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. The characters known as The Woman (Charlize Theron), Old Man (Robert Duvall), The Veteran (Guy Pierce) and The Thief (Michael K. Williams) took on a much more important aspect in the film's development process. And once the word got out about an adaptation by the producer of SEX, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE and THE PLAYER (Wechsler), the director of THE PROPOSITION (Hillcoat) and the writer of ENDURING LOVE (Joe Penhall), the short list of world-class stars became much shorter.
"It was very easy to cast this movie because the book had achieved such popularity," says Wechsler, "and the other roles, even though they might be small, they each packed a lot of punch--they each had a very specific purpose, and were very important to the movement of the piece. So any actor that was going up for one of these parts knew that that part would be a very fulfilling experience. So the casting came together quite well--the actors were willing to move around their availabilities and tried to get the producers of shows they might have been working on permission to carve out some time so that they could do a small part in our movie."
A notable departure from the way the story is told in the novel is the presentation of the man's wife, who commits suicide when she fears that whoever is out there will come for them. "Sooner or later, they will catch up with us and they will kill us," she says. "They will rape me … and they will rape him. … They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you won't face it. You'd rather wait for it to happen." The man's choice is to take his son after this tragedy and go out on the road in hopes of somehow finding a better future for the boy, if not for himself. In the book, the wife's choices are told starkly and pragmatically, against the backdrop of horror that has befallen them and the entire human race.
The relationship between The Man and The Woman is told in flashbacks, which the man returns to in daydreams, often--especially in the earlier scenes from their marriage when things were more upbeat--clinging to these vignettes like some elixir, the only bits of humanity he can grasp that keeps him going and reminds him of why he is on the road. One lyrical passage from the book illustrates this: "From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze the frame. Now call down your dark and cold and be damned."
In the movie, this scene is described without narration or dialogue, just cinematically, with sight and sound. While recounting the ups and downs of their life together, the flashbacks also serve to provide some elegiac moments of light, sun, music and happiness in an otherwise bleak world.
For this character, the filmmakers required not only a powerful actress but also a versatile one. "The thing in the book about The Woman is that the character's reality is very abrasive and harsh. And it is, and we keep that," says director Hillcoat. "But we wanted to really try and enrich that character and present her argument for making that choice as very sound because of the context of what is happening in the world."
The role demanded an actor who brought her own substantial talent.  "What is great about Charlize," he continues, "is we wanted to try to find someone that had a real kind of gravitas, an emotional kind of depth to show that transition of life from the world that the privileged few are accustomed to and take for granted, and then having that all stripped away. We wanted to show the emotional damage that is inflicted by this global catastrophe. Her refusal to accept the new world is a huge shift, an emotional shift. So, Charlize is someone that has already shown incredible range. Her transformation in MONSTER was pretty astounding. She seems to be one of those actresses that really is able to transform and go to real emotional depths."
Another pivotal casting choice was the use of Robert Duvall for The Old Man, a character the man and the boy meet on the road and spend some time with who provides another more philosophical perspective to their journey. Coincidentally, says Hillcoat--and this is one of a number of serendipitous coincidences about the production--"He knows Cormac McCarthy, he's so familiar with that world--that was really helpful."
Duvall's presence on the set was not only a link to the novelist's world view, it provided an opportunity for deepening the story, and inspiring the crew in the telling of it. And the actor brought some of his own magic to the piece under truly daunting circumstances.
"He did something that was quite extraordinary under extreme pressure," Hillcoat observes. While for most film crews, a sunny day is a good thing, for the makers of THE ROAD, a story about a world without light or warmth, the values were topsy-turvy. "We were plagued by weather problems. It was a day when the sun was out and the sun was our enemy. And that's been a running joke throughout the whole film that when it's actually beautiful weather that most people love we all get depressed, and when it's miserable we all get excited and run out into it.
