Catching Up With... John Hillcoat

Despite a long career directing numerous feature films, shorts and music videos, John Hillcoat's debut film in America arrived only just last week. The Road is an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's acclaimed novel and stars Viggo Mortenson as the father. But McCarthy has had a larger influence on Hillcoat than just this one film. Hillcoat spoke with Paste about his long relationship with Nick Cave, the fortuitous circumstances that brought him to The Road, and the difficulties in adapting a work by one of his favorite authors.

Paste: Were you surprised when The Road got pushed back, or was it kind of like you knew that the date they’d set originally was optimistic?
John Hillcoat: Well…more than optimistic, it was what I’d call unrealistic. [laughs] I mean, we had a lot of visual effects. The picture’s very location-based, and we shot all locations, but then we also needed to embellish things, because when you’re shooting outdoors, which most of it is outdoors, you’re getting things like airplanes in the sky and any sign of life, because we had to make it look like the world is finished, in terms of life and airplanes and media, etc. All those things. So in terms of creating the world we wanted to create, to finish it by that first release date, we hadn’t even finished the offline, let alone getting into any of that, so…it was a bit unrealistic, and we always knew it’s best to release this in the fall. We probably could’ve rushed it for sometime between the beginning of the year and now, but it’s the wrong time to release it. 

Paste: How did you meet Nick Cave?
Hillcoat: Right, well, I was a teenager when we met. We were teenagers in Melbourne, and he had his first band, which no one will have heard of here—well, some people. 

Paste: What’s the band’s name?
Hillcoat: The Boys Next Door.

Paste: Never heard of it.
Hillcoat: Yeah. This is even before The Birthday Party. So he got more exposure with The Birthday Party, which went overseas to the UK, but I was some young kid into music and there was quite a little art scene of music, film, photography, and painting and all that going off at that time. It was quite a productive period, we were all… I was making some short films that Nick really liked, and we shared an interest in similar writing and music, and then we worked on my first film in Melbourne, this was a long time ago, and he was doing score and co-writing and even performing. And then I started working on music videos with him, documentaries with him, and then he scored…along came The Proposition, eventually, which we were only ever talking about him doing the score, and I always talk about and think about the music, even as the script is being formed. That always comes first, yeah. And I guess part of the reason that we get on so well together is that Nick, with all his free time, watches more movies than anyone I know or have met. And in my free time I’m always listening to music. So it’s worked out as a good marriage. 

Paste: So you have a lot of ideas for the music before the script’s even in? Do you communicate these to Nick and Warren?
Hillcoat: Yeah, absolutely. It’s all to do with the kind of world and the type of material, and for me what’s great about listening to types of music is that it just helps get your headspace into... And I can pre-visualize things quite easily when I’m hearing music from the same kind of world. And then it just sort-of grows from there. With The Proposition, we’d been talking about the score for so long, and I had a different writer involved, and the script wasn’t really working, so I actually asked Nick originally just to write a small little outline, and then we’d get a proper scriptwriter in there, cause neither he nor I believed that he could cope with things like dialogue and the kind of format of script-writing.

I always knew that he had a strong sense of narrative. He was great with words, and a lot of his songs have quite a melodrama and story-telling and an emotional punch to them, with the lyrics. They’re also very visual; they’re filled with images. So we took the gamble, and once he started I kept pushing him to try some dialogue and try this and try that, and suddenly we were both mutually shocked and surprised at what he was able to do, and it just kept pouring out of him, and we bounced it back and forth every other day, and he ended up doing it in three weeks. And the original script actually had music cues written in. And so with The Road, he’s very particular about what kind of script work he’ll do now, and he loves Cormac McCarthy, so I don’t think that was going to work out. But the music, we had discussed before, as Joe Penhall was writing the script. 

