Kodi Smit-McPhee on the set of The Road

I finally read Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" and it took me all of five hours. As soon as I was done I realized it was the best book I had ever read. The scene in the house (you'll know once you read it) was more chilling than anything I read in "The Shining" and the ending is more emotional than I ever could have anticipated. Looking around the Internet if any readers have given it bad marks it's due to McCarthy's lack of punctuation as he seems to despise commas, apostrophes and quotation marks, but as long as you are warned in advance it won't bother you in the least and actually becomes a rather welcomed change.

I bring this all up as Charles McGrath has written a new article at the "New York Times" titled "At World's End, Honing a Father-Son Dynamic" looking at the film and bringing us our first official look at the film as you can see above.

The article discusses the making of the film and what it took to bring a world that is basically dead back to life. "Bad weather was good and good weather bad," reads the piece and to read it, it sounds like they may have hit the nail on the head and this is going to be a dark and disturbing descent into the end of the world as never seen before.

McGrath's piece talks about how the Mad Max films were discussed on set… and, thankfully, not in a good way:

"What's moving and shocking about McCarthy's book is that it's so believable," Mr. Hillcoat said. "So what we wanted is a kind of heightened realism, as opposed to the Mad Max thing, which is all about high concept and spectacle. We're trying to avoid the clichés of apocalypse and make this more like a natural disaster." He imagined the characters less as Mad Max-ian freaks outfitted in outlandish biker wear, he added, than as homeless people. They wear scavenged, ill-fitting clothing and layers of plastic bags for insulation.

I love how they look at Mad Max as cliché and are doing as much as they can to bring the sense of realism to this flick, because that is what it is.

This may be the end of the unexplained end of the world, and there may be cannibalistic "bad guys" chasing after the "good guys," but they aren't zombies, they are desperate people living in a time where the sun is never seen and the entire world has gone grey. All that is left is a father's love for his son and the hope of something, anything, at the end of the road.

As I read the book I immediately loved the casting choice of Viggo Mortenson as the father, but I wasn't sure about Kodi Smit-McPhee as the son only because I have never seen him in anything before and a lot of the emotional tension comes and goes with the kid. It sounds as if I have nothing to worry about though:

Days after the filming of a climactic, emotional scene, people on the set were still marveling at Kodi's performance. A couple said they had puddled up just from watching the monitor and needed to sneak a tear-dabbing finger behind their sunglasses.

Now that's what I wanted to hear.

We also learn from the article that Michael Kenneth Williams from "The Wire" will play the thief toward the end of the story, Robert Duvall will play the old, dying man, and Guy Pearce is another father wandering with his family. We already knew Charlize Theron will play the father's wife as she rounds out the cast.

For anyone that has read the book and loved it like I did, it is a great read and one that will give you confidence that director John Hillcoat put together the right people to turn this into the movie we wanted to see. To read it all click here.

The Road hits theaters November 11th from Dimension Films.

Related post categories: Movie News, Page Turner, Pictures and a Paragraph : Casting News, Guy Pearce, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Michael Kenneth Williams, Robert Duvall, The Road, Viggo Mortensen

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