JohnHillcoat Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Recently, I rejoiced about all of the upcoming projects that The Proposition and The Road director John Hillcoat's got brewing. But there's also another in turnaround that's getting new life. As The Hollywood Reporter's Risky Biz Blog reports, there's a whole slew of talent circling around the once-struggling The Wettest County in the World. Scarlett Johansson's name has been thrown around as well as one heck of a diverse mix of young male talent -- Ryan Gosling, Shia LaBeouf, Michael Shannon, and Paul Dano.

Sorry, Shia, but I feel compelled to sing: "Which of these boys is not like the other?" If there's any chance of getting into one of those odd-man-out scenarios, this would be the one. i can't imagine they're all up for the same part (as there are 4 main gigs), but could he really compare to four actors who have proven themselves to be quite hardcore and skilled? I don't care how many big-box office films he's been in, there's a difference between money and impressive acting skills.

A period piece rife with Depression-era bootleggers, Wettest is a crime drama based on author Matt Bondurant's own grandfather and great-uncles. The trio were a moonshine-led criminal gang, and the film will follow them alongside a writer named Sherwood Anderson who's "on the trail of the bootlegging story" and researching the 1936 novel Kit Brandon.

I say drop the names who can't compare and go wild because this combination sounds almost perfect. (We wouldn't want another Appaloosa/Renee Zellweger scenario!) How 'bout you?

The best movie scores don't just add extra depth to a movie, but they take on lives on their own; they sneak into your subconscious so that the next time you hear Nino Rota you feel like downing some espressos and dancing in the Trevi Fountain.

Post-punk/death rocker turned mustachioed Southern Gothic philosopher Nick Cave and his fellow Bad Seed bandmate Warren Ellis* have become standout film composers in the past few years, beginning with their collaboration on The Proposition, a Western from the land Down Under directed by The Road's John Hillcoat and written by Nick Cave. They also created the soundscape for the sadly underseen and somewhat overlong The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Their most recent collaboration on the score for The Road is worthy of an Oscar nomination -- subtle, appropriately dark but not overbearing, and elegant.

However, the two have also written scores for other, lesser-known movies like the documentary The Girls of Phnom Penh, about young Cambodian sex workers, and The English Surgeon, a doc about a brain doc who regularly travels to the Ukraine to perform surgery on the poor, sick, and often desperate.

White Lunar is an upcoming 2-disc compilation of these scores, along with a few extra bits from the vaults:

Days after Jessica Barnes compiled a nice fall schedule for you, the Weinsteins and Dimension Films had to go and mess it up a little. According to Variety, they've pushed the release date of The Road back from October 16 to November 25 -- almost a year to the day when it was supposed to come out in 2008.

The delay isn't because Dimension has lost faith in the film -- quite the contrary. The film is playing to rave reviews at Telluride (where our Eugene Novikov saw it and loved it) and Venice Film Festival, and the Weinsteins have realized they have an awards contender on their hands. "We've been getting great audience reaction at Venice and Telluride," Dimension topper Bob Weinstein said. "We feel that this is a commercial film that's worthy of a wide release." Considering Cormac McCarthy's book was a bestseller and won a Pulitzer, you'd think that might have tipped them off, but ah well. What's good about this decision is that it not only puts it into Golden Globe contention, it also promises a wide release. One of the big fears lurking around the film was that audiences wouldn't get it, and the film could vanish into limited release hell.

The Road will now be in direct competition with Nine, Old Dogs, and Ninja Assassin. Something tells me John Hillcoat's bleak adaptation won't top the holiday box office, but it'll make a far bigger impact. I've been saying since the first stills came out that this might be a role that nabs Viggo Mortensen an Oscar, and I'll stand by that.

Now that The Road is making its way to audiences -- with a solid review from our Eugene Novikov -- word of future features is starting to pour in, and man, the news is sweet. Variety starts off their post-Road piece with the news that screenwriter Joe Penhall is gearing up to remake the Gallic heist film La Bonne Annee, and wants Daniel Craig to star in it. But the better news follows that. While Road director John Hillcoat always works with Nick Cave (who scored the Viggo Mortensen-starring drama), he is now gearing up for another Cave-penned piece.

This is a fresh breath of cinematic air to anyone who has seen The Proposition -- the film Cave penned in less than a month, and one that single-handedly made me rethink my distaste of westerns. Unfortunately, this is a mixed blessing: The gig in question will be an adaptation of Cave's novel The Death of Bunny Munro, but there's no word on who will adapt this. Considering the achievements Cave made with Proposition, we can only hope that it's him. But just to bring things around full-circle to the first bit of news, Hillcoat is also talking to Daniel Craig for the project. (Not to mention another project between the writer and filmmaker -- a big screen adaptation of Penhall's play, "Landscape with Weapons.")

