What Do The Critics Say

"Some audiences wouldn't even call this entertainment. Others, who find the likes of "Children of Men" and "Blindness" thought-provoking, will want to travel here. Grim beyond belief and almost beyond endurance, 'The Road' is one of the most depressing 'apocalypse' movies ever made." Linda Cooke QUAD CITY TIMES "This one-note exercise in neo-medieval moodiness eventually dissolves into that perennial and most corny of Hollywood tropes: the search for redemption. A disappointment." Sukhdev Sandhu DAILY TELEGRAPH "Isolation, desolation and the odd skirmish: this is Hillcoat’s apocalypse, not Hollywood’s, but it lacks McCarthy’s power." Jamie Graham TOTAL FILM "When the most moving line in a movie is "Do you eat people?" you know you're in for a tough time." Gary Thompson PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS "In attempting to realize McCarthy's vision of the planet in chaos, Hillcoat delves so deeply into his source material that he loses sight of the audience." Michelle Orange MOVIELINE "Is the film too grim? Or not grim enough? In a perverse way, I fear it's both. The Road is an impressive, even noble, stab at cinematic adaptation. It’s one that perhaps should never have been undertaken." Christopher Orr THE NEW REPUBLIC

"What was poetic and spare on the page has become monotonous and oppressive on the screen. To watch The Road is to endure it, and that’s a technical feat in and of itself, but since when was that ever reason enough to take the trip? The Road is so barren, so somber that it threatens to scrape the humanity right off the bone." William Goss ORLANDO WEEKLY "Its high-minded, this is good for you equation of bleakness with brilliance works against it a little, serving up many of the same allegorical ideas as a George Romero film." Alistair Harkness SCOTSMAN "For all the desperation and tragedy, then, the film offers a kind of heroism, set against a frankly grim but also frequently poetic backdrop." Cynthia Fuchs POPMATTERS "Mortensen and Smit-McPhee may deliver intense, often gut-wrenching performances, but their journey is too mysterious and soaked in one-note misery to keep you rapt." Tricia Olszewski WASHINGTON CITY PAPER "There really isn’t anything to say. You can’t blame audiences for skipping this one. It's a grind. Each weary, rainy step is agony. Around every corner is more desolation. More destruction. More misery. On it goes until The Road finally hits a dead end." Gary Wolcott MR MOVIES TRI-CITY HERALD

