In Contention

Tag: Cormac McCarthy

  • INTERVIEW: ‘True Grit’ writers, producers and directors Joel and Ethan Coen

    Directors Joel and Ethan Coen have evolved into the quintessential American filmmakers of our time since charging onto the indie scene over 25 years ago. It was a trajectory hinted at in early depictions of Prohibition-era gangsterism (“Miller’s Crossing”), post-war Capitalism (“The Hudsucker Proxy”), Midwestern slice-of-life peculiarity (“Fargo”) and epic folk land adventurism (“O Brother, Where Art Thou?”), but it was a trademark that snapped into clarity in 2007 with their thematically potent examination of a country at a crossroads, “No Country for Old Men.”

    It seemed only a matter of time before they turned their attention to the quintessential American genre: the western.  But the word “western” didn’t really figure into their thinking when they set about re-adapting Charles Portis’s novel “True Grit” for the big screen.

    “To us, in a weird way, if you were going to put it into a genre, it was just a young adventure story,” Joel says. “It takes place in America in Oklahoma in 1878, so yeah, it’s a western, but the other thing almost kind of preceded it in our thinking. So I guess it wasn’t consciously approaching it as a ‘western’ in quotation marks. It’s an adventure story with the trappings of the old west.”

    (more…)

  • The Coens’ no-frills ‘True Grit’ hearkens to western heyday

    I’ve seen the Coen brothers’ “True Grit” twice now, and it’s not because the film is some “Inception”-like, mind-bending narrative maze. Quite the opposite, actually. I saddled up to it a second time yesterday morning because I wasn’t quite anticipating what I got the first time around and I wanted to consider it further knowing what it was.

    You see, this isn’t really “a Coen brothers film” to me. Outside of an opening act bathed in their usual trappings, the film feels almost anonymous, lacking the fingerprint stirringly present in each and every one of their efforts. And it’s all very much by design, by the way.

    “True Grit,” in its second screen iteration, is a classic western cut from traditional cloth. With its wide vistas, simple narrative and focus on character dynamics (as well as a handful of unrefined horse-back riding effects shots), it’s fair to say it bears more of a resemblance to the work of Anthony Mann, John Ford and Budd Boetticher than it does that of the Coens. The film isn’t focused on being as tight and complete as most of their films, and indeed, inchoate was very much a goal here.

    (more…)

  • Cormac McCarthy on adaptation and ‘The Road’

    Cormac McCarthyAs much as John Hillcoat’s filmization of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” didn’t work for me, I think it remains one title that could spring a surprise or two this awards season. Though the film has some high-profile detractors including Todd McCarthy and Roger Ebert, many have been profoundly affected by the film, while its prestigious cache is beyond dispute.

    Helping the cause is that Cormac McCarthy, the estimable author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning source novel, is fully behind the film.

    Today’s online must-read is an extensive Wall Street Journal interview with McCarthy, in which he discusses his own personal investment in the novel — much of which is directly inspired by his own relationship with his son — and the decade-long relationship between Hollywood and his writing.

    McCarthy has a healthily hands-off approach to adaptations of his work, bluntly stating that once the rights have been sold, “you don’t embroil yourself in somebody else’s project.” Claiming to have had confidence in Hillcoat from the outset, he goes on to say that the filmmakers “absolutely” caught the spirit of his novel.

    (more…)

  • PAGE TO SCREEN: “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy

    The RoadWe’re working from the outside in on this one, folks. You may recall that Brian Kinsley offered a thorough examination of Joe Penhall’s “The Road” screenplay for this column back in September last year, which already addressed many of the challenges inherent in this particular adaptation.

    However, in keeping with Page to Screen’s return to discussing source material rather than scripts – and with John Hillcoat’s film on a lot of people’s minds this week – I thought it a good time to take another look at Cormac McCarthy’s much-garlanded novel. I should specify that I have neither read Penhall’s adaptation nor seen the film; the novel is the only text with which I am engaging at this point.

    It seems only fair to start with a blunt, and admittedly very guilty, confession: I don’t very much like McCarthy’s novel.

    Before the irate attack begins, let me clarify that this statement is not in any intended as a challenge to “The Road’s” literary worth, much less its potential for successful filmmaking. It is, in its paradoxical construction of loose, virtual shaggy-dog-style narrative and terse, urgent prose, an indisputably awe-inspiring novel, one that at once gazes into the back-to-back mirrors of who we are and who we will be, and arrives at some discomfitingly vivid prophecies in the process.

