The long-delayed post-apocolyptic big-screen adaptation of “The Road” finally has an opening date. The film will be released on November 25 of this year according to SciFi Wire.
The film has been pushed back several times, but director John Hillcoat says it’s not a lack of confidence by the studio for the film.
“They were always way over-optimistic about their dates,” Hillcoat said. “I always said to everyone the first one can’t be done. Sometimes people are over-optimistic. I was being a realist. We missed that date, and we knew it had to be released in the fall, so it slid into this year.”
One positive spin on the news is that the studio wants to have “The Road” be part of the Oscar discussion. Most studios release the movies they want to push for an Academy Award during the last six weeks of the calendar year.
“I try not to think about it,” Hillcoat says. “I got the book when it was unpublished and before the Coens did No Country. So when No Country came out and [The Road] won the Pulitzer, there was a lot of weight on my shoulder.”
To capture all of The Road’s doom and gloom, Hillcoat turned to modern-day tragedies for inspiration. “The main thing we referenced is stuff that’s already happened, as opposed to a fantasy world,” says Hillcoat. “I found that a lot of post-apocalyptic stuff was all about the big event. There’s something about the book that had this incredible authenticity to it that made it even more than ‘this is what it could be like.’ A lot of that is from Cormac’s research. It’s simple things, like pushing the shopping cart full of their own possessions. That’s people living on the street, so it was really taking that lead and with the production designer, instead of just looking at other post-apocalyptic films, we ended up going to documentaries and photos of actual apocalypses or ones that didn’t go global. Within that small area, it’s the equivalent, so we looked at Hiroshima, Katrina and 9/11.”
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