Hi, I'm John Hillcoat, director of The Road, attempting a director's commentary.
Bear with me, 'cause I'm not used to these things.
If anyone listens, in fact. Anyway, here we are. Opening credits.
I'm just winging this. So, we start with flashbacks.
These were actually inspired by
the photographs of William Eggleston,
a fantastic Southern American photographer.
Just little snippets of life that we take for granted.
These are the memories that
are inside the mind of our central character, The Man, played by Viggo Mortensen.
Now we're back to the night of
when it all began.
I mean, when it all changed.
This is based, like most of these things, on a scene from the book.
Very realistic, not revealing much.
Just what people do in these times of crisis.
This is in fact a procedure that you're meant to do
when the bush fires in Australia kick off, or any bush fires or catastrophes,
is you run the water and fill up all your bathtubs and sinks.
Well, when I look at this stuff, I think about the conditions we're filming in.
These are all real locations.
Freezing cold winter in Pennsylvania.
That waterfall, in fact, was solid frozen ice
when we looked at it a few days before filming.
It started to thaw out.
You can see the breath there on Viggo. Gives you an idea.
This is also intercut with Mount Saint Helens,
which is in Washington State,
where half a mountain blew up.
And this is just to convey the force of nature.
One small incident and this is what you get.
All these trees were stripped of their foliage.
There was a lake, they were torn up and...
This is 1980, I think.
The roads were actually collapsing because they were covered in snow.
It took forever for us to get to this location.
But, yeah, there was a lake that was blown out up the mountain
and then it pulled all these trees back down into the lake
and it rose 300 feet. That's it, there.
And all those trees are just the ones dragged back down
when the lake dragged back down into its position.
There's hundreds of thousands of trees.
This is to set up, of course, this world from the book
where trees are collapsing, the world is dying.
We saved the voiceover...
As Joe Penhall, the screenwriter, and myself,
when we first discussed this, adapting the book,
I'm always in favor of holding off on voiceover as the very last thing,
because especially when it's so all-encompassing in this book,
the poetry of the language, I think one has to resist.
We would've relied too heavily on it.
So we came to it as a method of getting inside The Man's head,
the way that the novel does.
You have to find these cinematic tools, I guess,
that can get an internal thing.
So, hence, the flashbacks and the use of voiceover
are techniques for creating this.
These are combinations of real locations
and some visual effects on that last shot
where the building is half-collapsed.
Yeah, they're just a collection of ways
of telling this story through imagery, like this is from the book,
and the bodies hanging around...
This was actually in New Orleans.
Very spooky place in that there were actual passports of people.
There was a military recruitment office,
and there was George Bush smiling smugly on the wall.
And yeah.
Half our crew,
at that point, had been through Katrina,
which, of course, is really a combination of manmade and natural disaster.
Which kind of gave us...
The reason we used these locations,
like here is an ash pile out in Pennsylvania from the strip mining,
was a way of realistically being authentic
to what the book was really describing, when things break down.
And we've witnessed these things, whether it's the trolley over there,
where people... That's the homeless in every city.
And whether it's places like Katrina
or the mining manmade stuff
or total natural disasters like Mount Saint Helens,
this is all a way of building up this realistic vision of an apocalypse
that we've actually already seen in glimpses.
We had a hell of a time trying to drum up a big enough fire,
because everything was so cold and damp here.
But yeah...
And here we...
The smoke in the background there is actually from 9/11.
The size, the scale of the smoke plumes
could actually be seen from outer space, from satellite pictures.
It was about creating the scale of this world
and also referencing, as I said, the kind of reality.
This is a kind of... We're getting to a very controversial scene
That actually really disturbed me when I first read the book.
I had more problems with this scene than any other in terms of
who do we cast as this kid and how do we film it?
You know, how do we protect this kid from the content?
Which later, I was thinking of using special effects
and him being sort of oblivious to half the stuff going on,
which I later found out is what Kubrick did in The Shining.
Apparently the kid, that brilliant kid, never knew it was a horror movie.
However, in this tale,
Kodi Smit-McPhee, there, is in every scene virtually.
And Viggo also was worried about
how the hell are we going to find a kid that can pull this off?
And this is specifically the scene I was most concerned about.
Where the stakes are that high
that the father would rather,
understandably, take their lives
than be captured by cannibals.
And this is all about the realism of how people behave under pressure.
Anyway, getting back to Kodi, this was...
You know, I was blessed, really,
given a great gift in this child,
because he was so mature beyond his years.
And I discovered that was really the key to it all, was finding someone,
a kid that could understand this material in a very sophisticated way,
that understood drama, very grounded.
He comes from an acting family where his father is an actor.
He's actually one of the cannibals that I'll point out later in the cannibal gang.
His sister is a very talented actress.
They're very grounded Aussies.
In fact, when he came for the audition,
his father had read him the whole book.
And he was remarkably...
He didn't have any kind of nightmares and really understood that this was
talking about...
Like drama, like all great conflict...
That's what the essence of drama really is, is conflict.
He understood that sometimes these things are exaggerated
and taken to extremes in order to tell us about
human behavior and who we really are.
Of course, Charlize was amazing coming in here with Viggo.
We decided, having been there for the birth of my child, Louie,
my gorgeous boy,
I'd never forget how primal childbirth is,
to witness the screams.
To me, it's always depicted in films as kind of...
You never sense that real pain and agony of giving birth.
And so, that's what Charlize was doing very effectively there.
Here we have the road gang
and Kodi's father coming out, running out there.
And we wanted to avoid...
We wanted to avoid any reference to Mad Max.
So, instead of boilersuits,
which were in all the road gang in the book,
we kind of went more...
Deliverance was an inspiration, the great John Boorman film.
Kodi's father is on the right there.
Andy. And this is Garret Dillahunt, great actor.
He was in No Country for Old Men as well.
And we had lengthy discussions about
what happens when people revert to their base nature
and become the animals that all humans are.
When their senses...
When they are living in these sort of conditions,
the senses are magnified.
So what he does here really is...
It's actually the smell.
He's got these heightened animal instincts here.
He just can sense someone's there,
which was this idea of him just suddenly snapping on him.
Later, he plays with the sense of smell.
And Viggo here, I mean, these...
Viggo had been sleeping in this outfit and was...
