in exhausted industrial areas and New Orleans, itself the victim of the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina. CGI-rendered exploding cityscapes are mercifully absent, but Hillcoat admits there was pressure to make The Road a more conventional apocalypse movie.

“It’s such an obvious thing to do, but that’s what I wanted to resist. What won out was that we all wanted to be faithful to the book. We wanted the focus to be on the father and son. In most apocalyptic films, it’s so much about the big event there’s no human dimension.”

Hillcoat’s first thought on reading the manuscript was that the intensely moving relationship between father and son – played by Viggo Mortensen (of Lord Of The Rings) and newcomer Kodi Smit McPhee – must be at the centre of film, and just as in the novel, the disaster that befalls mankind is unexplained. While the director sees ecological meltdown as humanity’s gravest threat, he says it was important to leave the question unanswered on-screen.

“There are two reasons for that: one, it’s irrelevant to the story and [the characters’] day-to-day survival, and two, it’s really a projection of everyone’s fear, whether that’s nuclear war or a meteorite or anything else. If we explained it definitively, that would be taken away.”

Like the monster we don’t see in a horror movie, the catastrophe is made all the worse in only being seen through its devastating effects. Mortensen’s character is only able to think as far enough ahead as keeping he and his son alive long enough for them to reach warmer climes, and it’s this on-screen relationship that gives the film its most intense and poignant moments.

Mortensen was the director’s ideal candidate for the role of “The Man” from day one. The Danish-American actor shifted his commitments around to make time for The Road after reading British writer Joe Penhall’s script, and when filming began he slept in his clothes and maximised his discomfort to lend realism to his performance.

Less certain was the casting of his son, known only as “The Boy”.

“The only time I gave the whole project a second thought – even to the point of saying: ‘Do I want to make this?’ – was wondering who the hell would play this kid. It needed so much maturity.”

Hillcoat’s doubts were answered when a friend recommended the Australian Kodi Smit McPhee. Young enough in body but old enough in mind, McPhee is himself the son of an actor.

“The whole film would’ve fallen apart without him,” Hillcoat says.

His performance is so nuanced... the emotions were genuine and unaffected. There was none of that stage school thing.”

Mortensen, who has worked with the likes of Al Pacino, Sean Penn and Sir Ian McKellen, has said McPhee – just 11 at the time of filming – is among the best actors he’s ever worked with.

The reclusive McCarthy – who rarely gives interviews – drew on his relationship with own his son for the book, and both he and his 11-year-old boy John were invited to the set to watch the film being made.

“We got to see how the book came about, through his relationship with his son, who’s a gorgeous boy who calls him papa.”

“He’s an amazing man,” Hillcoat continues. “He said from the beginning a book is a book and a film a film, but that he was there to answer any questions. He didn’t ask to see a script and I didn’t volunteer one, but he loves the film.”

After a tense screening, McCarthy gruffly signalled his approval, pointing out that four lines from the novel were missing. “But he was respectful enough to leave it up to us whether we put them in,” Hillcoat says.

Another key relationship that defines the film is between Hillcoat and his musical collaborators Nick Cave and Bad Seed Warren Ellis. Hillcoat and Cave’s professional relationship is also a personal one; each is godfather to one of the other’s children.

“We didn’t want anything orchestral, but we talked in very loose terms about it being somewhere between folk and classical – loose and delicate.”

Some of the film’s most intense scenes, including a terrifying escape from a house of cannibals, are accompanied by Ellis’s chilling, looping violin, but Hillcoat says a balance had to be struck between building suspense and straying too far into horror flick convention.

The Man and The Boy spend much of the film avoiding other survivors, but one wayfarer is played by a barely recognisable Robert Duvall. Hillcoat says there was little trouble gettting Duvall – a friend of McCarthy – and Guy Pearce involved in the film, such was the enthusiasm for the project.

“These actors didn’t disappear into their trailers, even when it was freezing. I guess that’s just their dedication – they just wanted to get immersed in it. But it was important they integrated like that. The last thing we wanted for the film was obvious movie stars rolling up.”

Much has been made of the film’s delayed release, with speculation its backers weren’t happy with the finished product, or last-minute radical revisions were being made. Not so, says Hillcoat.

“We could have released it earlier this year, but the time wasn’t right. Also, the film just wasn’t ready – the original release date was overambitious. It’s frustrating, because it’s created a negative anticipation; people are walking in thinking there’s something flawed because of the wait, but it was only because the film wasn’t finished.”

This setback looks ready to be forgotten when the film is released on Friday. Critics have singled out The Road out as one of the movies of the decade, with particular praise reserved for the Hove director’s intelligent, measured approach.

Hillcoat is wary of talking too much about what’s next for him, but is contemplating a move into television at a time when directors such as Brian Singer (X-Men, The Usual Suspects) are looking increasingly to the smaller screen.

“I am looking there,” he says. “[American network] HBO has set off a renaissance in television and the dramas aren’t being equalled; TV needs to compete now and to make use of that gap for adult, intelligent drama that cinema is falling over with.”

* The Road is on general release from Jan 8

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