The film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer-winning, Oprah-certified novel, The Road, may have found its star.
After over four decades as a professional writer, McCarthy is suddenly hot in Hollywood. Though Billy Bob Thornton‘s 2000 adaptation of All the Pretty Horses was regarded as a sort of noble disappointment, advance praise for the Coen brothers’ adaptation of McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men has been plentiful — and with The Road in development, the author’s cinematic hot streak seems likely to continue.
The story centers on the travels of a father and his young son as they struggle across a bleak post-apocalyptic landscape, trying to reach the coast and avoid their fellow survivors (for reasons which soon become obvious). John Hillcoat has been set to direct Joe Penhall‘s script; now, from MTV Movies, comes word that Viggo Mortensen is in talks to star. As Mortensen tells it:
“There’s a book called ‘The Road’ by Cormac McCarthy. They’re going to make a movie of that and the people making [it] have expressed interest [in me]. Visually, it’s going to be a very beautiful movie. It’s a very good story…It’s mainly about a father and a boy. It’s a post-apocalyptic scenario, a wasteland that they’re trying to get through and not be killed by the few remaining packs of marauding humans. They’re trying to get to the coast and find someplace safe and find people who are not crazy criminals or cannibals.”
Mortensen can currently be seen with Naomi Watts in David Cronenberg‘s Eastern Promises.
Source: MTV Movies
