Garret Dillahunt on the McCarthy adaptation
When John Hillcoat’s awaited adaptation of The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, was pushed from its November release schedule by The Weinstein Company, Garret Dillahunt immediately understood why. “There wasn’t time. I think it was very ambitious for them to think they could get it edited together and out for the Oscar season,” the actor tells us while promoting The Last House on the Left. “I think they realized – and I say this because I have a very small part in it – Viggo [Mortensen] and the kid [Kodi Smit-McPhee] are fantastic, but I think they realized they have a very special thing on their hands. They wanted to do it right, so why not hang onto it?”
In the film, Dillahunt plays a gang member, just one of the many characters Mortensen and Smit-McPhee, playing father and son, meet along their journey across an American landscape crippled by a cataclysmic event. “I only had to be there for a few days and it was exhausting. They have incredible stamina, those two. Viggo’s a horse,” Dillahunt says respectfully. On the subject of “hope” in the film and its overall tone, the actor believes it carries “more hope than No Country for Old Men. That film was, ‘Look, this is what the world is today. There’s a new crime out there and if you can’t handle it, you better retire. Go hide in the woods, old man.’ And he does. The Road actually ends quite hopeful. This little boy…there’s a phrase they say, ‘You have to carry the fire.’ The fire means this hope, this belief in goodness, we’re the good guys. That’s what [the father and son] say as they try to live fighting off cannibals and stuff. In the end you feel like it’ll bloom again, man will find a way. It’s heartbreaking and beautiful.”
The Road also stars Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce and Robert Duvall. The Weinstein Company has not set a new release date, but the film is expected sometime later this year.
Source: ShockTillYouDrop.com
