The Road - We now have a trailer

A brilliant book looks to have a brilliant trailer.

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The Road - Esquire have seen it and loved it

John Hillcoat's adaption of Cormac McCarthy's brilliant novel, The Road, was due out last year, but was pushed back and back. It is now due in October of this year. Previously there have been reviews posted for rough cuts of the film and they were not that promising.

I really love the book so I wanted the film to be as good as it could possibly be so I was getting a little worried.

Now Esquire magazine have seen the final cut and it sounds as if things could be looking up. They say it could be the most important film of the year.

The Road is no tease. It is a brilliantly directed adaptation of a beloved novel, a delicate and anachronistically loving look at the immodest and brutish end of us all. You want them to get there, you want them to get there, you want them to get there — and yet you do not want it, any of it, to end.

You should see it for the simplest of reasons: Because it is a good story. Not because it may be important. Not because it is unforgettable, unyielding. Not because it horrifies. Not because the score is creepily spiritual. Not because it is littered with small lines of dialogue you will remember later. Not because it contains warnings against our own demise. All of that is so. Don't see it just because you loved the book. The movie stands alone. Go see it because it's two small people set against the ugly backdrop of the world undone. A story without guarantees. In every moment — even the last one — you'll want to know what happens next, even if you can hardly stand to look. Because The Road is a story about the persistence of love between a father and a son, and in that way it's more like a remake of The Godfather than some echo of I Am Legend.

A story without guarantees. In every moment — even the last one — you’ll want to know what happens next, even if you can hardly stand to look.” … “You have to see it. Really. You do. Not because it’s grim, not because it’s depressing, or even scary. The Road is all of those things, both acutely and chronically. But there was not a single stupid choice made in turning this book into this movie. No wrongheaded lyric tribute to the novel. No moment engineered simply to make you jump.

The film stars Viggo Mortensen, Academy Award winners Robert Duvall and Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce and 12-year-old Kodi Smit McPhee.

Have a read of the full review if you wish.

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Viggo will walk along The Road in October

Dimension Films and 2929 Productions have finally announced that they will be releasing John Hillcoat’s adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel The Road, on October 16th 2009.

Academy Award nominee Viggo Mortensen, Academy Award winners Robert Duvall and Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce and 12-year-old Kodi Smit McPhee star in the the story of a man (Mortensen) and his young son (Smit-McPhee) traveling through a desperate, post-apocalyptic world.

It was meant to be release last year, but was knocked back. I am made up it is finally going to be released as it was one of my favourite books of recent years.

Source: /Film

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The Road - Concept art for adaption of Cormac McCarthy's excellent book

It has been an absolute age since there was anything new about The Road. It was due out last year but has pushed back and is now due out in October, 2009.

Now Quiet Earth (via /Film) have found a Flickr stream that has a load of Style Frames for The Road - Water colours, pencil sketches and photo montage based on actual location photos.

It is an absolutely stunning book, haunting, melancholy, horrific in places yet strangely uplifting and these images capture just a little of that.

I really want to see the film as I am curious how they will portray some of the scenes (especially those set at night).

Directed by John Hillcoat, screenplay by Joe Penhall. Production Design by Chris Kennedy. The Road stars Viggo Mortenson, Robert Duvall, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce and Kodi Smit-McPhee

What are your thoughts on the style frames? Are you excited about seeing the film or did you think the book as wa great big waste of paper?
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The Road - First listen to Nick Cave's soundtrack

Quiet Earth found this piece of news.

In this four minute report over at BBC4, arts correspondent Rebecca Jones manages to talk to screen writer Joe Pehnall, play an interview clip with the author of The Road himself, Cormac McCarthy, and most importantly of all play a portion of music that Australian rocker Nick Cave wrote for the film.

This is the first time a single note of the score has been heard outside of a few early screening rooms so check it out. It's haunting, simple, perfect. Still no word on the actual release date of the film but Jones does confirm that the film is finished.

Can't wait to see this film. The book was brilliant.

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The Road - New photos of Viggo, Kodi and Charlize

Been a while since I heard anything about the adaption of Cormac McCarthy's excellent book, The Road. Now these new photos have hit the web.
They show Viggo Mortensen as the Man, Kodi Smit-McPhee as the Boy and Charlize Theron. Still waiting to see some photos of Guy Pearce and Robert Duvall.



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Viggo Mortensen is a bit disappointed that we won't be seeing The Road just yet.

The Road was due out this month but as you all know was pushed back to next year (go out and get the book by Cormac McCarthy, it's brilliant). Viggo Mortensen has chatted with AICN at the Chicago International Film Festival about many things and The Road came up, and here's what Viggo had to say:

"I wanted to see it. I want to see how it is."

"My understanding is that they know that they've got a story that a lot of people want to see, because of the book. And, the people that read the book, which are many, were very moved by it and by this relationship between this boy and this man, in particular, in that setting. And, I think that they are really aware of the fact that they've got one chance to do it, and if there's any little things that they still want to work on a little more, to get it just right, whether it's the music --I don't know what it is -- a variety of things, they want to do it right. And, if you rush it out before you feel in good conscience it's there ... So, I am disappointed."

