Guy Pearce

The Road UK premiere and release date

Posted by admin

Icon Film Distribution has posted an official press release to announce the UK premiere (October 16, London Film Festival) and release date (January 8, 2010) for The Road. Details below.

The Road,John Hillcoat,Viggo Mortensen

ICON Film Distribution Announce 8th January 2010 Release for THE ROAD

STARRING VIGGO MORTENSEN, KODI SMIT MCPHEE, GUY PEARCE, ROBERT DUVALL & CHARLIZE THERON

WRITTEN & DIRECTED BY JOHN HILLCOAT

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller from acclaimed novelist Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, All the Pretty Horses)

OFFICIAL UK PREMIERE AT THE TIMES BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL, FRIDAY 16th OCTOBER 2009

‘The Road‘ is a post-apocalyptic dramatic thriller about a father and his son walking alone through burned America.

Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food–and each other.

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from Cormac McCarthy (“No Country for Old Men”), “The Road” stars Academy Award nominee Viggo Mortensen (Eastern Promises) and Academy Award winners Robert Duvall (Tender Mercies) and Charlize Theron (Monster). Guy Pearce and Kodi Smit McPhee also star. [Press release]

The Road reviewed by Showbiz411

Posted by admin

Roger Friedman at Showbiz411 has posted his review of The Road. Here are a few quotes:

Hillcoat has done justice to McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winner. “The Road” is elegiac and moving, artful and yet suspenseful. No, it’s not a raucous good time. It can be thoughtful and grim. But here’s the interesting thing: Viggo Mortensen’s performance as a father walking through a post-apocalypse America with his young son is just fascinating. It stays with you long after leaving the theater. Mortensen is that good.

There aren’t a lot of other actors in “The Road.” Charlize Theron is very good as Viggo’s wife, in flashbacks. Both Robert Duvall and Guy Pearce make cameo appearances. Eleven-year-old (he’s 13 now) Kodi Smit-McPhee is just right as the couple’s son.

What Hillcoat and screenwriter Joe Penhall do is accurately capture McCarthy’s tone and lauguage. This isn’t easy to do. “The Road” is a bleak trip, told in muted blacks, blues, and grays. There are no blue skies after whatever caused the apocalypse (is it nuclear war? we don’t know. Everything left, including the trees, is dying.)

You can read the full article here.

The Road – first review

Posted by admin

The Road was screened in NYC the other day. AICN has the first shamelessly gushing review.

John Hillcoat has taken this dark and brooding story and turned it into something so cinematic yet still maintaining an absolutely faithful adaptation. I had read in an interview with him a while back where he said he was planning on adding a bit more color to this movie because an audience ‘doesn’t want to look at grey for 2 hours.’ Well if he did he made it very very subtle because the color scheme works entirely. It’s still very grey and still very dark. The scope of this movie is unbelievable with vast and detailed landscapes representing a dead world. These shots are accompanied by voiceovers spoken by The Man from passages taken directly from the book. As far as the visual aspects go and how much we are allowed to see of this world is niether overdone or underdone. It’s not JUST a forest and it’s not The Day After Tomorrow. The artistic direction really substitutes for the writing in the book and helped to give me the same feeling I got when I read it. A perfect balance.

So we have these seven performances that make up this movie.

Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce, Garret Dillahunt and Michael K. Williams all have one scene each of very important characters, all of which give us a very good portrait of every aspect of this society. I could go off on each of them and how they gave each role so much and why it worked so well with the world of the movie but this review would be far too long. They’re all just great.

Fox press junket: more about The Road and the Gang Member

Posted by admin

Garret was promoting The Sarah Connor Chronicles at Fox’s midseason press junket. The first report is mainly about The Road. It’s up at SCI FI Wire.

“I play the Gang Member, and they meet up with a pretty nasty road gang toward the beginning, in the first quarter,” Dillahunt said in an interview on Tuesday in Los Angeles, where he was promoting Fox’s Sarah Connor Chronicles. “Yeah, in the truck. And me and Viggo have a great scene in the woods where I try to take his son. The big fight in the woods.”

Dillahunt said the film shot in winter in rural Pennsylvania, a bleak setting that mirrored the book’s grim landscape, which Dillahunt described as “beautiful in its spareness.”

“We shot in just horrific places, you know,” Dillahunt said. “We found this incredible stretch of road that hadn’t been used since 1964, outside of Pittsburgh, these incredible tunnels and everything, really spooky, and the trees are bare, freezing cold. And I think they assembled a group of people that’s very interested in preserving the book.” The movie is directed by John Hillcoat and written by Joe Penhall.

Dillahunt—who, unlike many of his characters, is the nicest guy possible—says the role made him wonder how he’d react in similar circumstances. “I like to think I’d be like Viggo’s character or Guy Pearce’s character, you know? I’d like to think that that’s how I’d respond to that crisis. But if I’m starving, I wonder what I would do. I’m pretty certain that it wouldn’t be cannibalism.”

Still, Dillahunt said that he had to get into the mindset of a cannibalistic marauder. “I had more sympathy for the guy when I tried to think of it in those terms,” he said, but added with a smile: “That might have been… too kind.”