There's Kodi's father, Andy, in the foreground.
Yeah, he'd been thrown out of a shop in Pittsburgh.
They thought he was a homeless vagrant.
And he really got this freezing cold environment.
You can see the breath again coming out here.
He used it as a tool almost.
He would spray himself with water to feel the cold
and be reminded, you know, rubbing the dirt all over into his eyes.
A very...
Kind of a form of Method,
but that was just one of the processes.
Every actor works in a different way. He had to access a lot of raw emotion.
But I think all the cast were, by being in these environments,
working with it as another character.
As Kodi said, "it was a lot easier feeling a bit cold
"than actually having to act it on top of the emotional stuff."
And something...
Yeah, we got Garret to not blink, there was only one moment where he blinks.
Which, again, was just a detail that...
That was special effects, so Kodi was spared that.
But he knew it was all a fiction drama, luckily.
But he was amazing, incredibly professional and very enthusiastic,
and loved the story and what it was trying to say.
Of course, this is the hunt now,
and they're getting away from the road gang.
We had to shoot a lot of this stuff very quickly, 'cause the locations...
There were 50 locations, it was 80% exterior,
wintertime, four different states,
and we had short hours, nine-hour days.
Kodi had three hours of schooling, so we had to work very quickly
and be very focused, everyone involved.
So, for Kodi and Viggo, it was quite a challenge
to get into the zone of every scene.
And here I was talking to Kodi about what shock was.
He'd had an accident once,
so he understood how the body defends itself.
So, actually, your body
shuts down and you become numb to everything
as a defense mechanism.
But we were talking about how when suddenly you come out of shock,
it's like an emotional freight train. All the stuff hits you again.
And we were shooting a lot of this stuff with two cameras,
and this scene here is an example of...
Something extraordinary happened here where Kodi is such a professional.
He didn't tell us right here that he actually got so cold that he started...
He started to cry, for real.
And I could tell this was happening, and the crew were, you know...
It was a moment of reckoning for me ethically.
All the crew were eyes on me, and I was just about to call "Cut."
And he had just said "Papa" before and was playing the scene.
And Viggo was saying all his lines,
and I knew that they were both playing the scene, working the scene,
so I knew I couldn't. They would kill me, both of them.
And Kodi was like that, he said, "Did you get that?"
He's like a 30-year-old in an 11-year-old's body.
But Kodi's father was there, he was going to...
Viggo was left holding Kodi after I called "Cut."
And he did this incredible thing of stepping away
and leaving Viggo holding Kodi.
He later said it was one of the most heartbreaking things he's ever done.
But he realized, as an actor, that was a critical moment for them to bond together.
And from that day on, their relationship deepened
and there was a new level of trust between them.
A kind of fearlessness.
Of course, Kodi never saw this, but this was...
Yes.
I think we used cow or sheep guts there.
The CGI head of Garret.
This is a flashback from the book. We did want to...
I talked to Charlize about really making her argument very compelling.
And we wanted to really present her argument
as quite a legitimate and sane one,
as opposed to just being crazy.
It's very tough
as we're imagining the worst, most extreme circumstances
and how everyday people will behave.
For me, the book was all about what we're really made of, underneath,
when our comfort zone's stripped away.
And all these actors involved,
Charlize, Viggo, Kodi,
they all really understood about the emotional...
The essence of what's going on in these scenes
and trying to be truthful to that in some way.
Well, in a truthful way.
So we had to... Again, a lot of this stuff came through
to just shooting two cameras
and trying to get it in as few takes as possible.
Opposite of the Kubrick approach, where you film endlessly
until the actors supposedly stop acting,
I think, is what he was aiming at.
But I also think if you can somehow get the focus,
and when you're working with
these types of
dedicated actors,
it's amazing to see how they can
nail things so quickly, you know, with just a few takes.
But it's about creating the right environment,
and having a lot of conversations beforehand, I think, really helped.
We spent...
Kodi, Viggo and Joe Penhall, the writer, and myself
spent a long time in rehearsals,
not blocking any of these scenes or even emotionally working them.
It was more about just
discussing what the subtext was and what the actual...
What was going on emotionally for each of these characters,
and really understanding where they were coming from
and why they were doing the things they were doing.
And trying to answer as many questions in advance.
So those were the flashbacks, of course,
that are always happening inside The Man's head.
For me, the book was always like a kind of fable, a moral fable
about human goodness, fundamentally.
And, of course, human badness as a way to highlight that goodness,
which is what Kodi and Viggo are talking about in this scene.
What is it that
makes you rise above the road gang?
As an American tale, too, it's something where good guys/bad guys
is such a fundamental part of the vocabulary of Americans.
But in this case, these terms actually take on really complex three dimensions
as the story progresses.
The way that The Man, under pressure,
starts losing his own morals that The Boy then later rescues.
This, of course, is the great cola scene from the book.
It's funny, people misconstrue this as product placement of some sort.
But we had to actually shoot this scene
five different times with five different soft drinks.
One generic that you couldn't recognize, which was that one.
The first one was the cola version. We had all sorts.
Basically, all these corporations didn't want anything to do with the film,
because it was not a family...
They were a family brand that didn't wanna be associated with cannibalism
and the dark content of the book.
Later, Viggo and Kodi said that they actually saved their best work for that,
when we did that version.
It's for you.
Come on.
Back then we see the father's enjoyment
and what this means.
'Cause he knows what it contains and he's got the past symbolic imagery.
But to the kid, it's just a fizzy, bubbly drink.
It's a relief from dirty bark water
that they were filtering from the previous scene, so...
Yeah, this is actually an unopened bridge that we got access to.
But, yeah, so the way that corporations in this context, in this world,
actually have lost their meaning, we thought very important.
And yet, it just comes down to the actual substance itself,
which is what Kodi responds to,
and he's, of course, responding to his own father's reaction
to this special find and special gift.
A moment of kindness and relief.
This was the scene that I got the children, the boys, to audition to.
I felt it was a neutral scene
that was about loss and death
that most kids by the age of 11 have thought about on many levels
or even experienced, unfortunately,
whether it's with pets or family friends or family or etcetera.
So, yeah, I noticed my own boy,
from the age of six and seven,
started to ask questions about mortality,
trying to work out all of this.
