From Cormac McCarthy, author of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, comes the highly anticipated big screen adaptation of the beloved, best-selling and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, THE ROAD.  Academy Award-nominee Viggo Mortensen leads an all-star cast featuring Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce and young newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee in this epic post-apocalyptic tale of the survival of a father (Mortsensen) and his young son (Smit-McPhee) as they journey across a barren America that was destroyed by a mysterious cataclysm.  A masterpiece adventure, THE ROAD boldly imagines a future in which men are pushed to the worst and the best that they are capable of--a future in which a father and his son are sustained by love.

The story
It is more than ten years since the world was destroyed-by what, nobody can say. It could have been a nuclear event, or the collision of the Earth with another cosmic entity. Or the sun may have imploded and taken out the planet as collateral damage to its own flameout. One day there was a big flash of light, and then nothing. The result of this cataclysmic event, whatever it was, is that there is no energy, no power, no vegetation, no food.  Millions of people have been eradicated, destroyed by fires and floods or scorched and incinerated in their cars where they sat when the event hit or suffocated by starvation and despair in civilization's slow death after the power went out.
The Man (Viggo Mortensen) and The Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) - "each the other's world entire," as McCarthy describes them in his novel - are on the move with all their precious possessions--whatever food and clothing they can scrounge, utensils and tools, plastic bags, tarps, blankets and anything else to keep warm in the frigid, sunless, ash-filled outdoors--on their backs and in a shopping cart outfitted with a bicycle mirror so they can see who's coming up behind them. Their desperate, improvised traveling gear and their scruffy unwashed bodies give them the look of the homeless. And that is what they are. That's what everybody is in this lifeless frontier.
As they trudge along on foot, following the once-magnificent American highway system west toward the ocean, they hide in the woods and in old abandoned structures, any shelter they can improvise that keeps them safe from the elements and the wandering bands who would think nothing of taking everything from them. They come across all sorts of desperate people. There is a road gang, a bunch of tough hombres who have somehow managed to fuel their big semi. There are scavengers and hunters of anything that moves, some well-fed cannibals who keep a cellar-full of barely human cuisine in a big house on a hill. And there are all manner of thieves.
And then there is an Old Man (Robert Duvall), who they come across bent and shuffling down the road in front of them, walking with a makeshift cane in shoes made of rags and cardboard. The Boy takes a liking to him and persuades his dad to share some of their food and camp with him. The old man, who admits his name is Ely, is equally impressed by the boy--impressed at his very existence as they are by his. He tells them that he's been on the road forever. He tells them that when he saw the boy he thought he'd died and gone to heaven, seen an angel.
Even in this bleak universe, there are moments of happiness. Occasionally, the pair comes across some food long forgotten in a cupboard or stashed in a fallout shelter. While rummaging in an abandoned mall, the father finds a forgotten can of Coke stuck in the bowels of an upturned vending machine. When he gives the treat to his son, who has never indulged in anything like it, the father is amused by his son's astonishment of the drink's fizzy sweetness. And when they come across a waterfall with relatively clean water, both jump right in for an session of skinny-dipping.
And then there are the numerous flashbacks to the man's life with his wife (Charlize Theron) before the great disaster, before she took her own life rather than see it taken by what or who she knew was coming. The man clings to these memories that nourish him spiritually and help him to push his increasingly frail body ever further in the quest to get his son to some kind of safety. The sweet memory of his life before the fall and of his halcyon childhood days are some of the bright spots that enliven the terrain for him and the boy.
The child's innate goodness, his compassion and his sense of wonder and curiosity are also bright spots in this story, reminding the man of why he must keep on going no matter what even when he has forgotten why he must do it.

THE ROAD is an adventure story, a horror story, a road movie and ultimately a love story between a father and his son, between a man and his wife, as it is a celebration of the inextinguishable will to live.  It is a thrilling evocation of human endurance and an unflinching examination of people at their worst--and at their best.
For every mother, every father who's ever had a child, for every son of a father, THE ROAD will be a journey into the human spirit. It is a survivor's story in which the heroes carry the fire that is the life force that keeps hope alive no matter what.

