Cannes greets Kerouac classic On the Road
All- star cast tackles movie version of Beat generation bible
CANNES, France — It was a suitably long and winding road that led to Walter Salles’s adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s famed 1950s novel On the Road. Producer Francis Ford Coppola bought the film rights back in 1979, but it wasn’t until Salles’ involvement that the project began to gather steam. The results were unveiled Wednesday at the Cannes Film Festival, where On the Road is in the official slate of competition films.
Salles seems to have road movies in his blood. The Motorcycle Diaries, a critical hit that debuted at Cannes in 2004 and won the Ecumenical Jury Prize, is his story of a young, prerevolutionary Che Guevara ( Gael Garcia Bernal) taking a motorcycle journey through South America with a friend.
The director saw clear similarities between the films. At the press conference for On the Road, he said both embodied “the very beginning of a social and political awakening, as two young men discover a physical and human geography that was foreign to them. It’s about the loss of innocence. It’s about the search for that last frontier that they would never find.”
On the Road stars Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty, Kerouac’s fictional version of his friend and fellow traveller Neal Cassady. A charismatic womanizer, he married one woman ( played by Kristen Stewart), then left her for another ( Kirsten Dunst), with whom he would have three children. Sam Riley stars as Sal Paradise, the character Kerouac wrote as a stand- in for himself.
The film also features Tom Sturridge as a young Allen Ginsberg and Danny Morgan as fellow Beat poet Al Hinkle. Viggo Mortensen, who plays Old Bull Lee ( a. k. a. William S. Burroughs), arrived at the press conference toting a Montreal Canadiens flag. ( The Habs are Mortensen’s favourite team and much of the film was shot in Montreal.)
Calling it his 100,000- kilometre movie, Salles said he spent years travelling and researching the Beat poets, a group he said “completely altered the face not only of North American culture but of culture in general.”
Before filming began, he put his actors through a kind of boot camp ( or Beat camp), where they studied filmmakers who had been influenced by the movement, watched documentaries on such jazz figures as Charles Mingus, and even met with surviving Beats or their widows and children. “We saw so many things, and then we tried to forget them all and create our own story,” Salles said.