When Viggo Mortenson talks about making the film The Road you tend to want to listen because he makes a lot of sense and it sounds like it might have been a lot more fun to make than you would think. The film is a grim look into a post-apocalyptic world in which a man and his son must wander the ravaged roads that will hopefully lead them to salvation and what could only be described as an uncertain hope. The manner in which Viggo describes it is that the cast and the crew were both heavily invested in making sure that the film came together in a working, cohesive fashion.
The Road had a really dark look. This was a world that had somehow been lost and then struggled to move on, which made it a very difficult thing to watch and what you would think was a very difficult film to shoot. Yet for all intents and purposes everything went off without a hitch. Plus, one of my favorite things to hear, the director picked his spots when it came to adapting the book to the movie. He didn’t change things, he didn’t use his own vision to interpret one moment by adding or detracting from the original story. The director simply went with it and adapted the book to the big screen. As a writer/author/novelist I happen to love seeing this when it happens because it’s worthy of a lot of respect since it offers that same kindness to the story from which it’s derived.
Mortensen talks about this as much as he talks about other things in the film as to how it developed and how he and his younger counterpart interacted with each other. He had a good time on this movie and really appreciated what it did to bring the characters together and to show how the journey from hopelessness and despair can eventually experience a strange shift that can eventually give way to the idea of what it means to do more than just stay alive and be the person that others can look up to and aspire to be like.
It’s a grimy, dirty, and desperate movie, but it still shows the spirit of humanity when the chips are down and the need to survive becomes all-important. But it is also a film that shows that through hardship virtually anything can be accomplished, even if it doesn’t amount to what a lot of people might aspire to. In a world such as this the biggest accomplishments are to survive and to thrive while moving forward. That is the goal of any organism in truth if you really take the time to look at it, to move forward in one way or another.
Everything in this film was vital to its success. From the actors to the scenery there was nothing that went without being noticed, as the landscape was yet another character within the story that had a part to play. It’s easy to see that Viggo kind of enjoyed his time on the set.
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