The Road

John Hillcoat found his ruin rather than building it. The unit worked eight weeks around Pittsburgh in winter 2008 and used the old Pennsylvania turnpike between Breezewood and Sideling Hill, a 21 kilometre stretch shut in 1968; the eastern portal of its Rays Hill Tunnel was repaired for the shoot. Other stops are real disaster sites: Conneaut Lake amusement park two months after its Dreamland ballroom burned, Louisiana after Katrina, Mount St. Helens. Hillcoat says they “didn’t want to go the CGI world”; digital work was held to sky replacement and stripping greenery. The mother, barely present in Cormac McCarthy’s novel, is markedly enlarged in flashback, so Charlize Theron’s scenes break the walk with warmth the book lacks. The Nick Cave and Warren Ellis score refuses orchestral size and sentiment, saving its lyrical register for father and son. The Weinsteins pushed the film back a year from autumn 2008. Beforehand Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee spent a week or two in Pittsburgh reading the script a little at a time; Mortensen says it would not be as good without winter exteriors. A good fit if the gap between a computer built ruin and one found in a genuinely abandoned tunnel matters to you. Not for anyone expecting a mother as faint as the book’s, since Theron’s share was plainly increased.