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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Posted Thursday, October 16th, 2008 - Comments Off on A Bumpy Road
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A Bumpy Road

Rumor has it, apparently, that John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which was supposed to open November 14, may get pushed off to 2009. Which would be a bummer, but to be honest, I’d rather see the film done well than rushed and done poorly. I finally got around to reading the book over this past weekend, and wow, is it good. Bleak and horribly depressing, and it makes me wonder what kinds of dark thoughts haunt McCarthy late at night when he’s caught in the throes of writerly insomnia in the clutches of what Michael Chabon called “the midnight disease” in Wonder Boys. It’s a stark and horrific read, but absolutely compelling; I couldn’t put it down all weekend.
One of the commenters over on Fataculture said of “The Road” that nothing happens in it. And much as people lashed out at him for saying something so banal, on a certain level, he’s right, in that it’s not the easiest concept to translate into the visual medium of a film. It’s a guy and his young son, in world that’s been post-Apocalyptic for several years, and McCarthy’s vision of this world is bleak in the extreme. The world burned pretty much to a crisp. Everything destroyed. Hardly any animals still alive. No food growing or able to grow, and the existing pre-disaster food supplies long since plundered. Everything covered in ash. Ash on the ground, in the air, in the rivers, in the snowfall. And a few human survivors struggling not to starve to death. The entire story is just this guy and his son and their occasional encounters with those who would hurt them.
Hillcoat directed The Proposition, one of the best films of 2005, and one of the very few Westerns I would willingly watch multiple times. The guy knows dramatic tension, so I would expect that the narrative storyline will be compressed with an emphasis on the dramatic high points, which is fine to keep the story flowing, but I really hope that he holds onto the use of symbolism that’s woven throughout the story, and keeps his focus on the relationship between the father and son. “They were each other’s world entire.” That’s what the story is about, this man and this boy and how their relationship with each other allows them to cling to hope even in the face of almost unimaginable destruction and infinitessimal odds of surviving. And if it takes until 2009 for Hillcoat to get it ride, it will be worth waiting for.
Oh, and side note for the music geeks: Nick Cave and Warren Ellis (not surprisingly, but I’m dorkily ecstatic about it) are doing the music. I would see this film even if I didn’t care about the story, just to hear that.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon