The good news: Viggo is coming. The bad news: he’s coming to film The Road.
The producers filming Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer prizewinning The Road decided that Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania looked like the end of the world had the best variety of locations and filming incentives. “Filming will take place in suburban areas,” the Post-Gazette reports today, “along with coal mines, forests and an unused freeway a couple of hours away.”
Unused…freeway?
The fact is, you don’t have to squint too hard to see Pittsburgh as post-apocalyptic. Deserted streets, unoccupied row houses, boarded-up churches, cavernous empty warehouses. And nearby: abandoned mines, steep hills. All under an ever-gray sky with a dusting of snow and, in the film, ash.
The filmed will star Viggo Mortenson as the father and a young Australian as the boy. Charlize Theron will be the wife (please, don’t make the flashbacks too important) and Guy Pearce will “factor into scenes near the end of the movie.” Which means he’s one of the people the father meets on the road — or more than one? Is he a good survivor or an evil survivor?
Shortly after I moved to Pittsburgh I was an extra in the filming of Mysteries of Pittsburgh (it’s showing at Sundance). At first I thought no way I’d do that for The Road — who wants to lie in a filthy basement with a bloody stump or two for $60 a day? But if Viggo will be in the scene, I might just have to reconsider.
The Road is scheduled to film for 8 weeks starting in late Feburary “to take advantage of the cold and snow.” Oh, poor Viggo.
Guy Pearce must be portraying the man who takes The Boy in at the end of the book. (Sorry for that spoiler for those who haven’t read “The Road”.) I can see Pittsburgh standing in for McCarthy’s blighted landscape.
Another Cormac McCarthy book turned into a movie? Ugh… Couldn’t they choose an author who is less pretentious? Reading McCarthy is like chewing on a styrofoam and cardboard sandwich with a mouth made of thermal insulation… NO flavor whatsoever. And yet he’s held up as one of the greatest storytellers of our time. I’d rather watch a film version of the Book of Job.
-Mark
http://www.writedamnnow.com
I am strangely excited by this news. I have no interest in The Road, but I do love the idea of running into Viggo in the South Side.
New York? Pittsburgh?
It is intriguing how often Pittsburgh wins.
I don’t know, Mark. I’ll agree that McCarthy’s attempts at more commercial fiction — the so-called Border Trilogy and The Road — are tepid at best but I don’t see how any reader could remain unmoved by some of the dark poetic language and imagery in early novels like “Blood Meridian” and “Child of God”. I’m no raving McCarthy fanboy but I’ll take him over nine-tenths of his contemporaries in modern American literary fiction.
The Caterers come to my gas station almost every morning. I think they’re staying somewhere by Greentree (The Caterers only). They’re really nice guys. They’re in State parks currently though I didn’t gather which one. Someone was asking the main guy questions and he was just rather annoyed at him, answering only as much as he needed to to get the guy to shut up. I don’t blame him. I’d’ve been annoyed too.