    I commend McCarthy’s avoidance of didacticism and rationalisation: the novel’s grim, apocalyptic future is presented as a terrifying inevitability rather than a cautionary allegory, offering no concrete indication of what led humanity to the long-desecrated point at which the narrative begins.

    That may not make the novel as ideologically constructive as the kind of “it takes a village” finger-pointing that colors so many other literary and cinematic warnings of man’s imminent self-destruction – the film, when it finally arrives, would surely make for an interesting double-feature with Andrew Stanton’s “WALL-E” – but it is certainly a much more jolting, unnerving experience for it.

    (more…)

  • ‘The Road’ gets a release date

    (from left) Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Scott-McPhee in The RoadJohn Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” has been a big question mark for film-goers ever since it was yanked from the 2008 awards season.  I heard at the time (second hand) that the film was in disarray and needed to be “completely taken apart.”  Brian Kinsley, you may recall, reviewed the screenplay (essentially a cut-and-paste job) for us back in September.

    Whatever needed to happen seems to have happened as I’ve been hearing great things here and there, mainly for Viggo Mortensen’s lead performance.  And now, according to The Weinstein Company’s website, the film has finally nailed down a 2009 release date for the film: October 16.

    This is great positioning if TWC/Dimension is to take the genre film route with marketing, and from what I’ve heard, that would be the smart play.  Two weeks before Halloween and decent exposure in the middle of the awards season gives the studio some leverage on where to take it.  Audience and especially critical approval will tell the tale soon enough.

    In case you missed it, Guy wrote up a recently revealed gallery of conceptual art work for the film earlier this week.  I’m most looking forward to Nick Cave’s work with Warren Ellis on the film’s score, as their collaboration on “The Assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford” in 2007 was absolute magic.  Cave talked about his work in the film industry with the LA Times last year.

  • Visions of ‘The Road’

    Out there was the grey beach with the slow combers rolling dull and leaden and the distant sound of it. Like the desolation of some alien sea breaking on the shores of a world unheard of. Out on the tidal flats lay a tanker half careened. Beyond that the ocean vast and cold and shifting heavily like a slowly heaving vat of slag and then the grey squall line of ash.

    No adaptation this year is as dependent on matters of location and production design as John Hillcoat’s take on Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” a novel in which landscape is the narrative’s dominant antagonist. If the film can’t visually evoke McCarthy’s tangible sense of the familiar made alien through desolation, then it’s dead in the water.

    On the other hand, the sparsity of McCarthy’s prose leaves a lot of room of visual interpretation — contrary to what some have suggested, the novel is a highly cinematic work. So I’m intrigued by this gallery of conceptual “style frames” for the film, a collection of paintings, sketches and photo montages that give a vivid sense of the story world Hillcoat and his team have come up with. And on this evidence, at least, it looks to me like they’ve nailed it:

    The Road

    A couple more of my favourites after the cut. Check out the full collection here.

    (more…)

  • New images from ‘The Road’

    (from left) Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Scott-McPhee in The RoadOur friends at Cinematical point us this morning to six new images from John Hillcoat’s “The Road,” debuting over at USA Today with a nice accompanying story from Scott Bowles.

    I didn’t realize Hillcoat was filming this in Pittsburgh, probably one of my favorite sleepy cities in the entire country.  Bowles quotes the director as follows:

    It’s a beautiful place in fall with the colors changing…But in winter, it can be very bleak. There are city blocks that are abandoned. The woods can be brutal. We didn’t want to go the CGI world.  We wanted the heightened reality in the book.

    Very cool.  Star Viggo Mortensen is also quoted.  You can read the rest here.

    I’m currently thumbing my way through Cormac McCarthy’s book.  I’ve told a few friends who loved that it hasn’t exactly blown my skirt up yet, though more often than not the answer is, “Finish it and we’ll talk.”  Fair enough.  I do love the atmosphere McCarthy creates, more so than any of his other works.

    Dimension Films will be releasing “The Road” on November 11.  The film will have its North American debut at the Toronto Film Festival on Steptember 11.

