Jude Law plays the role of Maguire, a press photographer who moonlights as a hit man Maguire is the only main male character in the piece who is not directly linked to the father/son theme, but it was nevertheless one of the main selling points for the actor, as he felt it set the film apart from the traditional gangster genre. "It is not a typical gangster movie; it's about a father and son finding each other in the most adverse of situations. It's about parents and children, betrayal and honesty, and people and emotions and relationships, which we've all  experienced. These are the epic qualities of life, which for me are what all great films are about," Law says.

Although Law is somewhat younger than Maguire was originally described in the script, Sam Mendes had no doubt that he would be right for the role. "Jude was up to the task, no question. He is an utterly fearless actor. He has no concerns about playing someone quite unlike himself, and here he was a silent, gentle assassin, a man of the shadows, and all the more frightening for it," the director asserts.

"I was looking for a part like this, a character role that was far from anything I'd ever done, and this was definitely it," Law remarks. "Maguire is a crime scene photographer, specialising in capturing dead bodies at murder scenes, and he's also become a very successful paid assassin."

Law also saw an interesting correlation between the fundamental accoutrements of Maguire's double life. "I think every time you see Maguire load and point his camera, it has the dual symbolism of a gun because, to Maguire, the taking of the photo after the act of murder is more important, really. The actual murder is sort of by-the-by; he would never let a living body get in the way of a good photo."

A collection of Maguire's favourite photographs is seen on the walls of his seedy apartment, and Mendes reveals that some are actual police stills from the 1930s. "We used photographs taken of crime scenes during that period and, despite their goriness, they are strangely beautiful and very powerful. They gave Jude an enormous sense that these people really did exist."

One character in "Road to Perdition" actually did exist in real life, the powerful mobster Frank Nitti, played by Stanley Tucci. "Frank Nitti was Al Capone's right-hand man who, they say, for all intents and purposes, ran the organisation," Tucci comments. "Both Rooney and Sullivan come to him for help, leaving Nitti torn between the two and having to figure out exactly what to do."

Mendes says, "When I read the character of Nitti, I immediately thought of Stanley Tucci. I had always wanted to work with him and hoped I'd be fortunate enough to get him for this, and I was thrilled when he said he'd do it."

Both Maguire and Nitti are brought into the story through the actions of Connor Rooney, played by British actor Daniel Craig. "The real key to Connor is his relationship with his father," Craig observes. "Connor was brought up to be a violent man. He's his father's son, yet he has always had to play second fiddle to Michael Sullivan, who is his father's favourite, even though he's not his real son. So there's a lot churned up inside Connor and it fuels what he does. Maybe he's not justified in his actions, but it's the path he chooses. And once he gets going, there's a domino effect and nothing and nobody can stop it."

Sam Mendes agrees, "Connor is the person who sets the story in motion. I wanted a relative unknown to play him so the audience wouldn't know from the first moment that he was going to be a central player. I felt if this character were to work, he would almost have to creep up on the audience. Danny is dark, brooding and hugely charismatic, but there is also a great vulnerability there. I knew when I met him that he was the right man for the job."

Connor Rooney's resentment towards Michael Sullivan is tied to the fates of Sullivan's wife, Annie, and youngest son, Peter. The only woman in the main cast of "Road to Perdition," Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Annie, who, the actress notes, "has to make a definite impression in a short amount of time. It seemed like a real challenge because, with very little dialogue, we need to learn about this marriage and get a feeling of what their family life is like. Annie loves her husband very much. She doesn't ask him too much about his work--you didn't back then--but she's seen him come home enough times with blood on his shirt to know there is stuff going down that makes her worried for her kids. She has a good life and is grateful for it, but it's a life tinged with fear." Mendes, who had directed Leigh in the revival of the musical "Cabaret," offers, "I had hoped to have an opportunity to work with her on film as well. Then I happened to bump into her at a screening and asked her to play the part. I thought, 'I should be so lucky,' and I was, because she said 'yes.'"

The ensemble of talent in front of the camera was matched by the award-winning creative team assembled to work behind the camera, beginning with the man Sam Mendes calls "my central working relationship": cinematographer Conrad Hall, who also lensed "American Beauty" for the director. "I can't even describe how attached I've become to him and how immensely grateful I am to him," Mendes says. "In the midst of the chaos and the siege mentality that happens on a movie set, when Conrad puts his eye to the eyepiece of the camera, magic begins to happen. If you ask him how he knows where to point the camera, he'll tell you, 'I point it at the story.' But it's more than that; his artistry with light adds a dimension to the story that you could not have imagined. There is no such thing as an unimportant shot for him, and so he can drive you mad spending longer to light than you ever expected. But when you're in the screening room, you thank God every day for Conrad Hall."

Collaborating for the first time with the director were production designer Dennis Gassner, costume designer Albert Wolsky, and editor Jill Bilcock. "These are all very special people, incredibly gifted and at the top of their professions," Mendes states. "It was like having an entire engine room of ideas and creative energy behind me."