Just before the kid was born, the world burned. We don't know why, and the characters don't talk about it -- perhaps they don't quite know themselves, or maybe they've decided that it no longer matters. The Boy's universe is grey, full of ash, dust, and the ruins of a civilization he never saw. This is all he knows. His mother, seeing no point in going on, killed herself shortly after his birth. She was not alone. Many of those who didn't take their own lives were soon murdered by the desperate and hungry.

Skip ahead nine or ten years. The kid and his father wander the barren roadways heading south toward the coast for no clear reason other than that it gives them a tangible goal toward which to strive. (And there's always the hope that the ocean will be something other than gray.) Every day is a knock-down, drag-out fight for survival. They run, hide, starve, and fight off attackers who want their food, or their clothes, or, at one point, their flesh.

I set the stage like this not to horrify you or to gross you out, but to give you a sense of the relentless, pervasive grimness of The Road -- and then to turn around and say that The Road may be the most profoundly optimistic and life-affirming film you will see this year. Those who have read Cormac McCarthy's novel of the same name won't be surprised by this. John Hillcoat's faithful, near-perfect adaptation beautifully captures McCarthy's synthesis of all-encompassing darkness and enduring hope.

In news that is equally rumored and dreaded, it looks like the Weinsteins' haste to get The Reader in the running for this year's awards season might be a matter of John Hillcoat's anticipated adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's acclaimed novel, The Road, not being ready for its limited release a month from now, let alone year's end.

It's bad enough that neither film was ready for any of the big fall film festivals, but a good friend told me something similar three days ago, and now, Kristopher Tapley at In Contention and Dave Karger's EW Oscar Watch are talking along the same lines. I can't say that I'm the same William who posted the following reaction on Karger's page -- and I quote: "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" -- but my own sentiments on the (possible) move aren't all that far off.

For that matter, my feelings on the novel and film themselves are akin to those of our own Eugene Novikov: that the book is merely Damn Good, but could make for a Great movie. We may not have a poster, or a trailer, or a fully functioning website just yet, but for all the Weinsteins' release date shell games, I can't help but think they have more to lose holding off on this than The Reader, which producer Scott Rudin took his name off after it was bumped up to contend with star Kate Winslet's other awards prospect, Revolutionary Road (itself based on an acclaimed novel).

I mean, I'm not exactly wishing that The Reader is Winslet's next All the King's Men or anything, but is this studio not big enough for the both of them? Or is this year merely not long enough?

One of my concerns when I started doing this column was that each forthcoming adaptation I covered would equate to a new movie losing the ability to surprise me. What more effective way to strip oneself of the thrill of cinematic discovery, I thought, than to pore over the source material before watching? Ultimately I decided that the prospect of literary discovery along with the chance to write the column more than compensated for that risk, but here's some evidence that maybe I shouldn't have worried at all: having read Cormac McCarthy's The Road, I'm more excited to see John Hillcoat's adaptation – coming this November -- than I ever would have been otherwise.

Just when it was looking like No Country for Old Men had a monopoly on successful interpretations of Cormac McCarthy's drearily minimalistic prose, production on an adaptation of The Road suggests the possibility of healthy competition. The movie, which recently finished shooting in Pennsylvania and hits theaters in November, remains a wild card until post-production wraps. Nevertheless, if this colorful report from the set in The New York Times offers any indication, The Road appears poised to capture McCarthy's original gloomy lyricism. Reporter Charles McGrath points out the difficulties the filmmakers endured when the weather got too nice and the grass looked too green. In other words, they're working really hard to keep things bleak. The story, about a father and son wandering through desolate landscapes after a cataclysmic event destroys civilization, demands that the dark aura remain intact. However, it wouldn't work without two strong leads, and McGrath implies that with Viggo Mortensen and eleven-year-old Kodi Smit-Mcphee (the next Haley Joel Osment?), that need has been fulfilled.

The best match for The Road, however, is its director, John Hillcoat, whose work on The Proposition proves he's the man for the job. That woefully undervalued western had the intensity of a Sam Peckinpah movie in overdrive, and The Road screams for the same raw, stripped-down approach. It's nice to hear that Hillcoat sees the movie as an antithesis to Mad Max, meaning he wants to eschew cartoony violence in order to create a scarily realistic depiction of post-apocalyptic duress. Bring it on.

[Photo above: Kodi Smit-Mcphee on the set of The Road, courtesy of the New York Times]