Of course, this conversation triggers memories.
More memories of what
The Man actually has to carry inside his head.
Of course, actually with Kodi, though, getting back to this audition,
he, in fact, did these extra scenes as well with his own father,
who you saw earlier.
And they did that suicide scene that I was most troubled by
as part of their audition.
So, to me, it was a message either that, "My boy can cope with this,"
or that they're completely insane.
Which troubled me,
but then I found out that Kodi had done this other film,
Romulus, My Father, which was a challenging drama with Eric Bana,
and was a real professional.
So that was a relief.
This is the incredible production designer,
Chris Kennedy, that's done all my work.
We've worked together on every film,
and he found all these locations, a lot of them on his computer
and the Internet in Australia.
He's got incredible understanding of
how landscapes
and, visually, things work into stories and emotions
on a more complex level than just mere what the script describes,
and what props are needed for any given scene, etcetera.
The design goes for him... We spent a lot of time.
He's the first person, he and Nick Cave,
I talk to right from the get-go on any project.
And we do a lot of research, Chris and I.
We love referencing real things.
And that was...
Again, here's another quite emotionally intense scene.
I think, for me, acting, really, it's not about acting, it's about reacting.
And the way...
And this is a good scene, as an example.
It was really about their reactions to each other,
as opposed to anything else.
God.
You go south.
Yeah, there, the "Go..."
This is where the "Go south" mission starts,
the idea of trying to hang on to something to keep going with,
which is the father's route, The Man's route.
In this case, it's quite a taboo, this idea
of the mother unable to cope and leaving,
as we traditionally see the mother as being the all-nurturing sort
and the father being more absent.
And so it was good to explore
the role reversals in these cases,
where the father was more the nurturer that wouldn't let go in any way,
and to explore fatherhood in this nurturing, loving kind of way.
Which is really what the book is all about.
Cormac wrote it for his own son.
And he...
Cormac was fantastic to work with
because he didn't ask for a script, and we never volunteered it.
He was always available for conversations.
This was Kodi's most challenging scene, despite all the joy that he's showing.
That water was absolutely freezing,
but we had a hot Jacuzzi that he slipped into
and safety officers and stunt people, and all that, timing it.
We had to get it all within 30 seconds.
Yeah, now here, for me,
this said everything there is to say about cannibalism.
This is kind of leading to the most horrible, horrifying scene,
for me when I read the book, and for most people, I think,
over and above the baby on the spit, the controversial scene that I fought for
and made sure we had in the script and that we filmed and had in the cut,
and found that actually it didn't work.
Because by the time... It comes later in the story
and it was just made redundant, in fact, by this whole scenario.
I think this is where we really understand
just how far humans can go and will go.
Of course, Cormac is like a scientist himself.
He reads only nonfiction.
His passion is the Santa Fe Institute, which is a think-tank of great scientists,
the world's leading scientists,
and that he meets and talks and does his own research.
And of course, there's endless examples throughout the ages
of humans resorting to cannibalism for various reasons.
And here, in this scene, The Boy picks up all the hints
that the father won't really recognize
out of his own determination and desperation. He just wants to...
He thinks there's some vital food.
They're starving. They're desperate.
I think it's a very truthful reading of what people would do in these sort of situations.
And we were filming this in an old antique dealer's house.
We had a lot of great goodwill
with people that responded to the book and loved the book so much.
Including the people that you'll soon see on the floor,
who we cast as...
We were casting people that were really skinny
and willing to be naked on a cement floor,
and amputees.
These people weren't there when Kodi was there.
But we did some CG extras, CGI.
I must say the CGI, visual effects, was a critical part
of completing this world that we were creating.
So even there, it's all... We had real skinny people and amputees.
But they still then added
the cut, raw meat aspects of that shot,
for those people grisly enough to examine it.
I didn't wanna go overboard with any of this stuff,
because I think it's really about showing restraint,
even though you see what you need to see, so you understand what's going on.
This is actually what... Joe Penhall expanded this slightly
by adding domestic dialogue to this scene,
because we wanted to establish
these are like the bourgeoisie of cannibalism.
This is the middle class, the landed gentry.
But these people... There's a bit of black humor, the exercise bike.
There's a lot of black humor, as you can imagine,
going on in between all this stuff amongst the crew and the cast.
- Take it! Take it. Take it. - No.
Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid.
When they get hold of you, you're gonna have to do it just like everybody else.
You have to be brave. You have to! You know how to do it.
- You know how. - Be right up.
Bad guys. Bad men.
One thing I can talk about is fear. This is all actually...
In many ways, this is just about how people react under fear.
And now, this is something to intensify the fear.
This is one of the translations, that in the book,
all of this scene takes place out in the field.
They run away. They've already escaped.
And we decided that it would make more sense
to have it within the very house.
Again, that's a geographical, physical thing.
It's amazing how when you physicalize things,
how they change, the dynamics change.
'Cause if you imagine that prior scene in the bathroom
being actually already at this point,
all happening down on the ground from a safe...
Well, a reasonable distance, it wouldn't have the same
fear and tension.
On a more practical, pragmatic basis,
it's like in the book as well, there are things that work in the novel,
but when you physicalize it, it changes.
So for instance,
they're just pushing the shopping trolley through the woods.
I mean, there's a scene, several scenes in the book,
where, physically, if you had that, it would be impossible.
You can't push a shopping trolley full of stuff,
which is why we actually deliberately lost the shopping trolley
back when the road gang happened.
So we had to change things like that around
in order to make it credible in this context.
Getting back to actually...
Cormac, he said, "Look, a book is a book. A film is a film.
"They're completely different mediums. You've gotta do your thing."
This was the first conversation we had.
Actually, I'll get back to that, because here they're eating real...
Kodi and Viggo were hanging out together
as much as possible beforehand in Pittsburgh.
And somehow, on their travels, they came across, in a Mexican shop,
real, flavored insects that you could eat.
There were chili-flavored crickets,
and they got packets of them, and that's what they were using.
And this is a critical scene where
the father explains and reassures The Boy
that they will never resort
to what The Boy is most troubled by now,
having glimpsed it, at close-range.
And it's hanging on to that elevated aspect of humanity
that is what this tale is all about.
That's New Orleans, that's all real. A suburb.
