THE ROAD

Release date: 8 January
Certificate: 15
112 mins
USA 2009

Director: John Hillcoat
Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce, Kodi Smit-McPhee

After the ‘fresh hell’ of Australia in 2005’s THE PROPOSITION, director John Hillcoat once again steps into a benighted landscape with this adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s (No Country for Old Men) Pulitzer Prize-winning novel starring Viggo Mortensen (EASTERN PROMISES) and newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee.

Ten years after the planet was devastated by an unspecified apocalypse, survivors scuttle through the wind-whipped ashes of civilisation. All is decay: the death rattle of the human race punctuated by the screams of the victims as the starving remnants turn to cannibalism.

A Man and a Boy drift through this ruined world, carrying the fire, the last spark of memory for the morality that once defined them. They face the trials of a world stripped of reason, and ruled by fear, desperation and an ever-present survival instinct. But they keep moving, fuelled by hope and warmed by the fire inside.

Hillcoat has employed the full panoply of film’s visual power, finding a stark beauty in the mud and dust of a dying planet. Mortensen is haunting as The Man – hunted, sunken and emaciated – while Smit-McPhee is a major new find as The Boy.

//Preparing for the Apocalypse//
Viggo Mortensen is no stranger to the perils and pitfalls of adapting popular novels. His role as Aragorn in THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy was a physical and emotional test of his acting credentials, but it was nothing compared with the demands placed on him by THE ROAD.

When asked what attracted him to the role of a man stranded in a dying world, he immediately replies that it was “the fear. If I have a choice of something as interesting as this story, my final ingredient has to be that I’m afraid of it – afraid of failing at something that’s worth attempting.”

To make sure that he didn’t fail, Mortensen first put himself on a strict diet to achieve the sunken physicality of a man on the brink of starvation. And according to director Hillcoat, once on set Mortensen took to sleeping in wet clothes to maintain his character. “Shooting THE ROAD was as difficult as it should have been; as we hoped it would be,” he explains.

Filming on location in Pennsylvania rather than in the comfort of a studio mock-up, Mortensen and his young acting partner were exposed to the full brutality of the elements. Although, says Mortensen, “I kind of like that in a way because it inspires you. It makes you feel like it’s real, that you’re there; it helps you get into it.”

Far more than the physical discomforts, it was the emotional stress that Mortensen found difficult. “It was having to be naked from the inside that was the challenge,” he reveals. “You have to be honest with yourself – as an actor you have to be moved, really, in a story like this. You can’t fake it. And if people feel that when they watch it – if they’re moved in the way that we were moved telling the story – well, that’s great.”

“Absorbing and affecting viewing” ****
THE INDEPENDENT

“A heartbreaking classic” ****
THE TIMES