Don't worry, it's transcribed. You don't have to struggle with his thick British accent.
Joe Penhall is an English playwright who won a BBC award in 2001 for his play Blue/Orange. Since 2000, Penhall has made a name for himself in Hollywood by adapting novels for the big screen. We recently had the chance to talk with Penhall about his work on The Road, a post-apocalyptic Cormac McCarthy novel starring Viggo Mortensen.
Q: Can you talk about your first reactions reading the book and some of the challenges of bringing it to a visual medium?
Penhall: I read the book very late at night, in a hurry, and uh … the last kind of twenty pages really sort of moved me to um … to tears cause it wasn’t long after my own dad had died, weirdly in a very similar way. Not in a post-apocalypse landscape but of a lung condition. So … some of the things that were said in that final exchange were uncannily similar, and the rest of the book I just thought was extraordinarily adventurous in its … proposition. You know, when the end comes, it’s going to be very convincing so I was hooked immediately, and then when I wrote it a similar thing happened: I found it very exciting to write, because some of those propositions are just mind blowing, and, embarrassingly, when I wrote the last fifteen pages I was again quite teary and it was the same when I watched what Viggo was doing with it. So it was a great thing to do, it felt very pure, and was from the heart as well as being intellectually challenging and exciting, which is always what you want when you are doing the work, something that genuinely stretches you.
Q: did you work with Cormac at all?
Penhall: Not when I was writing the script, but when it was done we took a cut to Albuquerque where he lives - he lives in New Mexico - we met him in the screening room in Albuquerque and he turned up in his own Cadillac and he watched a reel of it … watched a cut of it. Then we went out and spent all afternoon and evening kind of chewing the fat and talking about it, we just had lunch and started drinking.
Q: So he didn’t see the script before you started shooting it?
Penhall: No no no. And then, the next morning, he sent about 3 or 4 pages of notes, some of them I took, some I didn’t. He’s just been sort of “in touch” now and then, he’s turned up at a few screenings, turned up at a festival … he likes the film so he’s been very supportive.
Q: Once it was shot what notes did he have?
Penhall: the big note, which was really appreciated, was that he loved the voice over. I’d always wanted the voice over, and John had wanted to try doing it without one, and then once it was shot, a lot of people said, “Why don’t we try one?” So we did, we were undecided with how effective it was … and then the first thing Cormac said was that he liked the voiceover and said it really worked and that we really needed it. There were a few phrases and bits of grammar he didn’t like - and were kind of my own - which was simplified, less archaic versions of some of his own. I mean, I retained all his dialogue and much of his descriptions, but occasionally things were simplified. Sometimes he didn’t like that, sometimes he did like it, sometimes I took notice of his notes and sometimes I didn’t, you know.
Q: And can you mention some of the notes that he had that you didn’t?
Penhall: Specific ones? They certainly weren’t major …. There were really kind of minor bits of language, semantics really. For example, in the introductory voice over, no … well, let me think of an example … no I can’t … (long pause) …you know things like a bit of voice over, especially towards the end that Viggo really wanted, like “If I was God I would have made the world dust,” and a few things like that. Very poetic, very heightened, straight from the book, and more often than not Cormac insisted on the exact wording in the book and things like that I would have found an alternative to. Seventy-five percent of the time my version stuck, twenty-five percent of the time I kind of ceded to Cormac just because I thought it’s a huge shame to take on a work like this and not retain something of the poetry of the writing … and that’s another reason why I always wanted the voice over in the first place … when your adapting a great literary voice its insane if you can’t use some of that voice, and one of the best ways to do it is in voiceover.
Q: So with the apocalypse, I know we don’t really see what it was, but did you guys ever discuss that? Or did you guys ever have a specific idea in your head of what it was?
Penhall: Yeah. He spends a lot of time at the Santa Fe Institute which is where all kinds of genius scientists are and he has an office there … and he has gone into it in great detail, how he thinks the world might end when it ends, and they’ve figured out pretty much that’s how it will end when it ends. You know, with environmental meltdowns and earthquakes and fires and snow and all that kind of happening at once.