About the Production
THE ROAD is a movie that had to get made. On the surface, a story about the Earth's end-game scenario that includes cannibalism and brutality and other unsavory elements is not exactly the right material for a popcorn movie. And though some studios initially passed on the project for these reasons, the producers, the director and the talent who were drawn to it were motivated by an absolute belief that Cormac McCarthy's novel would make an incredible picture.
Producer Nick Wechsler, a huge fan of the author, got beat out when he tried to buy the rights to McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, which went on to win the Oscar™ for the Coen Brothers, so he alerted literary agents to let him know when the next Cormac McCarthy book became available. He and producing partners Paula Mae and Steve Schwartz took advantage of competitors' skittishness and optioned the property when it was in manuscript form. "The great thing about this particular book was that it was so dark and so bleak that all of the studios and other producers were cautiously approaching it, weren't sure whether it could be made into a movie," he says. "That gave me an opportunity to seize the moment, outbid everybody else with the help of my partners, the Schwartz's, and acquire the material."
Like all the other filmmakers involved in making this movie, Wechsler was deeply moved by the experience of reading McCarthy's page-turner. He saw instantly, he says, that it would be great movie material. "I read the novel the evening that it was given to me and I thought it was an extremely powerful, emotional experience--the story of the father and the son and the journey they take and the passing of the fire, the passing of the idea of humanity from one to the other and back again.
"And I also thought that there were some good genre elements as well. The suspense and tension of the need to survive in an extremely hostile world--really obvious elements to make into a movie. I wasn't worried about the bleak aspect at all. I thought that an apocalyptic world is bleak and cannibalism in an apocalyptic world is bleak but that the emotional core of the piece was so fresh and so powerful that that's what would shine through in the making of a movie."
When Wechsler invited Rudd Simmons to come aboard as the film's executive producer, his choice of John Hillcoat to direct was already established. Simmons hadn't seen Hillcoat's film THE PROPOSITION, but when he did, he too was hooked on the director. "I was quite taken with John's film," he says. "What was interesting to me was what he did with the landscape and how much the characters seem to come right out of the landscape. THE ROAD is a fairly simple story in a way but it's mythic and the characters seem to just come right out of the earth. So, I talked to John and he and I got along great."
Another thing that impressed Simmons about the director's process was how prepared and how focused Hillcoat was on exactly how he was going to transform this great novel into a great movie. "At the very beginning John wrote a position paper--and I've never had that on any of the movies I've done," he says. "It was about three or four pages of what he was looking for, the themes that he was interested in, it had to do with genre and the overall look he wanted for the movie, and along with it were a lot of photographs. 
"It was a pretty great thing because we gave this to everyone who came onto the project and right off the bat we were all on the same page. We knew exactly what he was looking for. We knew exactly what it was he saw in the story," he says.
"What makes a really good adaptation is if the filmmaker finds something in the book that he is passionate about and tells the story from that point of view," Simmons adds. "And we knew what that was for John."
Some of Hillcoat's statements do read like a manifesto, but in hindsight, the director was analyzing the movie thematically, even philosophically, much as a professor of cinema studies might do. Here are two paragraphs from Hillcoat's position paper that illustrate this:
"The movie will operate on a number of different levels, where it can be viewed as a more mythic metaphoric journey of the soul, a fable, an adult fairytale about the passing of one generation to another, that inescapable reality of mortality and the archetypal parent's greatest fear, guilt and heartbreak in leaving the child behind (and by extension everyone's fear of being left behind utterly alone). On another level is the morality tale, an urgent wake-up call to us all where kindness, trust, hope and faith must prevail against all odds in the face of impending destruction and horror. On another is the immediate visceral reality of a dark epic adventure filled with terror and tenderness.
"As we all bear witness to a new age of violent global conflict together with the specter of apocalyptic environmental catastrophe, THE ROAD manages to tap into our collective psyche with the force of a universal nightmare. It evokes our deepest and darkest fears --and with prescience and lucidity addresses what matters most."
In adapting the book, the filmmakers took great pains to retain the simple, gut-wrenching directness of it while bringing in some universal truths about this collective psyche so that a science fiction story about the end of the Earth could jibe with some of the most common fears of our post-9-11 era--global warming, high gas prices, economic uncertainty and the real possibility of a monumental natural catastrophe due to mankind's abuse of the planet. So while McCarthy was ambiguous about what actually caused the great conflagration in his story when all the lights went out, the filmmakers were free to frame theirs in an ecological disaster.
"We did actually depart from the book," says Hillcoat. "In the book it was very much like a nuclear winter--everything was completely covered in ash and totally monochromatic with a thick layer of black soot and ash in the air."

