At World’s End, Honing a Father-Son Dynamic

Scene from The Road, the movie. Photo and story from the New York Times.

ERIE, Pa. — Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Road,” takes place in a world that, because of some unexplained catastrophe, has just about ended. The sky is gray, the rivers are black, and color is just a memory. The landscape is covered in ash, with soot falling perpetually from the air. The cities are blasted and abandoned. The roads are littered with corpses either charred or melted, their dreams, Mr. McCarthy writes, “ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.”

For the crew that has just finished filming the movie version of “The Road” — a joint production of 2929 and Bob Weinstein’s Dimension Films, set to open in November — that meant an upending of the usual rules of making a movie on location. Bad weather was good and good weather bad. “A little fog, a little drizzle — those are the good days,” Mark Forker, the movie’s director of special effects, remarked one morning in late April while the crew was shooting some of the final scenes in the book on a stretch of scraggly duneland by the shore of Lake Erie here. “Today is a bad day,” he added, shaking his head and squinting.

The full New York Times story here.............