John Hillcoat
The acclaimed director talks locations, finding the right actors and, his latest film, The Road.

Just a few weeks into 2010 and The Road is already been called the film of the decade. The director, John Hillcoat, took time out at the London Film Festival to talk about location shooting, working with 10 year-olds and the complexity of The Road.

John, although thematically quite different, the look of The Road is quite similar to that of your last film, The Proposition; what drew you to the material? Is there something about wide, open, desolate landscapes that really attracts you?

JH: Well I like a lot of hot heat and sun, coming from Australia. But really, yes they’re both polarised states, extreme worlds. I’ve always been interested in extreme environments, and the way in which environments can impact upon the people.

You could choose much easier shoots, inside comfortable studios, but you instead chose this rather demanding and gruelling project; did you find it that bad?

JH: No I love to unwind on a cold mid-winter morning. Yes, it is gruelling, but I hope – and I think that it’s true – that our performers, reacted to the environments in a positive sense and it helped to add a reality – as Kodi said, it’s a lot easier to feel cold than to act cold. Also, as a crew, it helps everyone focus in on what sort of a world striving to create. For me, working in a green-screen studio is a much harder thing to do.

Where did you shoot it?

JH: Pennsylvania, and that was to do with the abandoned feel, the deciduous trees. We also wanted scenes of out and out natural destruction so we headed to some of the areas where Katrina had hit, places where the clean-up operation is still ongoing. And also Oregon, for the great beaches.

Although very moving, some of the scenes are pretty heavy, I wondered how you approached these scenes with regard to the young actor, Kodi?

JH: Well that was my single greatest fear. Just like Viggo, we loved the material, like when I first read the book it floored me, but then I thought, how the hell are we going to find this kid, and also how are we going to protect this kid. I was thinking about shooting it in a way where the kid would not actually see half the stuff that we shot, I started from that point of view – from a very protective point of view. Viggo and I discussed at length how we’re going to work with this situation, and what happened was an incredible thing; Kodi comes from a very special family – a very close-knit family, and half of them are actors, including his father, and it was quite late in the day, friends had mentioned that I had to check out this kid in Australia, and they sent an audition piece that I never asked them to do, I actually asked the kid to do something quite neutral, to get a sense, but they did additional scenes which included Kodi’s father playing the father for real, and teaching him about putting a gun in his mouth, and that was basically his message to me to say, my kid can handle this. Or, they were completely insane, and of course that did cross my mind as well, and I thought at least I’ve got to check him out, I can’t just dismiss this, and I think by the time we’d got it down to about four kids, when we were working on the critical bit – Viggo’s relationship with the boy –  when we had Viggo work with each boy, Kodi at that point, his father had already read him the entire book, all of the stuff, so then my strategy went out the window, because here was a kid who was incredibly grounded, basically mature beyond his years, and it was that kind of maturity we were looking for. He was still a kid, and yet and an incredibly instinctual
understanding of what was required.

How old was he during the shoot?

JH: At the time he was ten, and turned eleven during the shoot. I mean we were originally looking at kids as young as seven or eight, but the actual whole dynamic changed. It suddenly didn’t become a two hander, it wasn’t as interesting or complex, and also that leap of faith that the boy takes, standing on his own feet at the end – that works better as it is in the film.