This, visual effects expanded it, but all those houses were real.
And the aftermath of Katrina.
Getting back to Cormac and the story of...
Well, he was available for questions. He said, "Look, you..."
He understood the differences between the two mediums.
It was great, and a release of the burden of responsibility,
to let us get on and do what we thought was the way to do it.
He said, "Look, the less cooks in the pot, the better.
"The more people out of your hair, the better."
So he left me to it, but was always available to talk, and we had long, long talks.
And he later came to set with his own son, which was an amazing experience
for all of us, really, to see where this story came from.
A lot of these conversations,
the book actually started.
Cormac's explained that he first got the idea
when he was looking out across a barren landscape in a motel
in New Mexico or some desert at 4:00 in the morning,
and his son was soundly sleeping in bed.
And he was looking at this desolate landscape imagining...
He was 76, sorry, 70, and the boy was five at the time.
And he was imagining, "What's gonna happen when I'm gone?
"How am I gonna prepare the boy
"in this kind of world?"
That parental fear that we all have as parents
and as human beings, just the fear of mortality of one generation.
"How do you leave your loved ones?" is something that... That's what he ran with.
And he just set it
in the most extreme scenarios.
But very believable, very human,
and that's what we were trying to do here, was just focus on this human relationship,
as opposed to any big spectacle about the big event.
And The Boy always senses that there is...
Not only senses, but here is a big turning point where now he knows.
He knows there's other...
He knows that there is possibly other kids like him,
other parents, other people in their exact same situation.
And yet, the father is so protective, understandably.
He won't allow this to happen.
So...
And the father, because they're both so hungry and desperate,
thought that it was all just a figment of his imagination.
So this is actually now part of just a rundown neighborhood
in Pennsylvania, in Pittsburgh.
And this shot here is actually 70mm IMAX footage
from two days after Katrina struck.
This is, again, aftermath of Katrina, but we've done some visual effects work.
And those collapsed towers are real.
Those electrical collapsed towers were sourced elsewhere.
This is desolate Pittsburgh
that we've...
So we've kind of made a synthesis of all these real events,
whether it's urban decay or...
And pieced it all together that way.
So, with the voiceover that we just heard,
what we ended up doing is trying to avoid any poetry of the language
that Cormac used.
We kept the innate poetry of the dialogue.
But the more poetic prose
that he's brilliant at
is something that we wanted to leave out.
Because it would then feel self-conscious,
it wouldn't feel like thoughts of a real character.
It would sound a bit contrived,
and it would be too much of an obvious reference to a literary source.
Which Cormac really understood.
The moment of reckoning really came when Joe Penhall and myself
took the film to New Mexico to show McCarthy.
And we had done a rough of the voiceover that we felt was necessary
and added something to the internal process
of The Man and the story.
And Cormac,
having never read the script or anything...
Joe and I were really anxious,
and he came, picked us up in this old, beat-up Cadillac,
and we went out to this recording,
I mean, a film studio that was strangely empty
in the middle of the desert in Albuquerque, and he'd driven hours from Santa Fe.
And we showed him the film
and the lights came up after,
and he mumbled something about needing the men's room
and disappeared for about 15, 20 minutes.
And at that point, Joe and I actually felt very similar
to what Viggo is doing right here and right now and feeling...
We thought we were finished, and he came back,
and said that it's really good,
and "It's like something we've never seen before."
And I kind of cross-questioned him, because at this point, I was so paranoid
that I didn't believe anything.
And he said, "Look, I didn't come all this way
"to blow smoke up your ass."
And then he took Joe and I out for a seven-hour lunch, which was fantastic.
And after many glasses of wine and incredible conversations,
he drove us to the airport and off we went.
And then at 8:00 a.m. the next morning, he gave us some notes,
which we asked for, relating to any comments.
And the great thing is he didn't miss anything from the novel
other than three lines of dialogue, which I'll point out later.
We put back in. Luckily, we had filmed, and I was hoping to get back in the film.
And so Cormac really aided in that process,
and also he gave some very specific notes on certain words
that he didn't think were necessary,
and other words that he did, on his old typewriter, typed up,
and faxed through the next morning.
Yeah, very precise, very helpful.
And basically, he really loved the film,
and he was a huge ally through to finishing it off.
And he's a great conversationalist and very inspired by film.
But it's an area that he just doesn't want to get involved with as well.
He actually wrote No Country for Old Men as a screenplay way back,
and no one would finance it, no one was interested.
As he says, "It's a brutal industry," and it really is.
And ironically, though, well, we all know what happened to No Country.
He turned it into a novel years, years later.
And then the Coens took it from there, so...
Here is...
That was just one of the many ironies of the film business.
This, of course, is one of the miracles
that they come across in their journey.
Just as we think they've hit their lowest point.
It's food.
And here is...
This is actually a set that Chris Kennedy and the art department made.
The music is something
that Nick and I had talked about from when Joe was writing the script.
And Warren Ellis and Nick Cave,
what they do then is like actors that discuss a lot and prepare and prepare.
Then they watch the film afresh and throw it all away,
and just respond to the feelings that they get
on a very organic, intuitive, semi-improvised way.
The thing we had discussed that we stuck to was there's gonna be two modes of music.
One was the very, just the carnal...
I mean, the primal fear stuff, of cannibalism and suspense
and adding suspense, etcetera,
representing the fear in this world.
The other was more delicate, which was just...
Originally, I was talking to Nick about somewhere between folk and classical,
and had a bunch of reference material.
There was a lot of Bach.
And just simple Arvo Pärt.
Simple classical influences.
But it was meant to, the music there...
That aspect of the music is related to The Man
and the world that he's left behind.
And this feeling of delicacy and beauty,
and loss, when these things are lost, a kind of tinge of melancholy.
As part of, again, the internal process,
and part of the tools of cinema, to utilize or not.
In the case of No Country, where they, wisely...
Well, they actually had composed a score,
and when they screened it for a bunch of trusted friends,
no one noticed that the score wasn't playing,
and they realized, "Well, we don't need it. Doesn't add anything."
They made the right choice there. We wanted to try something different here
because of the emotional, internal world of this character,
and a reminder of
the world as we know it.
And there are things I'm always open to
and always looking for actors to add things that come up
when they have to physicalize
and they have to bring this character
into reality.