The Inside Story They say that "The Road"is a movie that had to get made. On the surface, a story about the Earth's end-game scenario that includes cannibalism and brutality and other unsavory elements is not exactly the right material for a popcorn movie. And though some studios initially passed on the project for these reasons, the producers, the director and the talent who were drawn to it were motivated by an absolute belief that Cormac McCarthy's novel would make an incredible picture. Producer Nick Wechsler, a huge fan of the author, got beat out when he tried to buy the rights to McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men", which went on to win the Oscar™ for the Coen Brothers, so he alerted literary agents to let him know when the next Cormac McCarthy book became available. He and producing partners Paula Mae and Steve Schwartz took advantage of competitors' skittishness and optioned the property when it was in manuscript form. "The great thing about this particular book was that it was so dark and so bleak that all of the studios and other producers were cautiously approaching it, weren’t sure whether it could be made into a movie," he says. "That gave me an opportunity to seize the moment, outbid everybody else with the help of my partners, the Schwartz’s, and acquire the material." Like all the other filmmakers involved in making this movie, Wechsler ("We Own the Night" & "25th Hour") was deeply moved by the experience of reading McCarthy's page-turner. He saw instantly, he says, that it would be great movie material. "I read the novel the evening that it was given to me and I thought it was an extremely powerful, emotional experience: the story of the father and the son and the journey they take and the passing of the fire, the passing of the idea of humanity from one to the other and back again. "And I also thought that there were some good genre elements as well. The suspense and tension of the need to survive in an extremely hostile world: really obvious elements to make into a movie. I wasn’t worried about the bleak aspect at all. I thought that an apocalyptic world is bleak and cannibalism in an apocalyptic world is bleak but that the emotional core of the piece was so fresh and so powerful that that’s what would shine through in the making of a movie." When Wechsler invited Rudd Simmons ("Dead Man Walking") to come aboard as the film's executive producer, his choice of John Hillcoat to direct was already established. Simmons hadn't seen Hillcoat's film "The Proposition", but when he did, he too was hooked on the director. "I was quite taken with John’s film. What was interesting to me was what he did with the landscape and how much the characters seem to come right out of the landscape. "The Road" is a fairly simple story in a way but it’s mythic and the characters seem to just come right out of the earth. So, I talked to John and he and I got along great." Another thing that impressed Simmons about the director's process was how prepared and how focused Hillcoat was on exactly how he was going to transform this great novel into a great movie. "We knew exactly what he was looking for. We knew exactly what it was he saw in the story," Simmons says. "What makes a really good adaptation is if the filmmaker finds something in the book that he is passionate about and tells the story from that point of view. And we knew what that was for John." In adapting the book, the filmmakers took great pains to retain the simple, gut-wrenching directness of it while bringing in some universal truths about this collective psyche so that a science fiction story about the end of the Earth could jibe with some of the most common fears of our post 9/11 era. "We did actually depart from the book," says Hillcoat ("Ghosts... of the Civil Dead" & "To Have & to Hold"). "In the book it was very much like a nuclear winter: everything was completely covered in ash and totally monochromatic with a thick layer of black soot and ash in the air." In scouting locations, the filmmakers gravitated toward natural disasters that wiped out huge swaths of territory, leaving it in a ravaged state. Prepping the film Hillcoat embarked on a long journey with Simmons and his longtime production designer and four time AFI Award winner Chris Kennedy (1989, '91, 2002 & '05), in which they sought out places around the country that had been ravaged in that way, knowing that the locations would connect the audience with a modern-day horror story that could happen here. These distressed landscapes would tap into the collective American psyche by referring to some major traumas that devastated parts of this country. "What was great about the book was that incredible, visceral reality to it," says Hillcoat. "Neither Chris or myself have ever really liked apocalyptic films that much as a genre. But this felt so different from anything else. So we immediately thought this story seems to tap into experiences of natural disasters and man-made disasters; so why not utilize all of that. So we immediately began doing a lot of research in which we were basically looking at man-made and natural disasters that have occurred, and that’s what led us to things like New Orleans post-Katrina, and Mount St. Helens in Washington and mining in central Pennsylvania and around Pittsburgh where that industry left a kind of man-made disaster area in terms of the landscape: what’s left of it. So the process was about utilizing all those things and gradually piecing it all together. It was like this huge tapestry." For producer Paula Mae Schwartz the story was eminently filmable because of its inherent hopefulness and the tender emotional core of the novel. "We admired Cormac McCarthy very much, thought he had an original voice, and this particular book captured a unique love story between a father and son. We felt that the power of the love between the father and the son was palpable, so strong that it helped mankind survive after the apocalypse. So it’s the ultimate story of survival." 2007 British Independent Film Award winner Viggo Mortensen ("Eastern Promises") rooted his portrayal in the father-son dynamic as well. And though at the time he was offered the role, the actor was coming off a period of working a lot and looking forward to a break, he says, but when he got the script and read the book, there was no way he couldn't do it. "I thought, 'Wow, it’s going to be pretty hard to say no to something like this, this kind of character.' It's one of those books that’s hard to put down, once it gets going you want to know how it turns out." In this story, Mortensen notes, that basic human concern is cranked up a few notches because it takes place in a bleak universe where every human certainty is gone. "It’s taken to an extreme. It’s not just that I’ll be gone and his mother will take care of him or his aunt, extended family or just society somehow. There’s nobody. Zero. If I'm gone he’s alone in the world. As extreme as that is, it still connects for people with their own families. Any mother, any father, how they feel about their child, what they worry about." If anyone could survive in a post-apocalyptic world, the Hillcoat says, it would be Viggo. "It’s such a challenging and extreme survival world that he has to do things that have to be credible." And yet, the role requires not only physical verisimilitude, but the ability to show tenderness and inner strength. "Viggo has the perfect qualities as a man and as an actor to do this part. He’s got incredible depth of soul. He so immerses himself in a particular character you think, 'Wow, that is the character. That’s not an actor playing the character.' And that’s what we wanted for this part," Wechsler ("Requiem for a Dream" &"North Country") notes, " somebody who submerges himself into the role as well as any actor I’ve ever worked with." In order for the project to come together, it was clear to the filmmakers that casting the role of The Boy would be crucial. As grueling as the shoot was for Mortensen and the crew, the pre-teen actor who plays the son would have to be both a survivor and a great natural actor to keep up. After a series of casting sessions, they found that actor in Kodi Smit-McPhee, scion of a thespian family whose father Andy is an acting coach. Kodi's portrayal of another son in "Romulus, My Father" brought him to the attention of the filmmakers. Though the casting process was thorough, encompassing a few hundred boys from around the United States and in Canada, an audition tape that Kodi's dad had sent from Australia was the one that won out. "This movie rises and falls with how well the actor does that plays the boy," Wechsler says. "And Kodi survived the challenge of all those boys and ultimately was the one that we had to go with because he had a soulful quality to him. He had charisma if you can attribute that word to a young boy. We knew that he would pop. We knew that he was the one." "What does it mean to have talent as an actor?" says Simmons. "You look at Kodi and he can get to these moments that are real. It’s a remarkable thing to see from take to take. He’ll be working on something and all of a sudden he’ll hit it and it just rings true." To hear Viggo Mortensen ("A History of Violence") tell it, the movie will be memorable not because of anything he might have done, but because of the extraordinary talents of his child-actor co-star, Smit-McPhee. "He’s an extraordinary, extraordinary actor. I think that his performance will be a historic performance. Honestly, I think it’s going to be one of those that people remember for years: for years." The interaction between the boy and his father is what carries the story and elevates it above mere science fiction. While in the novel, there is much description of how the two interact with the tortured landscape and the battered environment, in a movie, which is a visual medium, all that must be conveyed with nuance and acting alone. A notable departure from the way the story is told in the novel is the presentation of the man's wife, who commits suicide when she fears that whoever is out there will come for them. "Sooner or later, they will catch up with us and they will kill us," she says. "They will rape me: and they will rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you won't face it. You'd rather wait for it to happen." The man's choice is to take his son after this tragedy and go out on the road in hopes of somehow finding a better future for the boy, if not for himself. In the book, the wife's choices are told starkly and pragmatically, against the backdrop of horror that has befallen them and the entire human race. "I’m really thrilled with the cast that we managed to get and the variety of different characters," says Hillcoat. "John has cast the movie well: it’s not just the two of us," Mortensen says. Editor John Gregory, production designer Chris Kennedy and costume designer Margot Wilson all make commendable contributions to "The Road". "What I love about both Chris and Margot is their eye for detail," Hillcoat states. "I’d be very happy to work with them for the rest of my days." The Verdict "There's a strange beauty to "The Road" despite its stark and bleak setting. It's not a pleasant tale, nor is it a journey many cinemagoers will find uplifting. This is a post apocalyptic landscape; one in which there is nothing to celbrate or anything that offers hope, except surviving as long as one can. It's a dark and harrowing experience. Watching what unfolds in "The Road" will test you nearly as much as it does the films hapless characters. Like them, audiences will find themselves battling to survive the films 112 minute run time. And don't be fooled by seeing Guy Pearces name in the credits. His screen time is miniscule. 2 1/2 STARS. Synopsis