Q: The apocalypse is his hobby?
Penhall: Yeah. Let me clarify that, he has a lot of eclectic hobbies and they are super wide-ranging and intense and that’s why we spent seven hours in a bar talking about it.
Q: what are some others?
Penhall: Folk songs.
Q: That’s intense?
Penhall: It is when your other hobbies are environmental meltdowns! You know, you have a bit of a swing to extremes, he loves movies … you know … I can’t really remember.
Q: What bar was this?
Penhall: It was a hotel, a grill in a hotel.
Q: What movies did he love?
Penhall: I think we talked about The Bicycle Thief, but that might have been because it was a movie that we both loved. I couldn’t say without misrepresenting him, really. We talked about writing movies, because he wrote No Country for Old Men as a movie long before it was a novel and couldn’t get it made … and he decided making movies was a waste of time so he went back to the drawing board and wrote it as a novel. We talked a lot about writing movies and good ideas for movies, I shared some of my ideas with him and he said they were good so we talked about what ideas make a good movie.
Q: Will you be collaborating again?
Penhall: I hope we’ll talk again, yeah. I’m sure we will. We talked about writing novels, he said, “You should write a novel,” and I said, “You should write a play,” and he said, “I would but my life is too short.”
Q: When you were reading the book for the first time what were the things that stood out to you? Was there ever a discussion about extending that 30 second Utopian life they had before the apocalypse?
Penhall: Yeah. I think we probably extended it as much as we could without running the risk of inventing way too much. I personally would have extended it more, and there was a cut where there was a tiny bit more … that’s the kind of person I am, I like to see more of the daylight, you know. But I think what we ended up with was right. I can’t say … it wasn’t my vision, because the director is ultimately responsible for landing it … but um, in the book, there is precious little of that life. I think the challenge was to make those brief flashbacks as vivid, convincing, and emotional as possible … one of my favorite scenes in the whole film is that brief one where he is in the theater with his wife, and that leads into a montage of sitting in the house … and Bach is playing … I love that. I find it incredibly wrenching and evocative and I could have used more, but I suppose you couldn’t add too much more because it looks like a trick and people yearn for the film to be in that world.
Q: But when you were reading it … when I read it … the two things that stood out to me the most were the use of the words “after a while” and the other scene when they are in the locker and are actually happy and have food. So what were yours? What were the things that really stuck in your brain the first time you read it … besides the last twenty pages?
Penhall: I love the scene in the bunker. You know, not only did that seem like a wonderful relief and throw open all these possibilities and leave you wondering what the hell was going to happen … and was there going to be a happy ending … it seemed like a brilliant midpoint sequence for a movie. I suppose what I liked about it was the currency of the story. Pretty extreme stuff. We’re talking about the extremes of human nature and a loss of humanity … general loss of humanity in the country and the world … and I love how it’s so blunt and convincing and real about that and it isn’t so hysterical. It’s not like Mad Max with hysterical frightening blokes roaming the land raping women. Its convincing. You think, “Jesus, this is probably how it will be.” I talked about this a lot with Cormac, he had consciously written about characters struggling to keep their humanity and hold onto their humanity and not fall into a wave of cynicism and despair … and they managed to hang onto their kindness and their optimism with how to treat each other and treat the rest of the world, against all the odds you know … and not in a cheesy way, but in a genuine way. I thought it was interesting to chew that subject over because I think currently the world is teetering in all sorts of disastrous directions, you know? The temptation to give into cynicism and despair is quite strong.
Q: So if you were in the situation what would you do?
Penhall: What would I do?
Q: Yeah, well let’s start with: you’re running the water in the bathtub. You’re Viggo and Charleze and you’re the boy … you can go any way, which way would you go?