And this is one idea that Viggo had amongst many.
Some were very useful and appropriate and others weren't.
And in this case, this was a great idea.
We were talking about this kid's still a kid,
regardless of him being born into this world.
There's still a developmental process.
And we were just talking along those lines and Viggo thought about,
"This child, why wouldn't he be collecting things as he goes along?"
So, of course, he's got this private collection of stuff
that he's collected and hidden from The Man,
because it's his own little private world of things.
And Viggo, The Man, has discovered them in The Boy's pocket
and this is what helps trigger the memory here
of just showing their life when it was full of security and comfort
and the love of his wife.
That's the other thing we wanted to kind of highlight in this story
a bit more than what's even in the book, is the memory of this love.
Because losing his wife
would be something that he'd think about every day.
And yet he couldn't...
He doesn't want to tell The Boy that and remind The Boy,
'cause The Boy has to live with the loss of his mother every day.
So, yeah.
I take the approach, as a director,
of a good idea is a good idea, no matter where it comes from.
And you have to kind of be open to that,
almost like an editor,
where you then edit what will be useful and works, and what doesn't.
And that's the magic of shooting, and the collaborative process.
You work with people like Nick Cave
and Warren Ellis and Chris Kennedy,
and Margot doing the wardrobe there.
Her references... We both collected photos of the homeless,
and the way the plastic...
The warmth device of keeping moisture out via plastic.
Well, here we can see how Viggo's been starving himself.
He was on a heavy diet,
severe diet to lose weight.
This cleansing montage
is actually another example of where we had to find a creative solution.
With 50 different locations
in four different states,
we couldn't afford to shoot...
I mean, it, logistically, was impossible to shoot chronologically,
which was always the ideal case,
especially in these sort of stories.
So that being an impossibility, logistically, as we got into pre-production,
we had to then find a solution.
Because in the book, The Man shaves when he gets to the bunker
and The Boy doesn't.
It's like this whole other reality
of them sharing the luxuries
of the past world together.
But then we couldn't do a clean shave 'cause we're shooting out of sequence.
So the solution occurred
in a way that, I think, works very well here,
is this idea of them cleansing.
So, it's not so much about the beard, it becomes something about cleaning away,
washing away all the filth
and the history of this struggle that they've been carrying with them,
as part of the comfort of food and all these other things that they discover.
It's that washing, and The Boy brushing his teeth
and scrubbing the din' away.
And here is...
Again, this is another hint that there might... Is it a threat?
Or is it something that you flee from?
Or is it what The Boy senses may be...
They shouldn't. I mean, this is a tough one. Would you leave this behind?
What would you do? Would the dog be
a threat or not?
So, now we replace the trolley with this garden trolley.
Here we come across the great Robert Duvall, The Old Man.
This is very exciting, to work with Robert.
I talked to him a lot about his first appearance in film way back,
To Kill a Mockingbird, "Boo" Radley.
I was interested in him just exploring a slightly more vulnerable side.
'Cause we know Robert in recent times, especially his...
He's got this real strength, this kind of gruff strength to him.
So, this old man was really...
We had to believe that somehow he could stick around all this time and yet
make it bring out something else.
And here's...
This is again... There's a little detail,
a great detail of Margot's with the homemade shoes,
and warmth, the plastic,
and sharing The Boy's...
Here is, again, where The Boy
has this innate kindness that he's tapping into,
and also he senses that this man...
intuitively, he senses that this man isn't a threat,
whereas his father, through fear, can't even afford to take that risk.
So The Boy is really becoming the moral compass now.
This is the beginning of
where they kind of go head to head.
The Boy has to challenge The Man, really, to stand on his own two feet.
I see it.
And I know what you're gonna ask me, and the answer is no.
Very sweet, funny line here.
What's the question?
We can't keep him.
And actually, Kodi utilized...
He had seen a dog that was blind,
an old, scruffy dog that was blind the day before doing these scenes,
and he wanted to work with that,
treating The Old Man like this damaged pet.
'Cause he's just not used to human interaction,
other than the closeness of his father and the memories of his mother.
So, this is a very important first encounter, really, close encounter with someone,
and The Boy... The father is going to practice caution.
That's, by the way, a huge ash pile in Nemacolin.
This environment was incredible.
You could see, look down upon this...
One of the biggest high-security prisons I've ever laid eyes on.
It was the size of a city. Supermax.
I remember when we first came out here,
we got surrounded by guards,
'cause we were wearing balaclavas 'cause it was so ferociously cold,
and they thought we were doing a break-out from the prison.
Anyway, that's the ash pile in the background.
Now, this is an amazing scene.
This, again, is where two cameras saved us, on Robert.
We had three takes, we were running out of time.
We were plagued by sunlight during the day, so we couldn't film much.
We kept trying to screen the sun, 'cause we're creating a world without sun.
So our worst nightmare was when the sun came out.
And so we lost a lot of time.
Here, Robert was going the next day and we needed to nail this scene.
So what happened here is,
we were working this scene, it was a great...
These are all lines from the book.
And again, this is where they have this kind of philosophical conversation,
and musings about the apocalypse, etcetera.
But it sounded strangely cerebral and kind of self-conscious.
And it was the only scene that felt
a bit like from a book or a play.
So I asked Robert, right here, before doing this take,
I just quietly asked him if he could personalize it somehow,
make it, you know, he's lived through all this pain
to give us a hint,
and let the actors, Viggo and Robert, just run with it.
So, what he just said, this stuff about having his own child,
was totally improvised and unscripted, that Robert just came up with in one take.
Whereas he then worked in the lines
that were originally from the book in the script.
And yet there's this incredible emotion that he's brought to it,
which kind of grounds it all in a human context.
It also makes Viggo, in responding,
reacting from this, he comes up letting his guard down a bit.
So, it's less icy and he's almost...
There's a point where he's sort of warming to the guy slightly,
but still reluctant to do it fully.
There were warnings.
Yeah, some people thought it was a con. I always believed in it.
We all just broke when...
All these close-ups were virtually one take
from this one improvised moment,
and we just all broke out into applause
as soon as I called "Cut."
We were cheering and clapping
'cause we just knew this is the sort of magic that just sometimes happens.
And both Viggo and Robert rose to the occasion.