  • ‘The Road’ on page and screen

    (from left) Kodi Scott-McPhee and Viggo Mortensen in The RoadThis weekend I opened Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel “The Road.” For whatever reason –- fright perhaps -– I’d hadn’t read it before now despite accolades from critics and friends.

    In June, Guy Lodge wrote a thoughtful entry about Dennis Lehane and how his books have easily transitioned to the screen. He likened him to Jane Austen. Mr. Lodge accurately noted that “it seems the studios are snapping up his titles faster than he can write them.”

    And for good reason. “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone” were exceptional (and successful) adaptations. “Shutter Island,” which will open in 2009 as “Ashcliff,” attracted the eye of Martin Scorsese along with an exceptional cast featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Emily Mortimer, Michelle Williams, Max Von Sydow, Jackie Earle Haley and Patricia Clarkson, to name a few. But I wonder if similar consideration might be given to Mr. McCarthy.

    John Hillcoat’s adaptation of “The Road” will hit theaters this November — just after thanksgiving. Unlike “No Country for Old Men,” the Coen brothers’ Academy Award-winning adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel, this film enters the market with far less fanfare. To date, it hasn’t screened for audiences or critics. It didn’t show at Cannes or Tribeca and, as of this writing, hasn’t been announced as part of the Toronto International Film Festival line-up.

    The film stars Viggo Mortensen, fresh off an Oscar nomination for “Eastern Promises,” David Cronenberg’s moody and dark film about the Russian mafia in London. Mortensen seems to have this genre down. While he was thrilling in Cronenberg’s haunting drama “A History of Violence,” the actor arguably made his name as Aragorn in those miserable elf movies from Peter Jackson. Five pages into the novel, his casting made perfect sense.

    In 2005, Hillcoat directed “The Proposition,” a brilliant western starring Guy Pearce and Ray Winstone. I found it to be one of the year’s best.

    “The Road” also stars Oscar winners Charlize Theron and Robert Duvall as well as Mr. Pearce and newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee, an 11-year-old boy who might just steal the film. Charles McGrath, writing in The New York Times earlier this year, noted that screenwriter Joe Penhall is “for the most part extremely faithful” to the story.

    The Oscar season is crowded with adaptations of books and plays. “Revolutionary Road,” “The Reader,” “Doubt,” “Frost/Nixon,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “House of Lies,” “Defiance” and “Miracle at St. Anna” are just a few. But if there’s such a thing as McCarthy fatigue, audiences may have it this year. Where “No Country for Old Men was violent and scary to a disturbing degree, “The Road” is – -210 pages in -– chilling and lonely. They are both beautiful works of literature, but how much stomach will the Academy have for another bleak story, particularly one set in a post-apocalyptic world?

    The critical success of “No Country for Old Men” may also work against Mr. Hillcoat. The Coens set the bar high — much higher than Billy Bob Thornton and Ted Talley when they adapted “All the Pretty Horses” in 2000. But I’m hoping that isn’t the case.

    Then again, if “The Road” isn’t enough to satisfy McCarthy fans and film lovers alike, in 2009 Ridley Scott will direct “Blood Meridian,” an adaptation of another one of his novels, with a script penned by William Monahan.

  • Variety sizes up the competition…again

    It looks like they’re spinning their Oscar wheels again over at that other film awards haven of mine.

    I say “again” because Justin Chang put together a very thorough year-in-advance rundown not two months ago, which was already wading further out into the waters than you’d expect from the Hollywood trade.

    This week — actually flying under my radar because I haven’t expected Oscar stuff out of Award Central in a while — it’s Pamela McClintock, eying the release date plays of various fall contenders as an angle on which to hang yet another look ahead. I came across the link via Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere.

    The usual suspects are rounded up: “Frost/Nixon,” “Revolutionary Road,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” etc. But there are a couple of new pics of note.

    For instance, I didn’t include John Hillcoat’s “The Road” (based on the Cormac McCarthy novel) on my own year-in-advance take because there was still some questiona s to whether it would be a 2008 release at the time. The Weinstein Company has it set for a Nov. 26 bow. And I also didn’t spotlight the Greg Kinnear starrer “Flash of Genius,” because quite frankly, it didn’t come up in discussions with Universal publicity brass, so I figured why bring it up? Both films are featured by McClintock.

    Anyway, the story isn’t much beyond a taking stock sort of thing, but it’s Oscarweb news nonetheless. Check it out.