"But, if they think they need a little more time, then I’d rather they took it than didn’t. There’s the thought, ‘Well, maybe, we can sneak in and get an award, nomination or something, or make some money right now’. And, then, you think about it later and go, ‘Well, if we only had done this and that, we really would have finished it, and then they really would have liked it’ or something. It doesn’t bother me that much.

What I hope they don’t do is then just put it out in February or something. I hope they wait and do it at the right time. I don’t know. Do you think it’s a fall thing?"

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Ridley Scott talks about Cormac McCarthy's Western, Blood Meridian, and Tripoli

Ridley Scott has been interviewed by Empire magazine recently. He spoke about Body of Lies but also gave some news about his adaption of Cormac McCarthy's Western, Blood Meridian, and the difficulties of adapting a book that is steeped in violence and which deals with seriously un-PC topics.

"It's written. I think it's a really tricky one, and maybe it's something that should be left as a novel. If you're going to do Blood Meridian you've got to go the whole nine yards into the blood bath, and there's no answer to the blood bath, that's part of the story, just the way it is and the way it was. When you start to scalp Mexican wedding parties that'll draw the line. One scalp of coarse black hair is pretty well either Mexican or Indian, and there was no difference to the scalp hunters in Arizona at that time, who didn't draw the line."

Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West is a 1985 novel by Cormac McCarthy. Wiki states, "The novel tells the story of a teenage runaway named only as "the kid", who was born in Tennessee during the famously active Leonids meteor shower of 1833. He first meets the enormous and hairless Judge Holden at a religious revival in Nacogdoches, Texas: Holden falsely accuses the preacher, Reverend Green, of pedophilia and intercourse with a goat and incites a mob to chase him out of town.

After a violent encounter with a bartender establishes the kid as a formidable fighter, he joins a party of ill-armed U.S. Army irregulars on a filibustering mission led by a Captain White. Shortly after entering Mexico, they are attacked and massacred by a band of Comanche warriors. Few of them survive. Arrested as a filibuster in Chihuahua, the kid is set free when his acquaintance Toadvine tells the authorities they will make useful Indian hunters for the state's newly hired scalphunting operation. They join Glanton and his gang, and the bulk of the novel is devoted to detailing their activities and conversations. The gang encounters a traveling carnival, and, in untranslated Spanish, each of their fortunes is told with Tarot cards. The gang originally contract with various regional leaders to protect locals from marauding Apaches, and are given a bounty for each scalp they recover. Before long, however, they devolve into the outright murder of unthreatening Indians, unprotected Mexican villages, and eventually even the Mexican army and anyone else who crosses their path.

Throughout the novel Holden is presented as a profoundly mysterious and awe-inspiring figure; the others seem to regard him as not quite human. Like the historical Holden of Samuel Chamberlain's autobiography, he is a child-killer, though almost no one in the gang expresses much distress at his committing these acts. According to the kid's new companion Ben Tobin, an "ex-priest", the Glanton gang first met the judge while fleeing for their lives from a much larger Apache group. In the middle of a blasted desert, they found Holden sitting on an enormous boulder, where he seemed to be waiting for the gang. They agreed to follow his leadership, and he took them to an extinct volcano, where, astoundingly, he instructed the ragged, desperate gang on how to manufacture gunpowder, enough to give them the advantage against the Apaches. When the kid remembers seeing Holden in Nacogdoches, Tobin tells the kid that each man in the gang claims to have met the judge before he joined forces with Glanton."

Scott also passed on a few tidbits about the background and setting for another proposed film, Tripoli, a William "Kingdom of Heaven" Monaghan-scripted tale of high adventure in 19th century North Africa, as a US diplomat teamed up with the dispossessed heir to the throne of Tripoli to challenge the heir's usurper brother.

There is lots more to read in the interview over atEmpire.

Have any of you read Blood Meridian? No Country for Old Men was a brilliant movie and The Road was a great book, so I imagine Blood Meridian is a cracking read and seems to be another movie in the slow Hollywood build up of Westerns in recent years. I also like the sound of the mysterious Holden being viewed by some as not quite human (a bit like Anton Chigurh played by Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men). Who could you see playing the monstrous and hairless Judge Holden?
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Early review of the early version of The Road

One of NY Entertainment's Interns got to see an early screening of The Road. This is what he had to say about it.

However you adapt it, Cormac McCarthy's The Road is going to be bleak. Director John Hillcoat, a relative unknown, gets it just about right. Arguably the best parts of the film (aside from some stellar acting, which I'll get to in a minute) are the postapocalyptic urban exterior scenes — burnt-out malls, crumbling highways, long-abandoned neighborhoods. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Hillcoat did most of the filming in and around Pittsburgh, a bastion of urban American beauty, but every inch of the landscape and set seems to be painstakingly trashed.

Hillcoat expands the book's flashback sequences to give Charlize Theron more screen time (she's good!), and contrasts the grayscale color palette of the movie-present with the vivid one of the movie-past. Viggo Mortensen seems to play a mix of Aragorn from Lord of the Rings and Tom Stall from A History of Violence. His unnamed character is human and believable (and naked at one point — Viggo didn’t want you to forget Eastern Promises). As his son, newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee holds his own.

Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall tone down the more gruesome parts of the original novel (we don't see the baby on the spit, for example), and they never actually show any of the cannibals eating people (we only see charred bones and a severed head). The scene in the basement, with the prisoners waiting to be eaten, is jerky and brief, though the camera lingers just long enough for us to see that one legless man has already been nibbled on.

Aside from a few sound glitches and yet-to-be applied color correction, The Road seems pretty close to completion. At the end of its two-hour running time, the crowd I saw it with (made up of those lucky enough to be walking through Union Square when they were passing out free tickets last night) applauded.

What do you think of that?

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The Road may be delayed

Looks as if The Road may be delayed until next year. Apparantly this change comes right after Harvey Weinstein moved up the release of Stephen Daldry's The Reader to early December. The Road also is not quite finished yet.

However, First Showing go on to say that this is a ludicrous decision by the Weinstein's. They say:

Well, I'm guessing that The Weinstein Company can't handle Oscar season marketing on two movies at once, even though they'd be three or four weeks apart. I can't speak for film's preparedness and if it is indeed ready or not, but I don't think it has heavy CGI work and it did shoot much earlier this year. What can speak for is the fact that The Road already has a lot of early buzz whereas The Reader does not. In fact, I hadn't even heard of The Reader until a few weeks ago. So why are they moving The Road when to me it seems like it would make more money than The Reader?

I have to agree with them. The Road is getting loads of talk around the web and The Reader simply isn't. They should be really pushing The Road as it already has a huge fan base. I know there are quite a few fans of the book who read this site - what do you think of the news?

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The Road - Official website hits and some photos from one of the people in the cellar

Here's a bit of an update on the making of Cormac McCarthy's novel, The Road, into a film. Quiet Earth had some photos sent to them from the personal collection of actor Jeremy Ambler (shown to the right) who was lucky enough to play one of the unfortunate "people in the cellar." They also found the film's official website which, at the moment, is just a front page.

These photos are from when they were filming the scene the one where The Man (Viggo Mortensen and The Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) explore a seemingly empty manor only to find that it's occupied by people who keep their living food supply in the cellar.

I've just finished the book and thought it was absolutely brilliant. Suspenseful, sad but strangely uplifting. The ending is sublimely melancholy. I'm made up to see these photos and cannot wait for the film.

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The Road - Script review of movie based on Cormac McCarthy's bestseller

Thanks to Daan for pointing this out (sorry I took a few days to get it posted Daan!). We had some photos from the shoot a while ago but this is all about the script.

Quiet Earth has this to say about it. Beware of possible spoilers:

To be blunt, the script is a complete stunner. It is a devastating masterwork which, I'm glad to report, has been written with absolute devotion to the original novel. If this is the script that gets filmed, then The Road will not only be the most important post-apocalyptic film ever made but it will profoundly affect the cinema going world. But I can't help but wonder; is the world ready for a film this dark?

I don't know how it's possible but everything, and I mean everything, from the book is in this script. No attempt whatsoever has been made to gloss over some of the book's more difficult subject matter and nowhere has Penhall tried to explain away the unexplainable. He truly gets this book and he gets why it was so effective. For example, we're still not told why the world is a charred smoldering pile of ashen snow, though there is a small hint at the beginning. The ambiguity is terrifying and Penhall is willing to let us draw our own conclusions about character motivations.

Surprisingly, most of the additions do the exact opposite of what I would have expected them to do. They actually make the world scarier, the situation seem more dire, and life more hopeless than the book even did. The first 15 pages are just scene after scene of powerful head-shaking stuff. I predict people are going to be blown away by how far this film is willing to go. And again, I don't mean to insinuate designer gore or cheap thrills but just dark dark dark subject matter and quiet, personal scenes of real life terror.

There is lots more to the review here, but by all accounts The Road is definitely one to watch.

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The Road - Viggo Mortensen on cover of the book

Check out our script review for the movie.

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The Road - Photos from movie based on Cormac McCarthy's novel

USA Today have some photos from The Road. A movie based on the book by Cormac McCarthy. It's set in America after a nuclear winter has set in and follows a father and son travelling down a deserted road trying to get to the coast. All they have are the clothes on their back, a pistol and some food.

The film stars Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron and 11-year-old Kodi Smit-McPhee was shot in Pittsburgh, New Orleans and on Mount St. Helens in Washington state for scenes of devastation.

"It's tangible, the misery and hopelessness and the bleakness," Mortensen says. "It gives you much more to work with if you're filming in that world instead of a green screen."

Sounds like a bundle of laughs, but I've heard really good things about the book and Mortensen is a solid actor. Think I'll be picking up the book.

The Road is directed by ex-music video director John Hillcoat, of The Proposition. The screenplay was adapted by Joe Penhall, of Some Voices, Enduring Love, and The Undertaker and is based on Cormac McCarthy's novel of the same name first published in 2006. The Road hits in November 2008

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