God wouldn't know what...
God wouldn't know what he knows.
I think it's something that you're always trying to find and always
trying to allow to come to the surface somehow
when you're shooting.
Beware.
Do you ever wish you would die?
No.
It's foolish to ask for luxuries in times like these.
Bitterly humorous line, that one.
- He's gonna die and you don't care. - I care enough.
Now we did some scenes like this all just one shot,
instead of your usual multi-cut coverage
simply because, you know... I mean,
that was a moment where
The Boy is really questioning The Man now.
Here's another slight diversion from the book,
where we had to get across
the idea of the cannibal threat without...
In the book, there was huge armies
where there were enslaved captives in chains,
and a big army of cannibals.
And we didn't want any kind of feeling to Mad Max,
and so, instead, we took the same idea
of a more organized, greater...
A feeling of spreading of cannibalism and ritual violence.
This idea, this blood, footprints, killing floor in the snow of footprints,
is literally a photographic reference I came across from Bosnia.
And then we just utilized...
This again here is showing that there are others,
possibly like the father and child, father and son.
Here's a woman and her child being hunted in an organized way.
Which then leads to the tree-falling sequence which was...
We had more conversations, technically, about this scene than any others.
"How do we achieve it?"
We were looking at special effects, creating all this stuff,
and Chris Kennedy, who works out in the countryside,
was pointing out...
My worry was the gravity and weight of trees hitting the ground.
So rather than building, constructing fake ones,
we just found a forest where...
Woods where trees needed to be felled,
and we got very experienced professional woodcutters in
to literally cut them up and let them fall.
We had multiple cameras,
and we were pulling the trees up by the roots, earlier you saw,
and cutting them down and letting them hit the ground.
Obviously, the actors weren't in frame when they actually hit.
That was a bit of visual effects, in-camera stuff like models.
CGI, I think,
when it's created from nothing,
the gravity and movement still feels disconnected.
I mean, it still doesn't feel like it's grounded in the laws of physics
as we understand it.
So, Mark Forker, our visual effects people, worked carefully with...
And our special effects guys, the physical special effects guys,
and Chris Kennedy, all kind of coordinated very closely together.
And this is a great location that we found.
Just an abandoned church
in a rundown neighborhood outside of Pittsburgh,
that they were using as a theater,
that stage, for the local community.
And here's the terrible realization that The Boy has
that now, on top of everything else, he's got to...
He realizes that his father's not gonna make it.
This was, I think, the third day of shooting.
We had snowstorms outside.
Kodi putting his hand over Viggo's mouth,
stopping him, saying, "Stop,"
was, again, just a natural response that was never scripted.
He just came up with that himself as a natural response.
Very moving, believable notion.
This map, people have tried to work out,
but like the book, it's got a great non-specific...
It feels real and very authentic,
and yet it's America without the landmarks,
without the iconography.
So we wanted to avoid the urban city,
the Statue of Liberty and all those landmarks that had been overused.
So that was just a synthesis of parts of America
and parts of a coast put together into a fictional America.
This new America that's been devastated...
The more you talk about the big event, the more it takes away
from the realism of the human experience.
I mean, more recently in Haiti,
the discussions were about survival, about food,
and about human survival.
And that's what would happen in any of these kinds of events.
Whether they're Katrina or 9/11 or wherever,
it immediately becomes about day-to-day survival
and hanging on to your humanity,
as opposed to focusing on the spectacle,
the big event, which is a more abstract notion,
or a detached notion.
Takes it away from the human experience.
Now, this is Oregon. We chose the beach
because of the volcanic sand, the gray, the dark sand.
That... Unfortunately...
One of Cormac's notes was that he has never seen in a film...
When people vomit, it always sounds fake,
because it's coming from the mouth up, never comes from the gut.
So, I happened to, when I was working with sound,
my assistant, Brett, and myself came down with a stomach virus,
and I had to keep working, so we recorded that.
And that is my...
I contributed there for Kodi, a little bit there,
coming up from the gut, on that vomit.
This is the exchange,
the only bit that Cormac missed when he saw an earlier cut.
And it's a simple, beautiful exchange
that really reflects the brilliance of the dialogue of the book,
where it's a love story, fundamentally, between a father and son
and yet they never say, "I love you."
And yet when you hear those lines,
it's saying that in a really fantastic way.
That, by the way, was a literal, verbatim conversation
that John, Cormac's son, had with him one night.
As kids do, they ask about these things.
So one night he asked Cormac,
"What would you do if I died?"
And Cormac's response is, "Well, I'd wanna die, too."
"So you could be with me?" "Yeah, so you could be with me."
So it's just...
And really, that is the real, kind of, what this story was meant to be about.
Full of obstacles, of course, and major ones like what's about to happen.
Logistically, we couldn't afford to go into the hull out onto the ship.
So we created a slightly different scenario. We just condensed time.
Because the book has the luxury of massive, expansive...
And we wanted to keep the film under two hours,
so we truncated time here.
And Viggo went in to these waters, very treacherous, very dangerous.
He wouldn't wear a wire. You can also see the weight loss there.
So we had jet skis, stunt men either side when he went into that water.
It was freezing cold, treacherous currents.
So, there was a hand signal that Viggo gave
when he had enough, and they pulled him back in.
This is also where Cormac and his son, John,
came to set for the first time.
So, that was amazing because he was watching these scenes
and I heard that he was very moved
at what he was seeing and we heard...
For all of us, the actors and the crew,
to hear the conversations,
Cormac's son calling Cormac "Papa,"
and the way they communicated,
you could see where this whole story came from.
So it kind of really was great to see how
it all came from the heart, really.
And here is a critical scene where, of course,
the real kind of showdown
of where the father is pushed beyond
the point of possible no return.
This is where, gradually, under endless stress,
what we see is a good man, a loving father,
can be pushed to degrees,
understandably, where
he'll go into...
He'll cross a moral line and go...
Michael K. Williams, another great actor.
I loved him as Omar in The Wire.
He was great. The way he brought in this kind of urban toughness initially,
that spitting and that "Fuck you" and all that kind of stuff
that he has back there with the knife, is all that bravado, affront,
but when the gun comes up and it's when The Boy...