Paste: And wasn’t Blood Meridian a big influence on The Proposition?
Hillcoat: Yeah, that had an incredible circular thing to it where I had actually, way back, before making an Australian western. I had always loved the big genres and tried to find a way of re-inventing…so far that’s all I’ve done in my work. And Blood Meridian to me was a totally new look at the West, in a way beyond Peckinpah and the revisionists of the seventies. So I was very keen to try to do that, but the rights weren’t available, so that in a way indirectly led me to look back at Australia and find the right story, because the landscape in Australia…what Cormac always has is the environment is equal to the main characters. And that’s something that I love about films, when you can create worlds where they transport you into another place and take you on that journey. So that’s what led to The Proposition indirectly, and the influence is there. And Nick also loved the book, Blood Meridian, of course, and Cormac’s writing. They kind of have their own visceral approach to violence, and looking at humans in extreme circumstances, how they behave.

But cut to years later, after The Proposition, I was here meeting various producers and companies talking about possible future other projects, and I’d mentioned in quite a few of these meetings, I’d mentioned my love of Cormac’s writing, and sometimes even referring to Blood Meridian and the influence on The Proposition, etc. And Nick Weschler who I had met with, must’ve seen that connection as well and stored it in his memory banks, so he came back to me a year or two later with The Road before it was even published. It was just an advanced proof. And it was incredible reading that, because there was no context other than Cormac’s other work, and the impact… I just couldn’t say no to it, of course. It was an absolute gift. 

Paste: With the amount of respect you have for McCarthy, how closely did you feel you needed to stick to the original The Road when adapting it for the screen?
Hillcoat: Well, I also felt that with The Road, unlike Cormac’s other work, even, because of the emotional story of the father and son, it just felt very personal, because it felt so real on a very deep, human level. And of course then I found out about his own son, and eventually when they came to the set, I realized as Cormac said, that his son sort of co-wrote the book. The conversations he and his son have are just like from the book, and the boy calls him Papa, and it’s just amazing to hear and see. So I knew it was quite a special…of course, all the books are special, but this had an extra personal significance. And I also have my own son, and I just felt that the context of what he was saying in this book too, an extra responsibility. Because it’s really kind of a reminder and a wake-up call for us to value what we do have. And ultimately I actually see it, even though it’s such a dark, terrifying world, it’s actually highlighting the best of humanity. And it’s such a special, moving, heartbreaking relationship, that I felt that I had to try and honor that in some way and respect it. And then of course as the novel built its own momentum, the pressure was on additionally, on top of all that. But because it’s all such a specific world and a specific… You know, I’m not a fan of post-apocalyptic films in general, as a general sort of genre, it’s not one of my favorite genres, but this just felt so different and so real. We always discussed trying to be faithful to… Even the very first conversations with Joe Penhall were about “How do we maintain the spirit of this book and keep the integrity?”

And there’s always that thing, if you’re adapting a great book, it’s very hard to pull that off, as we can see. In some ways it’s easier to take a pulp book and then elevate it. Novels can change time and get in one’s head, and they can do things that in film really challenges you, because film is so physical, actually, because everything you’re looking at has a physical reality to it, even if it’s made up. Do you know what I mean? It’s pre-visualized: it’s visualized so you’re witnessing it; your eyes are analyzing it. As opposed to it being with words, with a thought and then your imagination will take you wherever with that. 

Paste: The next movie that I’ve heard you’re working on is announced is Death of a Ladies’ Man. Is that actually underway in any sort of pre-production?
Hillcoat: Well, no. Funny story with that, and again all these circular things, is that Nick and I talked about that and he came up with that towards the end of The Proposition, and then The Road landed in my lap and I just couldn’t say no, it was a dream come true. And Nick understood that as well, so we put Death of a Ladies’ Man on hold. Then, Nick is so prolific and he hasn’t got the patience that it takes to be in filmmaking.

Paste: Yeah, I can see that. I can’t keep track of his albums…
Hillcoat: Yeah, so this year he’s gonna have two new albums, cause he’s got his other band now, Grinderman. So he turned it into a novel, and there’s like 30-odd countries that have already picked it up. He’s expanded the screenplay into a novel, and it’s amazing. 

