Interview: John Hillcoat of ‘The Road’

Posted on November 23, 2009 at 3:56 pm

I spoke to John Hillcoat, director of the apocalyptic new film, “The Road,” based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy. We do not know what caused the cataclysmic damage that has wiped out most forms of life on earth and left everything covered in ash. All we know is that there is a father (Viggo Mortensen) trying to protect his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) from the physical and spiritual consequences of the devastation.

NM: Do you see this as a spiritual film?

JH: It can definitely be read that way. Yes, absolutely. I never wanted to be heavy-handed about the approach. I wanted it to be open to interpretation according to your own belief systems. It’s certainly got a kind of ancient, Biblical parable feeling to it. There’s a morality tale there. But in terms of essence of humanity, that’s really brought to the fore because everything’s stripped bare. There’s nowhere to hide. So it definitely has those dimensions to it. There are many spiritual aspects, but the whole idea of carrying the fire is an ancient one.

NM: I do not diminish the power of the film at all when I say that it seems like an exaggerated version of what every parent goes through in trying to both protect the children and give them the survival skills they will need when we are not here to protect them.

JH: Yes, absolutely. Knowing Cormac and his son, he calls him “Papa,” like the boy in the story. It’s obviously a personal work and that personal relationship is definitely embedded into the text and that’s also why it strikes such a deep cord, even thought it is set into such an extreme scenario. There’s a truth to it.

NM: For me, one of the most wrenching scenes in the film is when they return to the house the father grew up in, and it is only there that the father truly realizes that his son has no frame of reference to understand what life was like.

JH: Where does he learn? How does he become this amazing being? It’s like a scientific experiment. That drive to keep going and the hope they create in this idea of going to the coast. Every parent starts from scratch, but this story just makes that more stark. Ultimately, the boy becomes the teacher. That is something all parents see.

NM: I was very surprised to find Guy Pearce and Robert Duvall in the film. I did not recognize them at first.

JH: We tried to quite change their appearance quite a lot.

NM: The New York Times said that Kodi Smit-McPhee, the now-twelve-year-old who plays the boy, was so shocked by the cold water he was dunked in that he began to sob for real, but that he kept acting and you did not know how distressed he was until the scene was over. Is that true?

JH: Yes. It was actually a real turning point, early on in the shoot. My job was also to protect the boy. But Kodi was such a consummate professional. He didn’t tell anyone how cold he was. And afterward, we had an understanding that if there was any time that he felt real uncomfort that he’s got to tell us. He was so determined to get the best for everyone and the best from him as a performance. The most incredible thing was his maturity; he really understood what the story was about, what each scene was about. His instincts were razor-sharp. And yet, as soon as we stopped filming, he became this kid, joking around, playing. And we really encouraged that.

With that scene, I was about to call cut, and then I heard the dialogue, and everyone’s glancing around at each other, and we see that Viggo is actually responding totally. It’s this incredible thing of being real, Viggo’s concern for Kodi, and playing their parts. That was a great gift and I wouldn’t mess with that. Luckily, we shot it on two cameras, so that was it. And when we were done, Viggo kept holding Kodi. None of us had put two and two together to realize why he was so upset. I had spoke to him about coming out of shock. Kodi’s father was there; he played one of the cannibals. Viggo started to hand Kodi over to them but he stepped away. Kodi knew he was there but he and Viggo from that day had this incredible bond.

NM: Tell me how you achieved the look of the film. It is so bleak and stark and powerful.