He can hear his boy pleading that he senses,
"Actually, this guy might have killed someone before,"
by the way The Boy's behaving. So he starts begging for his life.
It was actually a hell of a thing getting rid of those thumbs.
That's, again, some hint of
punishment, tribal punishment in the past.
But this was a really tough scene to do
because we were fighting every condition here.
It was shot over two days and we had...
We were fighting sun again.
And it was enormously difficult.
But the idea was to, by the end of the scene,
see how this guy that was a real threat
ends up being desperate and left.
Hopefully, we can empathize with each character as we come along.
And of course, The Boy's really disturbed by this. And he's seen...
He feels for what he's done, and really,
this is kind of the emotional turning point.
And an extraordinary thing happened in this scene.
We had very little time. We were running out of time and light
and had to leave this location, couldn't return.
Kodi was really struggling.
Subsequently, we found out later he was thrown off,
his concentration was slightly thrown by being called too early.
And I was working with him, as in the book,
and as scripted, he was emotionally going to break down at this point over this man.
But Kodi intuitively and instinctually
kept feeling that actually it wasn't... He felt anger now.
So, it wasn't about just crying.
He felt angry at his father and wanted to lash back.
So we were struggling with this and I was pushing Kodi
for more of this breaking down aspect,
and then I realized he was right, after doing some takes,
and instinctually, his instincts were spot on.
And it actually worked out for the best because you could see, there was also...
He was right on the edge of breaking.
It was one of those accidental things where
had I not been pushing him for that breaking point, he wouldn't have
pushed it to that edge, and yet, he was right in bringing in that anger.
So he really nailed it.
And that kind of sophistication and emotional maturity
is remarkable for an 11-year-old kid.
And the way Viggo reacts off Kodi
in that scene is fantastic, I think.
The shame, and upset.
Now he realizes that he has crossed that line.
And his son's actually right.
And again, it's an exercise in human kindness.
So they return the clothes
and Kodi throws in a can of food for good measure.
This was, again, we wanted to show that there was little bits of life
hanging in by a thin thread still.
In the book, they come across a bunch of truffles
buried in the ground.
So we made it an insect instead.
Truffles and insects would likely survive this degree of decay.
This was tricky. We were shooting...
We had to shoot in the rain.
Once rain started, we had to carry this through.
Viggo had to get that shot through with the flare gun.
He did it in, I think, two takes or one take.
Special effects guys didn't think he had a hope.
But this again is where The Man's crossed over.
He's now in a rage. He's lost.
And what he discovers here is not a bunch of ruthless cannibals,
but a desperate couple who are thinking that
this man and boy were following them.
And in the logic of this paranoid world,
they could have thought, "There's a man with a gun,
"and the kid may not be his own kid. He could be a prisoner,
"and he could be using the kid as a decoy." So all of this was...
That's an important twist on how this world is...
How people would react.
Checked with some medics about this scenario.
Stapling up your leg-
It's...
Yeah, and a bit of using whatever you can use, gaff tape.
Whatever keeps you going for that bit longer.
We had to really wrestle with the edit of the...
Jon Gregory, my great editor, who did The Proposition with me as well.
There was more scenes than what we ever needed
and we had to get the right balance.
But it always came down to
the father and son relationship.
And the more cannibalism stuff that we put in,
the more that created an imbalance.
And really, after the bunker, we realized that it was all about
their relationships, encounters with other people.
And we got Joe Penhall in to help
with the voiceover and looking at the cut at this point
to get that final shape.
I should mention the makeup, of course.
Incredible Toni G, who did
Monster with Charlize Theron, which was one of the most remarkable transformations.
Well, you saw earlier how she transformed Robert Duvall.
And was a major factor
of adding the realism necessary.
And I particularly love this moment
where he wakes up to The Boy
after having this kind of inverse structure
of actually what comes out of the book about...
It's when you're having bad dreams, you worry, but...
I mean, sorry, when you're having good dreams, you worry.
That's when you've got to worry.
And if it's bad things, you know you're all right,
but here, he's not all right.
He's fading and I just love that tender look from Kodi,
and the way this moment between them...
And so we're heading for the end.
This is a...
Actually, we filmed this in Lake Erie because of the stillness.
We wanted to just strip everything down now.
This is just about the father and son at the very end of their journey.
And in some ways, this whole story can be interpreted
as that endless life cycle,
when our time comes and we leave our loved ones behind.
So once again, we did the two-camera setup,
and essentially got these scenes in one take.
And the second take being focusing on the details,
like hands and cutaway details.
Javier Aguirresarobe,
again, our DP, had to struggle quite a bit
at times, to control the sun and block it out at different times.
Emotionally, there was nowhere to hide, like most of this film.
So really, it was about preparation and just creating the right conditions
for the actors to be able to access
and go into the zone that they needed and the place that they needed to get to.
The dialogue was all there from the book.
We didn't have to change much.
The first conversation we had when Nick Wechsler, the producer,
who got me the unpublished manuscript of this,
before the book went on to do what it did.
We talked to various writers and Joe just said,
"Well, look, it's all on the page. It's just editing."
And it was that pragmatic approach
that we knew he was the right person to do this.
And in that way, it was,
but then there's enormous expectations.
Of course, once the book was published and won the Pulitzer Prize,
and Oprah Winfrey championing it,
and then the Coen brothers coming out with No Country for Old Men.
A very different sort of film.
But then the expectations on us, they just kept building.
There's one of those details.
And that was always a challenge, I think, with a book,
so it's become one of the most translated books of modern times.
So it's very close to a lot of readers' hearts.
And really that's all about this end section and really what the book's...
The deeper themes about what it's on about,
as opposed to just the cannibalism and the bleakness,
which is of course part of it.
But that's not really what the story's about.
And I think...
It's very personal when people read a book like this
and then the built-up expectations.
It's like, there's no way you can ever break through that
because a lot of people came into this with... And couldn't see the film,
because they had their own expectations so formed in advance.
Sometimes on a second viewing, they got it more.
I'm very pleased that a lot of people that haven't read the book
had a similar response to those that did, and likewise, the people that read the book
felt it was very faithful. I mean, what we wanted to do,
all the way through this, is just be faithful to the spirit of the book.
Try to maintain as much
as possible, and yet, it working as a film.
So, Cormac was a great ally.