"And that happened with Robert that we had just this bright, sunny day that was just a disaster for the landscape we were in where there's a huge coal ash pile of remnants of mining debris and a scarred landscape. We ended up being really pressurized for time. We talked about trying something where he would bring an extra bit of history to the character. In terms of that pain and damage, because his character's an old coot--everyone's wondering how the hell did he survive and where did he come from, and he's a very enigmatic sort of a Samuel Beckett-type character. And so within a couple of takes, he just he came up with the most extraordinary bit of improvisation in the middle of the scene that was just heartbreaking and kind of helped shape the scene in a very quick time. That was great. It was hard to work under those conditions, and when you have actors with that kind of wealth of experience, you kind of wish you had more time to do stuff. But he rose to challenge and beyond."
The producers draw their own parallels between the casting of Duvall, Mortensen and Smit-McPhee, and job of their respective characters with regard to the theme of the story, about "carrying the fire," through a world of adversity into a future of hope. The scene around the campfire with the old man, the boy and his father, says Paula Schwartz, "has three generations of actors in it. There's Kodi Smit-McPhee - the budding star, the boy - there's the father - Viggo Mortensen, an established star - and then there's the legendary star - Robert Duvall. So it's very symbolic to me--there is a message in this. It is not a tutorial, but there's the continuity, there's the evolution, and there's this continuation: carrying the fire. And the fire is the symbol of life, the symbol of survival, which is what the movie's all about. The boy is carrying the fire. The father is protecting the boy. And that was very touching."
On the day they filmed the scene, the set was hushed, and everyone knew that something magical was transpiring. "It was an incredible, very touching scene," Paula Schwartz continues, describing the setup where Robert Duvall's character "has accepted an invitation to sit by the campfire with the man and the boy. And it's very poignant because you can see the admiration for this old man, who has withstood the catastrophe, the apocalypse, and both the father and the boy listening to his wisdom about why this happened and will people ever survive. It was memorable because Robert Duvall is 77 years old now and he has tremendous wisdom and energy in his voice that is catching. It was a magical scene."
Rounding out the cast of supporting characters who were only ciphers in the book were The Veteran, a rugged survivalist, one of "The Good Guys" who becomes the ultimate protector of the boy once he nears the end of his journey, and The Thief, a crafty man who steals everything from the boy and his father.
"I'm really thrilled with the cast that we managed to get and the variety of different characters," says Hillcoat.  "I couldn't think of anyone but Guy Pearce as the veteran and we were just very fortunate that we were able to get him. We wanted to convey that there are all these people wandering around this new world fighting for survival and Guy certainly, like Viggo, has some similar qualities--you can imagine him surviving. Adding to the mixture of personalities, Michael K. Williams brought a great kind of more urban, street thing to the thief, whereas Garret Dillahunt, who plays one of the road gang truckers, added a kind of more country, hick, backwater-type thing to it. And Molly Parker (Motherly Woman) was just great for the ending I think--a very difficult role to pull off, because she ends the film with Kodi. And really for them the challenge which was to get across their damage in a fairly short time, screen time, to give you a sense of where they've come from and the kind of emotional damage - that they've all endured."
Mortensen says the production was fortunate indeed to get some strong acting talent so that the entire film is not just about him and Kodi. "John has cast the movie well it's not just the two of us," he says. "Obviously Guy Pearce, who played the main role in THE PROPOSITION for John Hillcoat, plays a pivotal role towards the end. Very interesting character he did that really well. He and Kodi interacted well. Molly Parker, Michael Williams is great.  Everybody that's come in to do these sequences where the father and son actually run into people have been great, have been perfectly cast. We've been lucky … lucky in a lot of ways."

Read more about Charlize Theron


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.
"After my experience with THE PROPOSITION, I'd be very happy to work with them for the rest of my days," he says. "What I love about both Chris and Margot is their eye for detail. The richness of their understanding of the material goes so beyond what their official positions designate. Margot really, like Chris, really gets into the characters and why they're doing things, what the themes are and how they show up in their surroundings. What that says about them."
