Viggo Mortensen on The Road
Updated on 15 October 2009
The adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's book No Country for Old Men won the Oscar for best picture. So the film version of his latest novel, The Road, is much anticipated. Stephanie West reports.
There is also a lot of excitement surrounding the movie because it won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007.
The Road tells the story of a father and son travelling across a burned-out America, ravaged by some unspecified disaster which the reclusive author has never explained.
But as the film is shown in Britain for the first time, Channel 4 News talked to its director about Cormac McCarthy's vision.
Stephanie West talked to the film's star Viggo Mortensen about McCarthy's vision.
He said that he didn't feel an explanation for the book's post-apocalyptic world was important to the story.
"I don’t think it's really relevant," he said.
"The backdrop of a story, the landscape of a story that we travel through, it just serves to accentuate what's happening.
"These people have nothing - everything is stripped away and it's really about what you're left with. What do you do when you have nothing?
"In the end it’s a story about kindness or the possibility we have as people to choose, for example, to prevent misery rather than to avenge it."