JH: The spark for that came when I read the book. I was always trying to be true to the spirit of the book. Usually the post-apocalyptic films are about the big event and they feel so much like a spectacle and there’s no real human dimension or spiritual dimension or any other dimension really other than the roller coaster ride. So it was that feeling of authenticity, really simple things like pushing the shopping trolley with all your possessions in it. That’s the homeless in every city. And the dirty ski jackets. So it felt familiar. It’s almost like I’ve seen this before, not as a vision or a premonition, but we’ve actually witnessed these elements, just not on a local scale. That is what led us to those locations, and the locations were the key to the look. The bulk of what we got was in camera. We filmed in the winter in places like Pennsylvania like where all the mining leftovers are, the ash piles in the winter time. Where are the trees are bare of leaves. We had the aging and the muted colors of the wardrobe. There’s a strange beauty in these desolate locations. Then it also gave a real poignancy to working in a place like New Orleans, where the post-Katrina clean-up was still happening. When half your crew has lived through that, it really added focus. It also became something that the actors could really react off of, so it was like there was a third character working with Kodi and Viggo the whole time. We went to Mount St. Helens. We went to Oregon, the gray beaches. It was a patchwork tapestry of man-made and natural disasters that have already occurred. We added physical effects like spraying biodegradable ash and paper, but whatever we couldn’t get in the camera, CGI took over to eliminate signs of life, green pine needles, birds, jet streams. It was more to take out or put in. The challenge was when it was beautiful blue skies and sunshine, because we had to block the sun. There’s a shot of two ships sitting on a freeway. That’s 70 mil. IMAX footage from two days after Katrina. We had to replace the blue sky and green grass in that shot, but everything else is real. Even the smoke billowing in the background we took from was from 9/11. We deliberately used images we have all seen to make it more real and to give more poignancy and a warning sign and to surround it, because that’s what the book is about, grace under pressure. When you’re surrounded by your real fears, things that you know are possible in some way, it makes hope all the more special. The light shines brightest when it is surrounded by dark.

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Directors Interview

Giveaway: Curious George!

Posted on November 22, 2009 at 8:00 am

The adorable monkey whose inquiring personality frequently requires rescue by the man in the yellow hat has a new DVD for the holidays, in stores already: Curious George: A Very Monkey Christmas It is a charming story to relieve some of the pressure of the season with a reminder that laughing together when things go wrong is one of the pleasures we share with those we love.

And thanks to Universal Studios Home Entertainment, I have one to give away. Write to me at moviemom@moviemom.com and let me know about a time you were curious — the first one will win the DVD.

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Contests and Giveaways

Aria Wallace Unplugged

Posted on November 20, 2009 at 3:59 pm

Actress Aria Wallace of Roxy Hunter answered my questions about her “real time” experiment — 40 days without technology! This is a great idea to try with your family — no cell phones, computers, or television — listen to Aria talk about how slowing down, looking, listening, and even playing Clue was more fun and made her feel more connected to people. I love what she said about how much better it is to hear people laugh than to read “LOL.”

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Actors

Thoughts on ‘Precious’

Posted on November 19, 2009 at 3:59 pm

“Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire” has been warmly embraced by audiences and critics since it first appeared in festivals. Two of the biggest media powerhouses in the world, Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, signed on as producers after the film was completed to help ensure its distribution and box office. Ninety percent of the critics on Rotten Tomatoes have given the film a positive review. I gave it an A- .

But I find some of the criticism and commentary on the film very thoughtful and the issues raised well worth discussion. In my own review, I raised the question of what is sometimes referred to as “poverty porn.” It can be hard to draw a line between what is exploitative and what is sensitive and illuminating. The movie is based on the best-seller Push (re-named Precious to tie in with the movie), by the poet Sapphire, inspired by the girls she worked with as a teacher.

One of my favorite critics, Dana Stevens of Slate, made some of the strongest objections to the movie. She says the director’s “methodical commitment to abjection, his need to shove the reality of Precious’ life in our faces and wave it around till we acknowledge its awfulness, winds up robbing the audience (and, to some extent, the actors) of all agency….But in offering up their heroine’s misery for the audience’s delectation, created something uncomfortably close to poverty porn.”

Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy strongly objected to the film. “In ‘Precious,’ Oprah and Perry have helped serve up a film of prurient interest that has about as much redeeming social value as a porn flick.”

Milloy is critical of the plaudits from mostly-white audiences and of Winfrey and Tyler who rhapsodize about the small achievements of the downtrodden heroine instead of telling their own stories of unparalleled fame and fortune.

Maybe there is something to the notion that when human pathology is given a black face, white people don’t have to feel so bad about their own. At least somebody’s happy.

Sexual abuse is certainly an equal-opportunity crime, with black and white women similarly affected. But only exaggerated black depravity seems to resonate so forcefully in the imagination.

White suburban boys are so fascinated by it that they fueled an explosion of gangsta rap — misogynistic lyrics against a backdrop of booty-shaking black women.

