Hillcoat has of course collaborated with Cave many times before, most notably on his debut film Ghosts Of The Civil Dead, and 2005?‘s Cave-scripted bushranger western The Proposition. Hillcoat was due to begin work on another Cave screenplay, Death Of A Ladies?‘ Man, but that project was postponed when he was offered The Road, which follows the Coen Brothers Oscar-winning adaptation of another McCarthy novel No Country For Old Men.
"“He'?‘s filming it as we speak,"” Cave revealed to hotpress.com, "“Death Of A Ladies?‘ Man was written because he wanted to go straight into making another film after The Proposition, and we went for a low budget English film for practical reasons, because he lives in England and he could do something fast. So I wrote him this, which is basically set outside his door where he lives in Brighton, and I live in Brighton too. He wanted to do that while the Hollywood stuff he hoped would come in, which it certainly did.
“"But in fact to fund this film, which was considerably less money than any of the other stuff, was an absolute fucking nightmare. So what happened was it didn?‘t get made and John got offered The Road. And he had a very difficult decision because he really likes the film I wrote him, and he invested a lot of his own energy into the script as well. So anyway, now he?‘s making The Road, and we?‘re doing the music. It?‘'ll star Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron.”"
The Road will extend a prolific period of film work for Cave and Ellis, who recently collaborated not just on The Proposition soundtrack, but also the score for Andrew Dominik'?‘s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.