The director notes how the team's sensibility showed up in the interpretation of the material. "We wanted to avoid the Mad Max kind of thing that has defined the post-apocalyptic genre because it was such a landmark in that genre. So we thought about the imagery in the book and what sprung to mind is the shopping trolley and the ski jackets and the grime and all that and plastic bags and taping up runners and stuff. What that immediately brought to mind was the homeless in every major city in the world. This underclass is living that apocalyptic world of day-to-day survival on the streets with no money and no food.
"So that was our reference really. Margot collected loads of pictures and she was keeping an eye out on that whole world of being homeless and surviving on the streets. And hence she took that further where it was plastic lining in the jackets because the world was so cold to keep warm and the way people would recycle bits of clothing. It's just fantastically detailed."
When Margot read the script, she says, she had been sent photographs of some of the locations, and she began to piece together the types of characters that lived in them. "I read it about five times so I could get beyond the sort of sadness and the feeling and from all the emotions that that script evokes," she says. "One minute there's hope and then there's sadness--it takes you through the whole gamut. That's where I started feeling this love story between these two people, Viggo and Kodi.
"John sent me a whole lot of photographs along with his style notes," she continues. "But a lot of my research came from the homeless, unfortunately, because they're people that reflect what that world would be. They've got no clothing, they've got hardly any food and they just make do with what they've got and really that's what our characters are. The location photos gave me a sense of the bareness, of the nothingness really that we were dealing with and beautiful, stark landscapes. No color and dreary, but poetic at the same time."
Her method was then to think about the characters and make sketches of what they would look like in their improvised outfits. "When I read the script I knew who the characters were and that always helps because you're thinking about who the actors are and bringing them together with the characters, listening to the words that their saying, developing what type of people they are," she says. "I wanted the audience to look at a garment and see something familiar about it and recognize it as clothing that we wear today."
Once she settled on a look for the character, there were hours of painstaking work, "aging" the garments, many of which were picked up at second-hand stores. Care was taken to use clothing that didn't match--everything in this world would have been scavenged and adapted for utility--warmth, shelter from the elements, ruggedness--not style.
She also came up with a philosophy of life on the road that extended to all the characters. It amounted to portability, layers and a substance that will probably outlast us all--plastic.
"We had to think about a lot of clothing, obviously, the layers. If you haven't got anything in the world and you are traveling across America to try and find safety you're carrying your home on your back. So, the layers were incredibly important. For Viggo, we started off with he's brought his tee-shirt from home, he's brought a couple of shirts, a hoodie to keep his head warm, gloves, endless pairs of socks, shoes. But its not like you think, 'Yes, you can put a lot in a bag and we'll just carry the lot.' He had to think, 'What feasibly can I carry around on my back?' They can't be carrying endless luggage around."
That's where the philosophy of costume design interfaces with the mise-en-scene, she says. "You've got to sort of think of it from a minimalistic view, that it's almost like your going camping and I can only take a certain amount with me and what's going to keep me warm and dry? For keeping them dry we used shower curtains. He's found that somewhere along the road and turned them into a raincoat. So he's had to utilize certain things that he's found along the road.
"With Kodi, when he was born all the shops had gone, there was no electricity, that sort of stuff so I brought in the idea that the father and mother have put together. It was Viggo's pants that they've made shorter, they got one of his jumpers and stapled it together with staples. He's got a bigger shirt on and the coat is a coat that they had, his parka, in the house, the shoes are too big for him, his gloves are far too big for him because they can't just go and buy it. With Viggo's shoes, he's walking across America so we need to get comfortable shoes for him. He just has that one pair of shoes and over the years they eventually start to fall apart so we aged them heavily and then put duct tape around them. He carries a roll of duct tape and mends bits of his clothing with it. He tapes up his wound from the arrow with it.
