An apocalypse you can bear

When the Man and the Boy find the bomb shelter filled with canned goods in the movie, for example, there's now someone (or something) trying to break in. Rather than only contemplating having to kill his son to spare him from cannibals, the Man in the movie now actually cocks his pistol at his boy's head. And after stumbling across a cellar filled with barely alive people headed for some cannibals' butchering, the Man and the Boy must now dodge the prey like a scene out of a zombie film.

"That's not only to heighten the threat but also to get variety," Hillcoat said while Mortensen and a shaking Smit-McPhee warmed up from their freezing swim, the sun having ducked out of sight. "There's a lot of repetition in the book."

Hillcoat also has made the planet more of an active character, adding a scene where two massive trees nearly crush father and son. "It just builds on the story that we are creating of the revenge of nature," Hillcoat said. "We are certainly heightening the environmental threat."

Indeed, the visual references for the film are far closer to the eruption of Mt. St. Helens (whose swath of fallen trees may open the film) than the rubble of the World Trade Center.

"We will create a post-apocalyptic world that is boldly original and present a vision that will captivate and haunt precisely because of its strange echoes of familiarity," Hillcoat wrote in his style notes for the film.

With that in mind, the production filmed not against green screens where invented destruction could be added digitally but around areas of actual urban decay and natural disaster, taking cameras to New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward and slums outside of Pittsburgh. The production even found an abandoned four-lane highway in Pennsylvania to serve as one of the film's central thoroughfares.

The idea was to ground the story in American reality whenever possible rather than where-in-the-world-are-we "Mad Max" fantasy. Hillcoat hoped that one of the film's most distressing images would be a field of snow covered with blood and bloody footprints, inspired by a picture the director saw from a Bosnian Serb slaughter of Muslims.

With so much death, though, audiences may need a little life too, and that's where the relationship between Mortensen and Smit-McPhee will be critical. If the story's father dies before he can bring his son to a safe place, he knows that his young child will at best have to face this unforgiving world alone and at worst suffer a horrible end at someone else's hands.

If the father can somehow remain alive long enough, his son -- and, by extension, the human race -- might just be able to make it. Since the Man (likely a doctor) is dying of some unknown ailment, he needs to know that the Boy will still "carry the fire," as McCarthy memorably put it, and try to build a new and better world in the days and years ahead.

Hillcoat hoped that his movie's closing image will be an extreme close-up of the Boy's face, filled not with dread but optimism. "It's like first contact," Hillcoat says. "You can literally see the wheels of his mind spinning. The human story is what has to be the most intense."

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john.horn@latimes.com