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We've been watching John Hillcoat’s work for years. He’s the music video director behind such bands as INXS, Depeche Mode and Robert Plant. His first feature, “Ghosts … of the Civil Dead” was nominated for nine Australian Film Institute Awards, enabling him to transition smoothly into feature film directing. In 2006, “The Proposition,” starring Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone and Danny Huston, was nominated for 12 Australian Film Institute Awards and won four.
His latest is “The Road” starring Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Cormac McCarthy, it centers on a father and son struggling to survive in the wake of an unexplained apocalyptic event. Rich in theme, McCarthy’s novel examines civility in a lawless time and what separates humanity from the beasts.
I do think there is a timeless quality to it -- it’s almost got an ancient parable to it. It has been throughout time, the apocalypse has been there. I think it’s just a projection of our worst fears. But in another sense, it’s very timely, too -- I think we’ve all been living in a bubble in terms of the chickens coming home to roost with 9/11 and climate change and now with the economic thing.I worry about when you turn the whole world into a consumerist capitalist system -- how do you sustain that? I remember years ago, in the early ‘80s, there was a conference. All these thinkers got together after the Soviet system collapsed. It was a great victory for capitalism -- and yet these guys got together, and the one thing they came up with is there are no ethics, there’s no ethical moral code in the nature of capitalism. It’s dog-eat-dog.
I do really worry about the environment and how we can sustain the resources and how we can sustain that. There have got to be some radical changes. But I hope that the new generation latches onto making some of those changes. To bring it back to the book, we are sliding and we need to be pulled into check, and hopefully that kid does that for us.