Paste: So what’s next for you personally, then?
Hillcoat: I’ve got a few projects in development that are quite at an advanced stage, where the scripts are coming in now. In fact one of these projects Nick has written for me, that’s based on a book called The Wettest County in the World, which is a rural Goodfellas-type thing of the footsoldiers of the Prohibition-era in the backwoods supporting the Al Capones in the city. We don’t’ ever go into the city gangsters of that time, it’s all from a rural perspective.

Paste: So when you were talking about how you like to work with the big genres, is the gangster genre one of the ones you’re talking about?
Hillcoat: Yes. I personally think that out of all the genres in the history of filmmaking that the two robust, great American genres are the Western and the gangster movie. And of course there’s been all sorts of sub-genres, there’s horror and there’s comedy and there’s all sorts of other genres, but I think they’ve got such a history behind them from very early days, and the way they’ve transformed cinema. 

Paste: You mentioned them as an American genre. I’m curious, have you moved here?
Hillcoat: No, I haven’t as yet. I live actually in Brighton, in fact Nick’s one of my neighbors, we’re very happy over in England by the sea. But it really depends on, I mean, there’s been a lot of great material so far here and great talent here, so it’s kinda hard to resist. And I grew up as a young kid in America and Canada, in fact until I was a teenager, and the great cinema of the seventies I saw as a kid, and they transformed my life. And then I went to Australia. So I’ve spent a third of my life in Australia, a third in Britain, and a third in North America. And where I’ll end up, I’m not sure. That’s the problem with being a hybrid. But really it depends where, 'cause there are a couple of other projects in the UK. I’ve got three gangster films in various stages here. But in each I’m trying to look at a new perspective on it. I’ve just talked about the rural element there, that’s kind of a moonshine...where moonshine, as opposed to the way the drugs in Goodfellas and in the ‘70s and ‘80s changed the entire world, and the whole business, and likewise in Prohibition, that was the biggest crime-wave in history. So there’s that. There’s another great project that’s a different period with the gangster story, and that’s a really great project as well. There’s also Mob Cops, which is that true story of those detectives in New York who were moonlighting as hit men. So there’s a couple of projects that I’m looking at and trying to put together, because I’d love to do something in that genre. But that’s just one genre, and there’s many more I’d like to do. 

Paste: At this point in your career, are you mostly interested in features, or do you think you’ll do anything short or with music videos again?
Hillcoat: Oh no, music’s a long-term passion that I’ll never lose, but I try to keep them…it’s a very different. The music video aesthetic is, I see, because what you’re doing is providing images that complement and go with the music. And it’s interesting to see how that aesthetic has infiltrated the biggest blockbuster films being made. But it’s an aesthetic that I think is inappropriate for cinema, in the sense that it doesn’t… I mean, personally, my favorite videos were those in the heyday, in the ‘90s that were a series of short films, inventive short films, like the Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry and Glazer and Chris Cunningham in particular. And I did some work with Nick Cave and this German band. I had a great experience with that, and people like Depeche Mode and various bands. And I also love documentaries, so I’d love to get involved in music projects again when I find the time. And also that whole industry has radically changed, as I’m sure you’re well aware. It’s becoming quite difficult, as video-makers, until that medium gets reinvented, which it kind of has to do. 

Paste: It kind of died on its own. They’re still being made, but the kind of ambition died off a few years ago because there’s no outlet for them.
Hillcoat: That’s right, yeah. Go on MTV Thursdays, with their various… The internet has changed everything, and you have to embrace the technology; you can’t fight it. So I’m kind of curious to see how that will develop, but I’m definitely interested. There’s a great company that was The Oil Factory and then it has continued as Factory Films in the UK, and they do music related projects and music videos, and that’s all they’ve been doing. They’ve recently started a bit of advertising to try and survive, but they have some great people there. But as I say, it’s a different kind of aesthetic; it’s not about real storytelling and characters, it’s about mood and imagery that reflects the emotion of the music. So I try to keep them very separate. But it’d be great if there’s more things that can come out of that.