Joe Penhall

The Road opens this week

The Road finally hits the theatres in the U.S. tomorrow (November 25). You can find the showtimes on Fandango.

Here is a behind the scenes featurette that showed up online this week:

And all the international release dates available on IMDb:

Canada – 27 November 2009
France – 2 December 2009
Greece – 10 December 2009
Russia – 10 December 2009
Finland – 25 December 2009
Belgium – January 2010
Norway – January 2010
South Korea – 7 January 2010
UK – 8 January 2010
Slovenia – 14 January 2010
Argentina – 21 January 2010
Estonia – 22 January 2010
Sweden – 22 January 2010
Australia – 28 January 2010
Netherlands – 4 February 2010
Brazil – 5 February 2010
New Zealand – 18 March 2010

And finally, the latest poster, from BeyondHollywood.com:

The Road,The Road movie,The Road poster,Garret Dillahunt

The Road – premiere, reviews, clips

The Road was screened for the press yesterday and premiered today in Venice, so the first reviews are in. But you probably want to see this first:

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For more clips from the film, go to TrailerAddict.com.

John Hillcoat, Joe Penhall, Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee were at the premiere. For some pics, visit Zimbio.

The Road has also been added to the Telluride lineup. The festival opens tomorrow.

Here are some initial reviews from the Venice screenings:

In “The Road,” director John Hillcoat has performed an admirable job of bringing Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the screen as an intact and haunting tale, even at the cost of sacrificing color, big scenes and standard Hollywood imagery of post-apocalyptic America. [The Hollywood Reporter]

John Hillcoat’s superb adaptation of the prize-winning novel by Cormac McCarthy leads its audience on a road to nowhere. The route takes us through blighted forests and past derelict homes, all this way to a grey and barren ocean that breaks against the shore. (…) What a haunting, harrowing, powerful film this is. Before last night’s premiere there were rumours that its lengthy post-production period (the movie was actually shot back in February 2008) spelled signs of a troubled, sickly production. By and large, those fears have now proved to be unfounded. [Guardian.co.uk]

As heartbreaking on screen as it was on Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer-prize winning pages, The Road is an almost unbearably sad film, beautifully arranged and powerfully acted – a tribute to the array of talents involved. There is so much in this picture, from dread, horror, to suspense, bitterly moving love, extraordinary, Oscar-worthy art direction and a desperate lead performance from Viggo Mortensen which perfectly illustrates the wrenching desperation of parental love. But its hopelessness will make The Road hard going for general audiences: critical and awards support are vital to its commercial success or failure and even still The Road will be a challenge. [ScreenDaily.com]

John Hillcoat has made a film of power and sensitivity that works remarkably well on the big screen. It plays like a Dystopian version of Huck Finn. “Tattered gods slouching in their rags across the waste,” was how McCarthy described the father and son on their grim odyssey south across America toward the coast.

The film captures well the strange mix of heroism and seeming futility that characterises the journey. What is most impressive is the restraint the filmmakers bring to their material. The look of the film is muted and grey other than in the flashbacks to the pre-apocalyptic moments that the man (Viggo Mortensen) enjoyed with his wife (Charlize Theron) before the world ground to a halt. [Independent.co.uk]

The Road is harrowing and beautifully composed. It aestheticises horror, thus getting away with ugly, disturbing, even ghoulish scenes by turning them into the cinematic equivalent of those Sebastiao Salgado photographs of Brazilian gold miners.

McCarthy’s novel worked partly because of what it left to the imagination. The film leaves nothing to the imagination — not even a cellarful of desperate human cattle who are being kept alive for slaughter. So although Joe Penhall’s script is remarkably faithful to the original, it doesn’t feel quite right. The film is bleak and visionary, but it leaves a faintly nasty taste in the mouth, as if it wanted to rope in the horror fans under its arthouse cloak. Yet there’s no denying its raw power. [London Evening Standard]

The Road – a portion of Nick Cave’s score played on BBC4

theroad12Rebecca Jones, the arts correspondent at BBC4, talked to Joe Penhall, who adapted The Road for the big screen, and played a portion of the score Nick Cave wrote for the film.

Cave previously worked with director John Hillcoat on The Proposition, the Australian western starring Guy Pearce and Ray Winstone, for which he wrote the script as well as the score.

Also included in Jones’ report are a few audio clips from Irish writer John Banville, who won the MAN Booker Prize in 2005 for his novel The Sea and is a fan of the book, and from Cormac McCarthy himself.

You can hear it here.

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

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.”