Articles
When the Streets Have No Names
Talking to the director John Hillcoat on his staggering new film, The Road. Cormac McCarthy's award-winning novel, The Road,...
11.27.09
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JH: The great thing about the book is the way that you can project into it. Even to the extreme of the characters not having names. And, likewise, with the big event. To me, [the environment] is the overwhelming issue right now. It's catching up with us. Seeing how powerful nature is is really something, but I didn't want to spell that out. Nuclear terrorism could jumpstart things. Or something that just comes out of the blue, like a meteorite. If you're the last people trying to survive, how it happens is irrelevant. But there is that element of the wakeup call, reminding us how vulnerable and how special we are. This is why Thanksgiving is the perfect release date, to remind us of basic things. I think there is a lot to be said for really basic things, like goodness and kindness, that we completely forget. I think there is a moral. It's a parable. It's meant to be some kind of reminder for us.G:It's a bit ironic how closely this film follows on the heels of the bombastic apocalypse in 2012, isn't it?JH: It seems to be a zeitgeist out there. But they're very different approaches.G:Yours is the more realist.JH: I think, with the book, there is great humanity there. It's really about who we are, what's important, as opposed to the roller coaster ride. Although, it has that.G:So, coming out of the movie, the first thing I did was call my dad.JH: That's great.G:But then the second thing was that I was thinking, I might need to get a gun. It just struck me that the gun was so helpful to the Man and the Boy. And it made me reconsider a lot of what I think about guns.JH: So you're packing now?G:Not yet. But I want to know if that was something you considered. It just seemed so integral to their survival.JH: I think that's more to do with the mythology and what Cormac writes about, which in some ways it's a new frontier, it's like the Wild West. It's survival. All those frontiers, whether they're in the future or the past or happening right now, they're always rife with extreme conflict. But your first response is what I hope carries through, as opposed to a lot of people arming themselves to the teeth. I don't think its come to that yet.G:There is quite a bit of religious imagery, especially a pivotal scene in a church. Was that intentional? Did you consider this a religious parable? Or am I reading too much into it?JH: The church was just one of the locations. We looked at a lot of photographs of major conflicts, like the second World War. I saw this image of a bombed out church, and what interested me was the change of things and their meaning to this whole other extreme. It's an abandoned place, where people aren't coming together to worship. Quite the opposite. It's interesting how things change. At the moment, the most powerful things on the planet are corporations. Yet, things could change so that they're totally meaningless. That's one positive thing about the apocalypse. Getting rid of corporate cannibalism.G:And replacing it with literal cannibalism?JH: Well, I don't know which is worse. But going back to the church: People can read different things. It can read on a mythic level or just appear on the human level, which is how I was approaching it. A story about human goodness can be a metaphor for so many things, whether it's just the better side of humanity or some higher power. We didn't want to hammer home any definitive answer there. You know, the book is the most translated book of modern time, and I think that's because of the different levels you can read into it.--Header photo by Javier Aguirresarobe © The Weinstein Company, 2009; Hillcoat photo by Macall Polay, 2929/Dimension Films, 2009.