"All these little elements go together. He carries plastic bags with him and wraps his feet in plastic bags because plastic doesn't break down and it's one thing that keeps you warm so that came in very handy but I also wanted to show that, I used plastic bags on Robert Duvall's character and also the thief because I wanted to show that plastic, whatever happens to the world it will be one thing that will survive beyond everything else".

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. For the Schwartz's, as Steve Schwartz says, "There was never a question for us about whether we wanted to make this movie after we read the manuscript. Since the mid-20^th century--since the invention of the H-Bomb--people have been wondering if mankind has been facing its last hurrah. But it seems since the start of this century, there's even more peril at every turn. People are more and more engaged with the thought of the end of the world. And THE ROAD paints a picture that is--in its devastation and in its realism that you just can't turn away from. But if that's all it did, we wouldn't be interested. In a sense the world is redeemed by the father and the son and their love, and at the end there is a glimmer of hope."
But make no mistake, he adds, THE ROAD is a horror story, an eco-disaster, post-nuclear apocalypse horror story, but a horror story nonetheless. Since 9-11, people have had good reason to be scared, and "people are going to be scared as they watch this. I hope people will think it's a smart scary movie, and of course if you're smart today, there's a lot to be scared about. But because it is so realistic, it's very scary. And Hillcoat is a genius at creating the kind of tension both on-screen and off that makes you squirm in your seat."
But it is about hope in the end--carrying the fire. To the boy, that is a process of staying the course. "The boy divides people up into two categories. What he's learned from his father is the good guys are the ones that don't eat people and the bad guys are the ones who do," says Paula Mae Schwartz, "and that's why he says to the veteran--who he meets after his father does die, 'Are you one of the good guys?' Do you eat people or not?"
"For me, the scary part is these aren't zombies eating people - these are people eating people--people like us," says Steve Schwartz.
"The earth itself is a cast member," he continues. "We don't signal the cause of the apocalypse, but it's apparent that there have been profound alterations to the planet, and they're not good. That's a simple statement, but how do you execute that? And once we got into the nitty-gritty details of that, you realize that you have to come up with a set of rules for how you're going to alter the planet, and those rules have to be consistent. I was very impressed early on with John Hillcoat's willingness to get his arms around this and to make sure that the new world we created was internally consistent. Hillcoat's vision was always very clear. He had a profound vision and it never varied. He saw this very clearly from the get go, and has stuck to this vision, and I think the resulting film reveals this very coherent visually interesting new world."
"Cormac McCarthy's book starts after the apocalypse. That's intentional, of course," Paula Schwartz adds. "I think one of the real thought-provoking results of that is that people are going to be much more aware of the multitude of causes that could have really caused the end of the earth so that they'd be aware of the environmental cause, the possibility of a nuclear war, the possibility of a planetary event, like a comet, but I think the awareness of the fragility of the earth is very important to the story--that we all have to be careful."
When he visited the set, McCarthy was very happy with the choices of locations--in particular New Orleans, where there has been an actual natural disaster. Nature and the environment are so important to this film.
"What I really loved about the book," says Hillcoat, "and what I love about Comic McCarthy is he's so kind of unflinching in exploring the depths of humanity and not shying away from just how scary we really are and how we're our own and the entire planet's worst enemy and always have been and always will be. And yet what is extraordinary about the book that isn't in his other books is that incredible emotional richness and tenderness between the father and the son at the core of the story.
"And the world. What I loved about the book as well was there was no discussion or buildup of actually what happened. You don't even know what happened. There was so much stuff that was left unsaid in the way it should be left unsaid because, you know, if a disaster of that scale, whether it's nuclear or a comet or whichever way it goes, any disaster on that scale would immediately from that day on it would be irrelevant about exactly what happened and what caused it. From that day on people are fighting to cope with the radical change, and the way he kind of kept that on a knife I thought was original and quite haunting and disturbing. It felt particularly real and particularly relevant for these times."
"It is a biblical story," says Paula Schwartz. "The story of the triumph of love over evil, and we feel that it will give people a good feeling when they leave the theater--that there is hope."

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