Penhall: Well OK. You could drown the kid, throw the woman out the window and shoot yourself, but I have to say, I’d do what he does. This is what I loved about the book: the fact that what he does is, in a way, indecisive. The wife makes an extreme decision and commits suicide. The boy doesn’t know anything other than to optimistically continue and the father is in the middle … and he battles on. Occasionally he gives into despair, and occasionally he manages to be a driving force behind it … and he just kind of reacts to an impossible situation as best he can in a messy ugly way, which eventually runs out of steam, but eventually, he gets the boy South. And I think I’ll probably do what he did - the father. By the time this movie was finished … having started with the death of my father… by the time it was finished I had just had my first son. The very short answer is: I’ll do exactly what he did.
Q: At some point was there a discussion about how this was a modern-day Hamlet?
Penhall: A modern-day Hamlet?
Q: Yeah. It’s all about father/son issues, indecisiveness. Do you live on? Do you kill yourself?
Penhall: I don’t want to put words into Cormac’s mouth, but it’s quite possible we started talking about that. Again, that procrastinating quality of man faced with an impossible choice, um … more than anything else … but … I don’t know. I’m from England and a playwright … and everyone talks about Hamlet all the time, so … I don’t really want to get into a discussion about Hamlet.
Q: Did you ever talk about the mechanics of adapting this book? This book basically has no punctuation, so how did you put text on the paper in a screenplay format?
Penhall: Well, it does have punctuation. The language is incredibly rich and muscular and idiosyncratic, and that’s Cormac for you … but if you listen to it and read it out loud, that’s how people speak and how people think. So I decided if I wrote the screenplay in the same language as if Cormac were writing the screenplay, that a) I’d be lucky to get it made, and b) if I did get it made, it might be as vivid and extraordinary as the book and not conventional in any sense of the word … but it might manage to work the same trick as the book works: it gets to you on a subconscious level. All the sentences, all the dialogue … it’s very terse and bitten-off and demonic. I think that’s how people would probably talk, if it had been ten years patrolling the post-apocalyptic waste, starving to death and fending off cannibals, you wouldn’t have that much to say and what you would day would be through gritted teeth. And all that has to be taken into account. There lots of really good reasons why it’s like that.
Q: Was there any difficult studio note saying you’ve gotta give him a name?
Penhall: No, one of the great things about Nick Wexler finding the book first and getting the ball rolling, is that he’s a fabulous independent producer … and that he’s been doing this for decades … and that he fended off any of those kinds of advances and set it up in a way so that we were pretty independent. So it was a large independent film as opposed to a studio picture, really. There were studio notes, but nothing disastrous or hugely interfering. Silly notes, but nothing that would damage us. I always said to everybody the challenge wasn’t so much the formal challenge of writing the narrative and the structure in a pleasing way, it was much more the political challenge of getting this set up in the film business given what the film business was like at the moment, which is favoring generic movies and comedies and cartoons and stuff like that.
Q: Did you ever discuss with Cormac what other of his books should be adapted or did you ever joke about what should never be adapted?
Penhall: We talked a lot about Blood Meridian because so many people have tried that and failed … because a lot of people wanted a go … and I did think about it for a bit, but I thought there’s a reason why everyone had tried and failed, you know? It’s a tough one.
Q: What are you doing next?
Penhall: I’m doing something with Mike Nichols which is actually another adaptation... which I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing. It’s a Patricia Highsmith thriller about a very dysfunctional marriage, and its gonna be set in Southern California.
Q: Can I just ask you one other question about the apolcypase? When he (Cormac) talks about how this is his theory about what might happen, is there a timeline? Is it soon?
Penhall: With Cormac? Again, I don’t want to put words in his mouth, I get it the feeling it might not happen in his lifetime. Maybe mine or my sons. It wasn’t great news … again … you don’t want to talk about that, it’s the holiday season! Nobody’s ever going to see this film!
Q: Do you have a favorite book of his?
Penhall: Yeah, this one. It’s the most contemporary and the most immediate, and it reaches out to me.