I caught up with the director of The Road (my favourite film of the year), while he was in London for the London Film Festival a few months ago, check out the results below. If you missed out on my Viggo Mortensen interview, check it out here. The Road is in cinemas now
The look of this film is very different to The Proposition, yet while I was watching it I was struck by some of the similarity’s, what drew you to the material?
John Hillcoat: Yeah they’re polar opposites but they’re both extreme worlds, I have always been interested in extreme environments and the way they impact on people. The performers in our amazing cast reacted off the environment in that it helped to add a reality. As Kodi (The Boy) said, it’s easier to be a bit cold, than to act a bit cold on top of all the emotional stuff, also for the crew I think it helps everyone. Working in a green screen studio is a much harder leap.
The addition of extended scenes with the mother worked out well for me, I was sceptical hearing about that at first. In the book she’s not featured heavily at all.
John Hillcoat: I think the haunted loss for the man and having to hide that from the boy in his way of protecting raises the stakes, I thought it was an incredibly tricky thing to manoeuvre for Viggo to have that loss without talking about it with his son, on occasions they bring it up but he has to carry that all the way through and build on that, to remind us how precious those things where.
How did you approach some of the more harrowing scenes with Kodi (The Boy)
John Hillcoat: That was my single greatest fear, I loved the material, when I read the book it floored me, but then I thought how the hell are we gonna find this kid and how are we gonna protect this kid, I was thinking of shooting it in a way the kid would not actually see half of the stuff we were shooting, I started from a very protective point of view. Viggo and I discussed it at length about how we are gonna work with this situation. But what happened is that Kodi comes from a very special family, a very close knit family, half of them are actors including his father and it was quite late in the day, friends had mentioned I’ve got to check out this kid in Australia. They sent this audition piece, that I never even asked them to do, I actually asked all the kids to do something quite neutral, they included scenes where Kodi’s father was playing the father for real and teaching him about putting a gun in his mouth, that was his message to me, to say my kid can handle this, or they were completely insane (laughs).
I had to check him out, by the time we had got it down to 4 kids, the critical thing was the relationship, so Viggo came in and worked with each individual kid at that point and Kodi had already read the entire book, so my strategy went out the window because this kid was incredibly grounded and mature beyond his years. It was that kind of maturity that he was still a kid, yet he had this instinctual understanding of what story telling is.
What were thought on how the story ends?
John Hillcoat: Cormac’s amazing at being unflinching with how we can slip into our base nature, I think the whole world is just a backdrop, it’s the projection of our fears, it’s every parents worst fear and every humans worst, I think the point at the end, is that as you see the story progress, even though the boy is born into this world and the man is trying to protect him, but by this way of protecting him he’s closing down through fear other possibility’s. I think it’s as simple as that, there are other people in that predicament but they can’t connect, in the end the boy basically stands up to the man and opens up the new possibility’s and takes a leap of faith and in doing that his instincts are correct, it’s the one thing we have to cherish and not get blinded by fear.
Cormac said the book is about human goodness, Blood Meridian was about human evil. The whole point is that we have to face our own mortality and there’s a whole nother generation coming along, I think the whole setting of the apocalypse was purely a metaphor to highlight that, a moment of hope, the greater the darkness, the more special that is.