I think this is an over-reaction, and in parts just wrong. Stories are a way of helping us make sense of the world by imposing a sense of certainty, logic, and meaning that often eludes us in life. Therefore, they are often melodramatic, exaggerated, and unrealistic. They often focus on suffering and on exaggerated depravity and very often rich white people are doing the suffering or bearing up under the depravity. Look at soap operas. Or any given episode of “Law and Order.” And white suburban boys can bear only a portion of the blame for gangsta rap. The rest goes to the perpetrators. There is an unforgettable moment in the Jay-Z documentary “Fade to Black” when two aspiring rap stars admit they feel queasy about writing songs that glorify violence and misogyny but do it to make money.

Frequent provocateur Armond White is one of the film’s harshest critics. He objects to the way that after it was completed Winfrey and Perry signed on as “producers” because it fit with their own narratives of triumph over abuse and poverty. “Promoting this movie isn’t just a way for Perry and Winfrey to aggrandize themselves, it helps convert their private agendas into heavily hyped social preoccupation.” He calls director Lee Daniels a “pathology pimp” and says that the movie is “an orgy of prurience.” He criticizes the film for “cast light-skinned actors as kind (schoolteacher Paula Patton, social worker Mariah Carey, nurse Lenny Kravitz and an actual Down syndrome child as Precious’ first-born) and dark-skinned actors as terrors” and says that the daydreams Precious has about being adored on a black carpet “sells materialist fantasy as a universal motivation.”

He concludes his review:

Worse than Precious itself was the ordeal of watching it with an audience full of patronizing white folk at the New York Film Festival, then enduring its media hoodwink as a credible depiction of black American life. A scene such as the hippopotamus-like teenager climbing a K-2 incline of tenement stairs to present her newborn, incest-bred baby to her unhinged virago matriarch, might have been met howls of skeptical laughter at Harlem’s Magic Johnson theater. Black audiences would surely have seen the comedy in this ludicrous, overloaded situation, whereas too many white film habituÃ©s casually enjoy it for the sense of superiority–and relief–it allows them to feel. Some people like being conned.

White’s point about the skin color of the movie’s characters is echoed in an essay by Jada F. Smith on The Root. Also on The Root, Deborah Douglas criticizes the film for its portrayal of incest, contrary to what statistics show about the far greater likelihood of abuse by a step-father or brother than by a biological father. And Salamishah Tillet compares the response to this film to the more critical reaction to another movie about an abused teenager impregnated through incest, “The Color Purple.”

I suspect the greater outcry about “The Color Purple” was in part because while it was based on a book by a black woman, the movie was made by a white man. But “Precious” director Lee Daniels is black. There is always more leeway for anyone telling a story about his or her own ethnic and cultural group.

I think that Stevens makes some good points and the issue of the characters’ skin color seems a valid one, though Mo’Nique’s skin is much lighter than Gabourey Sidibe’s. While I like the way he writes and admire the intensity of his engagement, I do not agree with White’s comments about “materialist fantasy.” A key theme of the movie (as in many movies) was the heroine’s realization that the limited fantasy life she had based on television did not offer the satisfaction of real achievement and real relationships.

I really like the commentary from another of my favorite critics, Teresa Wiltz, also on The Root. She gets it exactly right when she reminds us to focus on the characters in the story rather than trying to make them stand for some major cultural conclusions.

deserves every bit of attention that it gets. But there’s something discomfiting about her declarations that “We are all Precious.” In short, she Oprah-fies Precious, rendering Precious’ fierce individuality the stuff of platitudes and Stuart moments on SNL.

No, we are not all Precious. We all get our power from the individuality of our stories. Precious stands alone.

Wiltz and Smith are featured in an NPR interview about “Precious” as well.

If you see the movie or if you or someone you care about is dealing with issues of abuse, please visit Beliefnet’s prayer wall inspired by the story. And if that abuse is in the present, please take inspiration from the story of Precious and get help now.

The Real Story: Michael Oher of ‘The Blind Side’

Posted on November 19, 2009 at 3:59 pm

This week’s release, “The Blind Side,” is the story of Michael Oher, played by Quinton Aaron. Here is a glimpse of the real Oher, now an offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens. What I find most touching is when he says that he became a part of the family when he realized he was needed.

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