The Road To God Knows Where

It hasn’t been a sterling year for Irish film, but if we need to make up the numbers, between author Cormac McCarthy, direction by John Hillcoat and a score by Nick Cave, the filmmaker insists that we’re allowed to include The Road among our tally.

“Cormac is a southern gentleman in so many respects,” says Mr. Hillcoat. “But if it wasn’t for the accent, you’d swear he was Irish. He’s a real raconteur. He’s full of ideas. He’ll go anywhere and he’ll talk to anyone. Then you have Nick Cave, another honorary Irishman – all words, language, and flamboyant character – and me. I’ve got some Irish in me. Thank God.”
The director of such sublime, thoughtful works as Ghosts of the Civil Dead and The Proposition is only half kidding. He genuinely sees the blockbuster source novel as part of a larger canon of Hibernian, albeit Diasporic literature.
“It’s all in the words,” he tells me, hours before his latest film premieres to excellent notices at the London Film Festival. “Like Russia, and Spain a little bit, Ireland is a country that suffered incredible loss. The Irish are attuned to what loss actually means. Other nationalities can’t reach those depths so easily. And like those Russian writers, there’s no fear or snobbishness attached to expression or to art. Culture is far more integrated into mainstream culture and life. People are not afraid to sing out.”
Born in Queensland, Australia, and raised in Ontario, the 48 year-old filmmaker has long posseessed a talent worth attending to. As a child, his paintings were hanging in the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Canada. In his twenties, he made various artistic debuts as the documentarian behind INXS: Swing and Other Stories, as a pop promo wunderkind and as a feature film director with 1988’s highly regarded Ghosts of the Civil Dead. He has worked with just about anyone you can think of – Depeche Mode, Gemma Hayes – but is best known for his collaborations with Nick Cave.
Predictably, Hillcoat’s magnificent, tactile screen adaptation of The Road, for which Mr. Cave (working with Warren Ellis) provided the music, does not shy away from the gloomier aspects of McCarthy’s source novel. What is it about these gentlemen and gloom, I wonder?
“Nick had an interesting take on the book,” says Hillcoat. “For him The Road describes just how fragile and delicate everything is. So it’s all about loss. You’re right. There is a pattern there. Nick’s entire career is about loss. His whole life has been greatly impacted by the loss of his father as a teenager.”
The Road follows an unnamed father (Viggo Mortensen) and son journeying together toward the sea across a post-apocalyptic landscape, some years after a great, unexplained cataclysm has killed most life on earth. The pair hope to encounter other ‘good people’ but most of the human survivors they encounter have been reduced to cannibalism and senseless violence.
“I read it before it was published,” recalls Hillcoat. “I was totally floored by it. There was an initial emotional kick but then afterwards I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. Even now it’s hard to shake. There are whole passages of Cormac’s book that remind me of the Black Death. Everything is stripped away; how people respond to those external circumstances is extreme. The internal voice of the man affected me. It pulls you into that world completely.”
Set in a world now choked by ash and darkness, the film was never going to be an easy proposition.
“I’m not a big fan of sci-fi,” admits the director. “I would never normally go there. But I love the way genre creates a world for us to travel into. It’s a free passport that allows us to live vicariously. The difficulty is finding a new take on it that’s fresh. When I heard it was apocalyptic my first thought was ‘Oh shit. What can I do with this that hasn’t been done before?’”
He responded to the material with a brave and fiercely honest adaptation that seldom strays from McCarthy’s bleak vision.
“You have to be brave with this kind of material,” says Hillcoat. “You can’t couch things in a nice cosy way. I just stuck to Cormac’s vision. For me it’s not about fantasy or projecting into the future. It’s about the here and now. There’s something very familiar in the details. Cormac is passionate about science so there’s a meticulousness in the writing.”
Though well receieved by fans of the book, the film, as some critics have noted, is unlikely to be confused with Mary Poppins.
“Even now I have Roger Ebert saying you cannot translate this book,” says the director. “I was surprised because I really rate Ebert. He has good reasoning and he’s very passionate. Todd McCarthy at Variety responded really badly. He thought nothing worked on any level. Bad cinematography, bad performances. It was very negative. I’m a director. I’m the one who is supposed to focus on the negative. It was more important to me that Cormac loved the film and he did. And audiences seem to get it and respond to it.”
It has not helped that the film’s US distributors released a wildly misleading trailer that edited stock footage of disasters into Hillcoat’s finished film.
“That was unfortunate and I had nothing to do with that,” he says. “I understand what they were trying to do. They were hoping that book fans would come to the film anyway. They were trying to contextualise the film and broaden its reach. So I get it. But they’ve since realised the trailer went a bit too far. It is difficult when somebody intercuts stock footage to tell a story that’s radically different from the film you’ve shot. It was a mistake and it backfired because fans of the book saw it and decided oh o, they’ve butchered the whole thing. Others – I hope – could see through the lie of it.”
He shrugs it off. He’s used to making films in an uncompromising way and problems that brings. His attempts to film Nick Cave’s screenplay ‘Death of a Ladies’ Man’ failed to come to fruition and the singer was forced to rewrite the script as the novel, The Death of Bunny Monroe. The duo are currently struggling with an American gangster film; “It’s a beautiful script,” says Hillcoat, “with a phenomenal cast – Michael Shannon, Shia le Beouf, Amy Adams, Michael Fassbender, Jeremy Renner, Paul Dano – and there’s no interest. There have been major changes in the industry. In the seventies, the studios lost control and let filmmakers run around. As a result, films like Nashville were making the cover of Newsweek. Nowadays it would be lucky to get a capsule review. Foreign language film is a dirty hyphenate. That does worry me. There are extraordinary films being marginalised in a broader dumbing down. That brings us back to the importance of Irish literature.”
He laughs.
“Because there are times when I envy that Irish black humour.”