The ultimate Road movie

It has been a long wait, but finally, at the Venice Film Festival last night, the big screen version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road was unveiled. Directed by John Hillcoat and starring Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall and a youngster called Kodi Smit-McPhee, the film is an extremely faithful, disturbing but deeply moving adaptation written by London playwright Joe Penhall.

When Penhall's agent first rang his 42-year-old client and said, "They've got this Cormac McCarthy book but you're too busy and you're not interested, are you?", he could not have been more wrong. "I told him, Get me that job or I'm going to come around and shoot your family'," Penhall recalls.

It was a typically gung-ho response, especially since a number of heavyweight Hollywood screenwriters had already declared the story unfilmable. On top of that, the Coen brothers had already set the benchmark for Cormac McCarthy adaptations with their Oscar-winning movie of his No Country for Old Men in 2007. But Penhall found The Road's vision unforgettable and knew that he couldn't pass up the challenge of putting it on film.

The Road, which achieved instant cult status and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007, is a post-apocalyptic epic about a father and son trekking southwards through a ravaged, smouldering, sunless America to which climate change has come with a vengeance. Scavenging for food, they fight off bands of raiders who have turned to cannibalism because there is nothing else left to eat. Put simply, it is the ultimate road movie.

"My favourite moments in the film are things that have the least of me in them," Penhall admits. "I love the scene where he [McCarthy didn't name his characters] shoots the guy in the head because, for a writer who lives in west London and does theatre to be able to write, You look at me again and I'm going to blow your head off ' — that's a load of fun."

The dialogue in that scene is taken straight off the pages of the novel. "Exactly," says Penhall, "the only way to make this film was to do it exactly as it is written. The book is dramatically well structured; it's got great characters, great dialogue, great atmosphere. The only challenge was to stick to it and not futz around with character arcs and all that shit that screenwriting gurus like Robert McKee prescribe."
Inevitably, there was if not futzing around then some rejigging during post-production, particularly the addition of an opening voiceover. "It was something I'd always wanted," says Penhall, "but the director didn't, and we agreed to try and go without it. Then later we decided to give it a go."

Penhall, who lives in Hammersmith with his partner, Emily, and their baby son, William, has known Hillcoat for 20 years and they have been trying to work together since the mid-1990s. Hillcoat, fashionably shaven-headed, is Australian; Penhall, somewhat more hirsute, is half so: born in the UK, he grew up in Melbourne and Sydney and still speaks with a slight twang. He had admired Hillcoat's cult debut, Ghosts of the Civil Dead, and the two of them had previously tried to get a Hong Kong-set crime movie off the ground. But it was Hillcoat's film The Proposition, written and scored by Nick Cave, that triggered the meetings that led to The Road. And, once he'd had them, he turned again to Nick Cave and fellow Bad Seed Warren Ellis for the soundtrack — and to Penhall for the script.

It was not, on the surface, an obvious choice. Penhall's forte is dialogue, which has won him numerous plaudits, including an Evening Standard Best Play award for Blue/Orange in 2000, but there is little apparent similarity between, say, the word games of that play and the street talk of the gripping and controversial TV mini-series Moses Jones, which aired on the BBC earlier this year.

Penhall also worked on the screenplay for The Last King of Scotland for several years before the producers brought in another writer and he took his name off it. Otherwise, however, his only other feature-film credits have been a 2000 film version of his 1994 play Some Voices (which starred a pre-Bond Daniel Craig), and Enduring Love, an adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel, also starring Craig, which is about as far from The Road as you can get.

"I'd just written a play which the director [Roger Michell] liked," recalls Penhall of that particular commission, "and he asked me to write the script. I fart-assed around trying to do what I thought was a film script but I had no idea what I was doing and it's all over the place."
With The Road, though, he reckons he has nailed it. "I think this has got clarity and precision; it's hard and it's sharp and it works as a movie — a big American movie," he says, eschewing false modesty. McCarthy, apparently, agrees: Hillcoat and Penhall flew to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the novelist lives. They showed him the film. He liked it. They then spent the rest of the day in a bar.