He loves the movie and has become a good friend.
And that meant a lot. That was a huge help.
He doesn't... The poetry of language...
And cinema has its own poetic language.
And so, you're always...
I knew every rifle, every gun would be aimed at me
for taking a project on like this.
But I think it's always better to take that risk
and fall flat on your face than to shy away from it.
It was challenging, but the whole crew and cast were so taken by the story.
That was a great help.
I've never been on a shoot where the grips, the gaffers,
everyone had their copy of the book.
And there was an excitement about what was coming next.
Like Guy Pearce arriving!
That's always exciting. One of my favorite actors.
A great collaborator and brilliant actor.
He has a lot of the qualities that Viggo has of an "everyman."
I think you have to buy that he survives in this kind of world.
And yet, there's this threat that we wanted to get across initially.
So he, like in the book, has this mysterious missing thumb,
this business from the past,
something murky in his past that he's got through.
But I think through this conversation, Guy is so precise. He really...
That threat, you can see, without giving much away,
you can gradually, gradually see that his...
There's more than meets your eye.
I think Kodi is remarkable in this scene, as well.
The way he reacts off of Guy.
Like every one of the cast that entered, they kept saying,
"Who is this kid?"
Just those little gestures, they were so spontaneous and so genuine.
And Guy would add in those little eye movements
just to keep an edge on things.
And yet, the conversation moves to,
again, the main theme of the whole book,
which is carrying the fire and morality.
It's a morality tale.
And once you discover about him having children,
Kodi senses that this is the other...
What he always suspected, which is...
So he's able to make this leap of faith that ultimately saves him,
but the father understandably could never make that.
And this is what fear does to us. And I think we've kind of...
For me, it's all about fear and our worst fears as parents,
as individuals, as a human race.
And it's just set in the extreme worlds,
where the character of that world is one of the main characters.
To me, I always saw it as a three-hander.
There was the father, the son and the world.
And they were three equal characters interacting.
This was a challenge, this ending, because in the book, it goes into...
Once he meets the family,
it goes into the future of when The Boy is older.
So, in some ways, it's even more optimistic in the book,
in the sense that it shows that he's lived on
through the years and has...
And, yeah, so we had to show that visually by actually then seeing
the other kid that he saw earlier
to imply that this is a family that has managed to survive
through various methods.
And part of that is this idea of the dog.
This idea that The Boy always thought they were being followed
and that there were some other families like them that he wanted to connect to,
other people, basically, like them.
Not necessarily families. Whether they're made up of new members
or whatever, it's irrelevant. It's more just like-minded people,
and that's what he's hopeful about.
And the dog is, we realize...
Well, the dog is something you would never...
It would be the very last thing you would ever eat.
Because that's helped them survive.
It's your alarm for any danger.
It can sniff out food in advance of anything.
And that ending on The Boy's face of where he's looking into the future.
He's looking at his future by looking at these survivors
and people that clearly have made similar choices
that he and his father had made, rather than...
There was some discussion, God forbid, of voiceover of the kid
at an older age, etcetera, which would have been way too much.
And there were the bizarre methods...
Making this, this is my first American film.
Having test screenings, for instance, is quite a strange process.
It's a pseudo science that is over-utilized.
And especially for dramas like this, you can't...
I think it makes sense when it's a comedy
or a pure genre, pure horror, where...
But it's interesting, it was worthwhile seeing it with an audience, feeling it,
but the actual aftermath of analyzing questions
and focus groups and all of that is extremely misguided.
But luckily, we survived that process,
and managed to make the film faithful.
And I think it was because of the book that we really...
That was what we could always get back to.
And, yeah, there's this thing that we also did here where
we wanted to bring in the natural, like a flashback...
The natural sounds, just as a reminder
of the way the world is that we all take for granted.
So in that way, the book and the film's meant to be a little bit of a wakeup call.
So we brought in just these natural sounds.
And they're utilizing the same sound from the beginning.
Yeah. So, yeah, there's a lot of elements to get in place.
It was a delicate balance because it was so intimate,
the story, compared to the big,
more genre elements.
And that took extra time.
We missed out, unfortunately, on...
We were still in editing
and actually went back to the Mount Saint Helens location
because it was 20 feet under snow.
We had to start post-production and then go back to that at a later point.
And a lot more visual effects than expected.
All those planes flying, or background birds, or any...
The signs of life, despite all these locations we filmed in,
there was constantly... Or blue skies that needed replacing.
So we decided that we had to release it
at the right time of the year, as well.
We didn't wanna release it during summer.
It wasn't really a summer film.
But that was frustrating because that also added to the negative expectations,
when you're just trying to get it all right.
But I understand how these things happen.
The joke on set, of course, was that we had to
finish this film before it became a reality.
The way it was kind of dragging on.
This was my first American film, as I mentioned,
and likewise with Chris Kennedy, my production designer, came over
to America, in fact for the first time.
I'd actually grown up, spent some time in America
and 10 years in Canada as a young kid, traveling all over the place.
Whereas Chris, this was his very first time. And we're in Hollywood and Beverly Hills,
and the financier, 2929,
we were up in their offices in this high-rise in Beverly Hills,
and Chris went out for a smoke, having just arrived,
and there, about 25 feet in front of him,
a body landed, splat on the sidewalk.
And he of course went into shock,
this horrendous sound that will haunt him,
and he came back into the offices
and it had been a suicide from one of the neighboring offices.
And the producer, in his famously dry humor,
just patted Chris on the back and said, "Welcome to Hollywood, mate."
Yeah, that was a hell of a way to begin it all.
And it's a different way of working.
It's got its pros and cons. Fantastic locations,
and I'm glad that they're being utilized more
with the subsidies, etcetera.
But it was a tough shoot,
but very rewarding because of the richness of the material.
That's what brought us all together on that.
And despite all the various struggles along the way,
with this kind of a film, we knew it was gonna be challenging.
It was certainly challenging for Louie Hillcoat, my little boy,
who I dedicate the film to there.
And my wife, Polly Borland, because I was away for so long,
ironically making a story about a father and son.
So, yeah, but we got through it all in the end.
And that's it, really.
So I was raving, lots of "um's" and "ah's," lots of rambling.
And that's all I can come up with off the top of my head, folks.
I hope you enjoy it.