Movie Version Of "The Road" In The Works

I've just finished reading "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. It's a rather bleak novel about a man and his young son struggling to survive in post-apocalyptic America. As I was reading this excellent book, I kept wondering whether someone would try to make it into a movie. The subject matter is pretty grim.

But it looks like a film version is in the works:

[P]roducer Nick Wechsler has rolled the dice and picked up film rights for what could be McCarthy's most controversial book yet, The Road.

Wechsler will use independent financing to put together the pic, which already has John Hillcoat (The Proposition) onboard to help develop and eventually direct. But why is it so controversial? Well, according to Variety's description, story revolves around a "post-apocalyptic nightmarish road trip of a man who tries to transport his son to safety while fending off starving stragglers and marauding packs of cannibals." Yeah, it appears the whole cannibal angle scared off potential studios, and so Wechsler set out to package this puppy up on the outside, something he's already used to. He says, "I've done quite a few movies lately this way, and it gives you the creative freedom and a more promising upside, especially on the DVD front."

Anyone who has both read "The Road" and seen The Proposition should be pleased that Hillcoat will be directing the screen version of McCarthy's novel. Although The Proposition was set in late 1800s Australia, it had the feel of a movie about a post-apocalyptic era. Guy Pearce played the lead in it, and I think he'd be a perfect choice to play the father character in the film version of The Road. In fact, the only thing he'd need to do differently is speak in an American accent.

If you haven't seen The Proposition (which is likely, given that it was only released in 200 American theaters last year), Roger Ebert's review can be found here. Ebert had some interesting things to say about it:

Have you read Blood Meridian, the novel by Cormac McCarthy? [The Proposition] comes close to realizing the vision of that dread and despairing story. The critic Harold Bloom believes no other living American novelist has written a book as strong and compares it with Faulkner and Melville, but confesses his first two attempts to read it failed, "because I flinched from the overwhelming carnage." * * *

Why do you want to see this movie? Perhaps you don't. Perhaps, like Bloom, it will take you more than one try to face the carnage. But the director John Hillcoat, working from a screenplay by Nick Cave, has made a movie you cannot turn away from; it is so pitiless and uncompromising, so filled with pathos and disregarded innocence, that it is a record of those things we pray to be delivered from. The actors invest their characters with human details all the scarier because they scarcely seem human themselves. * * *

Sounds like they might have found the right director for The Road, given that Hillcoat's last movie was compared to a Cormac McCarthy novel.

And one thing about the aforementioned cannibalism in The Road: although there was a lot of references to cannibalism in the book -- the main characters were, after all, doing their best to avoid "marauding packs of cannibals" -- it just wasn't a big part of the story and it shouldn't have to be a big part of any film version either.