"Road to Perdition" is set in 1931 when the country was in the grip of the Great Depression, prohibition was still the law of the land, and gangsters like Al Capone were at the height of their power. Long before the cameras rolled, research was the order of the day for everyone involved in the production. "The challenges of a period movie are obvious," Mendes comments. "Everything must be discussed in detail before you begin, because everything has to be made or re-created. It was also important to me that the movie pay witness to the time, rather than announce it. I want the audience to feel that they are looking through a window into this world, and I wanted to put a lie to some of the perceived notions about gangsters. You will see no double-breasted pinstripe suits, no spats, and only one machine gun, and that has a very specific and unusual presence in the movie."

In at least one instance, the research resulted in a major thematic element of the film. Mendes reveals, "In planning the wake held at the beginning of the movie, we discovered they sometimes kept corpses on ice to stop the body from decomposing, and as the ice melted, the water would drip into buckets. The linking of water with death then became a recurring image in the film. It speaks of the mutability of water and links it to the uncontrollability of fate. These are things that humans can't control. In other words, the dam might burst at any moment. All that came out of a tiny piece of research."

Stage lights notwithstanding, makeup artist Daniel Streipeke's first edict to the cast was to stay out of the sun so they would have that Midwest-in-the-winter look, as opposed to California suntans. For Tom Hanks, Streipeke says, "We wanted to take some of the vulnerability out of his face. He needed to look like a powerful, tough guy, without being too clichéd about it."  The greatest transformation was reserved for Jude Law, whose good looks are obscured by Maguire's seedy countenance. "We gave Jude a sallow skin tone and beat up hands, which would come from being in a darkroom with his hands in photo fluids all the time," Streipeke describes. "We also lowered the gum line in his mouth and rotted his teeth, which works for the ferret-like character he plays."

"You can flesh out a character so much with those subtleties, which became very relevant to portraying Maguire because he says so little," Law notes. "He has to make a visual impression--not so obvious that he couldn't disappear into a crowd, but if you were to look closer, you'd see something a little off-center and slightly twisted."

The personalities and lives of the different characters were also reflected in the production design. "The design is all character-oriented," production designer Dennis Gassner affirms. "What Sam and I tried to do was come up with a variety of settings that support the mood of the characters, as well as the story."

Gassner points out that the Sullivan home is in cool blue tones, to reflect the wintry atmosphere that exists both outside and inside the house. By comparison, the colour scheme of the Rooney house is much warmer because, the designer points out, "although he is a gangster, he has a certain warmth and charm. He is also old money, so he has a classic sense of style."

Filming on "Road to Perdition" took place entirely on location in Chicago, Illinois and the surrounding towns. "I wanted to shoot on location and, in Chicago, what you see on screen is what's actually there. It still exists," Mendes states.

The fact that it has existed for the better part of a century meant that Gassner and his team had to go in and turn the clock back 70 years. "Doing a period film is basically undoing what's been done to a piece of art and then restyling it properly to fit the time," the designer observes.

In what appears to be a series of different towns, one of the film's key sequences is the string of bank robberies perpetrated by Michael Sullivan. What was interesting was that Mendes had conceived of the sequence as a continuous tracking movement from left to right. Hall expounds, "Rather than as a montage, where shots fade out and fade in, Sam wanted the bank robberies to move from one directly into the other, without a cut in between."
The problem with that plan was that the action in one of the locations chosen for the robberies would only work shooting from right to left, but not from left to right. Rather than switch the plan, Gassner and his team switched the location, so to speak, by reversing every telltale element--including all the street signs, license plates, and even the steering wheels in the cars--to a mirror image. With that done, Mendes and Hall could shoot from right to left and flip the film to accomplish the desired left-to-right sequence.

"There was an enormous amount of manufactured weather. We had snow, rain, ice, sleet, you name it. And let me tell you, they don't always mix; they become a kind of awful mush," Mendes laughs. "There were times I cursed the day I ever decided that the first 20 minutes of the movie should take place in a snowscape. But," the director adds, "there was a very deliberate reason for it. The reason there is snow and ice in the opening of the story is it symbolizes a frozen world…frozen in the emotional sense. It's a paralysed family until the father and oldest son are thrown together by tragedy and they begin to have the relationship they never had before. So out of the bad comes good, and everything that was intended to be set in ice at the beginning begins to thaw."

Dean Zanuck reflects, "Michael Sullivan and his son start the movie far apart from each other, but a terrible turn of events brings them very much together. It's an emotional journey as much as a physical one that they go through."

"It's an exploration into a man's relationship with his son, and of how a fuller and more meaningful relationship is brought about by tragedy. That is the crux of the story," Richard Zanuck remarks.

"At the center of the film is the relationship between a father and a son, but there are actually wo fathers and two sons," Mendes adds. "One of the great ironies of the film is that, although the two fathers love each other, in each having to protect his less favoured son, they are set on a course of mutual destruction."
Mendes concludes, "That is the core of the story: two men protecting their children. In the end,
what can be more important than that?"                       BACK TO MENU