Scouting locations
In scouting locations, the filmmakers gravitated toward natural disasters that wiped out huge swaths of territory, leaving it in a ravaged state. Prepping the film Hillcoat embarked on a long journey with Simmons and his longtime production designer Chris Kennedy, in which they sought out places around the country that had been ravaged in that way, knowing that the locations would connect the audience with a modern-day horror story that could happen here. These distressed landscapes would tap into the collective American psyche by referring to some major traumas that devastated parts of this country.
"What was great about the book was that incredible, visceral reality to it," says Hillcoat. "Neither Chris or myself have ever really liked apocalyptic films that much as a genre. But this felt so different from anything else. So we immediately thought this story seems to tap into experiences of natural disasters and man-made disasters-so why not utilize all of that.
"So we immediately began doing a lot of research in which we were basically looking at man-made and natural disasters that have occurred, and that's what led us to things like New Orleans post-Katrina, and Mount St. Helens in Washington and mining in central Pennsylvania and around Pittsburgh where that industry left a kind of man-made disaster area in terms of the landscape--what's left of it. So the process was about utilizing all those things and gradually piecing it all together. It was like this huge tapestry."
For producer Paula Mae Schwartz the story was eminently filmable because of its inherent hopefulness and the tender emotional core of the novel. "We admired Cormac McCarthy very much, thought he had an original voice, and this particular book captured a unique love story between a father and son," she says. "We felt that the power of the love between the father and the son was palpable-so strong that it helped mankind survive after the apocalypse. So it's the ultimate story of survival."

Mortensen rooted in his portrayal
Viggo Mortensen, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his riveting performance in EASTERN PROMISES, rooted his portrayal in the father-son dynamic as well. And though at the time he was offered the role, the actor was coming off a period of working a lot and looking forward to a break, he says, but when he got the script and read the book, there was no way he couldn't do it. "I thought, 'Wow, it's going to be pretty hard to say no to something like this, this kind of character.' It's one of those books that's hard to put down, once it gets going you want to know how it turns out," he says. Read more

Casting the role of the boy was crucial
In order for THE ROAD to come together, it was clear to the filmmakers that casting the role of The Boy would be crucial. As grueling as the shoot was for Mortensen and the crew, the pre-teen actor who plays the son would have to be both a survivor and a great natural actor to keep up. After a series of casting sessions, they found that actor in Kodi Smit-McPhee, scion of a thespian family whose father Andy is an acting coach. Kodi's portrayal of another son opposite Eric Bana in ROMULUS, MY FATHER brought him to the attention of the filmmakers.Read more

Other key roles
While the novel The Road is a pas de deux, a solitary journey by two main players in which other people are either hazards, horrors, flashbacks or ancillary players, the movie version of the story called for a shift in emphasis in the human universe in which they live. So the filmmakers made a conscious decision to expand some of the key roles in the telling of the story. Read more

The design: interpreting the material
For Hillcoat and his team, the mission was to convey the horrific aspect of a ravaged world without resorting to well-worn clichés from the end-of-the earth genre. His main go-to people in this respect were the editor John Gregory, the production designer Chris Kennedy and the costume designer Margot Wilson--all of whom he'd worked with before and had the comfort level and filmmaker's shorthand to get the job done.Read more

The story of Road is bleak indeed; underneath it's a story of hope
The story of THE ROAD is bleak indeed, but it is about survival, and underneath that is a story of hope for the world where the possibility of annihilation has come so close to all of us that it's nice to know that we could go on even if there was a catastrophe. Read more

