COLUMBIA RIVER GORGE NATIONAL SCENIC AREA, ORE. — The FATHER and son struggling to stay alive in "The Road" understand that everything they know is coming to an end.
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An apocalypse you can bear
Too bleak for the screen? Filmmakers adapting Cormac McCarthy's novel 'The Road' followed the ray of hope found in its father-son relationship.
ON THE SET
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Ext. ROAD -- DAY
In the burnt, barren landscape, through swirls of soft ash and smoggy air the MAN appears dressed as if homeless, a filthy old parka with the hood up, a knapsack on his back, pushing a rusted shopping cart with a bicycle mirror clamped to the handle and a blue tarp now covering its load. The little BOY, similarly dressed with a knapsack on his back, shuffles through the ash at his side.
Screenwriter Joe Penhall's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's bestselling novel opens with the two survivors of some unspoken earthly catastrophe enduring an earthquake, witnessing a forest fire, stepping around a severed human leg and discovering a family of three who have hanged themselves -- all before Page 8. In Penhall's script, father and son also encounter a man stumbling along in near blindness, his hair singed, his flesh charred; run from a pack of gun-toting cannibals; and find a crudely painted billboard proclaiming, "Behold the Valley of Slaughter."
The world -- and everything in it -- is dying, and the Man and the Boy are determined to keep moving, knowing that if they stop, some horrible fate will claim them. The shopping cart's mirror isn't for decoration: It's to see if anyone is gaining on them. In such dire circumstances, the least comfort -- fresh food, clean water, a blanket -- is magnified into the greatest luxury, and that has made the scene that "The Road" director John Hillcoat was filming on a late spring day even more difficult to execute.
With a little more than a week of principal photography left on production of the film, the Man (Viggo Mortensen) and the Boy ("Romulus, My Father's" 11-year-old Kodi Smit-McPhee) had reached Horsetail Falls, a cataract thundering into a verdant gulch an hour east of Portland. Especially by Oregon standards, it was a stunning early May morning: The weather was T-shirt warm, with songbirds flitting about in the waterfall's mist. As Penhall and Hillcoat imagined the scene, which falls in the screenplay's first quarter, the two actors would wade into the waterfall's icy pool and, for a moment, pretend as if there was nothing wrong and the world hadn't become a soot-covered graveyard.: The Boy even remarked to the Man, "Look. Colors."