A Man and a Boy are on the move with all their precious possessions: whatever food and clothing they can scrounge, utensils and tools, plastic bags, tarps, blankets and anything else to keep warm in the frigid, sunless, ash-filled outdoors on their backs and in a shopping cart outfitted with a bicycle mirror so they can see who's coming up behind them. Their desperate, improvised traveling gear and their scruffy, dirty, unwashed bodies give them the look of the homeless. And that is what they are. That is what everybody is in this lifeless frontier. As they trudge along on foot, following the once-magnificent American highway system west toward the ocean, they hide in the woods and in old abandoned structures, any shelter they can improvise that keeps them safe from the elements and the wandering bands who would think nothing of taking everything from them, killing them: eating them.

Who Plays Who?

Viggo Mortensen Kodi Smit-McPhee Charlize Theron Robert Duvall Guy Pearce Molly Parker Michael Kenneth Williams Garret Dillahunt Bob Jennings Buddy Sosthand Agnes Herrmann Mark Tierno

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Man Boy Woman Blind Old Man Veteran Motherly Woman The Thief Gang Member Bearded Man Archer Archer's Woman Baby Eater

The Production Team

Director From the Adaptation by Screenplay by Producers Original Music Cinematography Film Editor Casting Production Designer Art Direction Set Decoration Costume Design

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John Hillcoat novel "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy Joe Penhall Joe Penhall Paula Mae Schwartz/Steve Schwartz/Nick Wechsler Nick Cave & Warren Ellis Javier Aguirresarobe Jon Gregory Francine Maisler Chris Kennedy Gershon Ginsburg Robert Greenfield Margot Wilson

Run Time 112 minutes Rated MA15+ [AUST] Copyright ©2010 - Dimension Films - All Rights Reserved ©1999-2010 The Movie Pages & impact Internet Services. All Rights Reserved. Protected by Australian and International Copyright. Trademark Laws and Intellectual Property Rights apply.