About the Physical Production: Shooting the film
In a movie in which the planet is a central character, it became crucial for the filmmakers to find a great deal of varied terrain that reflected the changing scenery as the boy and his father made their way from a mountainous region across the country through rolling hills and finally to the ocean. And since the planet is one big disaster area, they had to find many ruined, abandoned or devastated locations as possible. Read more

About the Filmmakers

JOHN HILCOAT / Director
John Hillcoat grew up in America, Canada and Britain. A career in Fine Arts led to enrollment at Swinburne Film School in Australia, where he produced two celebrated short dramas, THE BLONDE'S DATE WITH DEATH and FRANKIE AND JOHNNY. He went on to a successful career directing and editing music videos for such artists as Nick Cave, INXS, Crowded House, Depeche Mode, Robert Plant, Muse and Razorlight, for which he won several international awards and an Australian Recording Industry Award for Best Director.
After three years researching maximum-security prisons in America and Australia, John co-wrote and directed his first feature film GHOSTS ... OF THE CIVIL DEAD. The film was nominated for nine Australian Film Institute Awards.  His follow-up film, released in 1998, TO HAVE & TO HOLD is set in the jungle of Papua New Guinea and stars Tcheky Karyo and Rachel Griffiths.
John's third feature film THE PROPOSITION stars Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Danny Huston, John Hurt and Emily Watson. The film is an Australian Western set in remote outback Australia and was released in 2006. It was nominated for twelve Australian Film Institute Awards and won four. It was also nominated for nine IF Awards (The People's Choice Awards) and won four including Best Film. The movie went on to win numerous other international awards.
In addition to THE ROAD Hillcoat is also in development on JOE PETROSINO, with Pete Dexter writing for Anonymous Content and Summit Entertainment, with Benicio Del Toro attached; THE WETTEST COUNTY IN THE WORLD, with Nick Cave writing for Red Wagon and Sony Pictures; and MOB COPS, with Terence Winter writing for Spring Creek and 2929 Productions.

Joe Penhall / Written By
Award-winning writer and director Joe Penhall was described by The Financial Times as "one of the finest playwrights of his generation."
His play BLUE/ORANGE won an Olivier Award, an Evening Standard Award and the Critics Circle Award for Best Play. Joe wrote the award-winning television series THE LONG FIRM and won a National Critics' screenplay award for the feature film ENDURING LOVE, based on Ian McEwan's novel.
Among his motion picture credits are: LANDSCAPE WITH WEAPON, a feature film based on Penhall's original play, in development for the Weinstein Company; THE UNDERTAKER, a 15-minute film, which Penhall directed, starring Rhys Ifans and Natalie Press, which premiered at London International Film Festival 2005; ENDURING LOVE, a feature film for Film Four, directed by Roger Michel, based on the novel by Ian McEwan (2004). Nominated for the National Critics Award for Best Screenplay; SOME VOICES, starring Daniel Craig and Kelly McDonald (2000).
In television, MOSES JONES, an original 3 parter for BBC1, written and exec produced by Penhall, is his most recent credit. The adaptation of his play  BLUE/ORANGE for the BBC, starring Brian Cox, John Simm and Sean Parkes was directed by Howard Davies in 2005. THE LONG FIRM, a four-part serial for the BBC, based on the novel by Jake Arnott was nominated for BAFTA award;  and GO BACK OUT, directed by Mike Barker for the BBC in 1996.
His Theater productions include HAUNTED CHILD, an original stage play; LANDSCAPE WITH WEAPON, which premiered in 2007 at London's National Theatre. Directed by Roger Michell and starring Julian Rhind-Tutt and Tom Hollander; DUMB SHOW, a play for the Royal Court, starring Douglas Hodge and Rupert Graves (2004); BLUE/ORANGE (2001); THE BULLET, Donmar Warehouse (1998); LOVE AND UNDERSTANDING, Bush Theatre (1997); PALE HORSE: Royal Court (1995); and SOME VOICES, Royal Court (1994), winner of the John Whiting Award.

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