Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning 'The Road'is scary, but no more nerve-wracking than having to show your big-screen adaptation of the novel to its author, writes dramatist Joe Penhall
CORMAC McCARTHY'S The Roadis one of the most frightening, daring, dark and desperate books to have emerged in recent years, rightly winning the Pulitzer Prize for its author, Cormac McCarthy, and going on to sell millions. Fortunately for me, it hadn't been published when I began the task of adapting it for film. Unfortunately for me, by the time I had finished my screenplay a year later, it was Oprah Winfrey's favourite book, and McCarthy, who had seen the Coen brothers' film of his No Country for Old Men win four Oscars, was showing a keen interest, along with the rest of Hollywood. McCarthy, who has a messianic following, is frequently described as "America's greatest living author" and is increasingly viewed by Hollywood as the golden goose.
In February 2008, in sub-zero temperatures in Pennsylvania’s rust belt, he turned up on set, with his 11-year-old son, John, to see how filming was going. Another year later, as the picture was being locked in a west Hollywood cutting room, he agreed to drive up from Santa Fe to watch it, with a view to giving it his almighty blessing. The director, John Hillcoat, and I were under no illusions. We knew that only McCarthy’s approval would allow us to release the film we’d truly wanted to make. Without him, we were at the mercy of increasingly nervous investors, and our Hollywood film-making future hung in the balance.
So when McCarthy’s ageing silver Cadillac emerged from the shimmering New Mexico desert one chilly November morning to meet Hillcoat and me, at a deserted Albuquerque screening room, the stakes couldn’t have been higher. Things got off to a shaky start when the projector failed. As McCarthy made his way up in the lift, Hillcoat laboured to get the machine going. Then it looked like we had no sound. That, too, was duly fixed. Finally, the three of us sank into leather armchairs, a discreet distance from one another, and the film began.
Immediately, McCarthy began scribbling notes on a reporter’s notepad. Hillcoat and I eyed each other nervously. By the end, he had pages of the damned things. He stood up and stretched, yawned and said absolutely nothing as the credits rolled. Finally, Hillcoat asked: “Well?”
“I have to go to the restroom,” was the impassive response, and he was gone.
“Just like a critic,” I murmured.
We were sure he despised the movie more than any of the other Hollywood McCarthy adaptations – and there had been a few stinkers. We watched the clock and waited. Either the bathroom was a long way away or McCarthy had flown the coop.
We looked out the window for the silver Cadillac, which was, reassuringly, still in the car park. Then McCarthy reappeared, studied the floor like a man who had dropped his car keys down a storm drain, sighed and said: “It’s really good.”
Hillcoat, who had been beaten over the head with the spectre of failure by just about everybody involved up to this point, couldn’t contain his doubts: “Really? You’re not just saying that?”
“Listen,” McCarthy reassured us, “I didn’t drive all this way to blow smoke up your ass.” He added that it was “very powerful” and “a film like no other film I’ve seen . . . but we should probably eat something before we get too carried away”.
We piled into the Caddy and headed for a grill on the outskirts of town. I, for one, needed a stiff drink but knew that McCarthy took a dim view of boozers – he’d known too many in the past. So when he ordered a bottle of Shiraz to go with our burgers, it felt like my birthday.
The first thing he said he liked about the film was the voiceover. This had been a source of consternation for some time. Initially, I wanted to write one to fully capture McCarthy’s coruscating lilt - but Hillcoat didn’t want it. Then, once it was filmed, the producers wanted the voiceover. Hillcoat reluctantly agreed but our star, Viggo Mortensen, was dead against it. Nick Cave, who was scoring the film, was all for it. Meanwhile, Robert Duvall, who is in arguably the best scene in the film, had taken to improvising his own extraordinary dialogue, which some of us thought might make a fine voiceover.
When I finally sat down in my Sunset Strip hotel room to finish writing it, with eight worried people on a conference call chewing over every word, the voiceover was starting to look doomed. Now we had it from the horse’s mouth: “It’s very successful. It really works.” I wanted to lift McCarthy off his feet and give him a bear hug.
WE GRADUATED from Shiraz to the local beer (“Fat Tires“) and the conversation got interesting. McCarthy revealed that No Country for Old Men was first written as a screenplay, until he realised that starting a film career was a waste of time and wrote it as a novel instead. (The Coen brothers’ screenplay later went on to win an Oscar.) McCarthy had written a play, The Sunset Limited, and I asked him why he hadn’t written more for the stage. “Because I realised my future is too short,” he drawled, practically yawning his disdain for theatre.
We talked about his newfound popularity with Hollywood film-makers and audiences. My theory is that post-9/11, post-Katrina, post-Iraq, ordinary Americans can at last conceive of a world bereft of humanity, a world McCarthy has depicted for decades. He shrugged at this, non-committally. And of course we talked about John, the treasured son who inspired so much of The Road, born as McCarthy neared his 70s, his greatest prize arriving so late in the day. An encroaching fear of mortality, and of where his own death leaves John, is behind The Road.
I had begun my screenplay not long after my own father had died prematurely, identifying with the boy in the book. But by the time we began the edit, I had my own son on the way, and was identifying solely with the father, who, as the world gradually burns up, despairs of ever seeing his son grow old. If his other masterpiece, Blood Meridian, was about "the limits of our inhumanity", McCarthy says, The Roadwas about "the limits of our humanity".
With lubrication, the atmosphere became collegiate, as we discussed writing, children and music (McCarthy was once a folk singer and still writes songs). At 7pm we said our goodbyes and piled back into the Caddy for a lift to the airport. I asked McCarthy to sign my copy of The Road, and he refused – the only copies he will sign are for young John. I asked him to sign my script, and again he refused: “Why the hell would I want to do that? It’s got nothing to do with me.” Instead, he signed my copy of Blood Meridian. By this time we’d all had a good few drinks, so it was with some concern that I later read the inscription: “From your friend Cormac, Albuquerque, November 2002.” It was November 2008.
I turned to Hillcoat, happier than I’d ever seen him, in the economy seat beside me: “Christ, John, how much did we drink? He’s got to drive back to Santa Fe in the dark – if he winds up in a ditch, we’ll be responsible. We’ll have killed America’s greatest living writer.”
The next morning, at 8am sharp, four hand-typed pages of notes appeared on the cutting-room fax, painstakingly transcribed from McCarthy’s screening-room scrawl. One or two were unintentionally withering: “a weak line . . . too obvious . . .”; some were generous; all were extraordinarily useful.
Hillcoat had cut perhaps the loveliest and harshest exchange in the film: “What would you do if I died?” the boy asks his father. “I’d want to die too,” he replies, with the blunt tenderness which characterises the book. “This exchange,” McCarthy insisted with exquisite understatement, “is important.” Hillcoat hastily restored it. Notes, at the best of times, are one of the world’s great arse pains. Those four pages I should have framed.
The Roadis on general release
