‘A man of miracles’: The Road director John Hillcoat on Cormac McCarthy
Firstly, this is extremely hard for me to write. The loss of such a unique and monumental artistic force is one thing, and the loss of such a special friend is another.
We first connected via a phone call one week out from shooting The Road. Cormac lifted a huge weight from me by simply pointing out that “a book is a book, and a film is a film”, two distinctly different mediums and that I should go make my movie – having not even seen a script. Later when shooting on location he shared his appreciation for the realism that we were utilizing via America’s disaster zones.
The moment of reckoning finally came when me and Joe Penhall, who adapted this precious novel, had to show Cormac the cut of the movie. Straight after the end roll he disappeared for 20 agonizing minutes then returned to tell us that he “did not come to blow any smoke up our asses”. He only missed a few lines from the book, an exchange between the father and son: “What would you do if I died?” “If you died I would want to die too.” “So you could be with me?” “Yes. So I could be with you.” Luckily we had filmed these and I had been in the thick of a relentlessly bruising battle with the Weinsteins that included trying to get these crucial lines back into the movie. Cormac saved the day, and we went on to a glorious five-hour lunch.
Cormac was not only a great raconteur but also a great joke-teller. Of course, dark, yet a superb sense of humor. Finding something funny within the direst of circumstances was always on the agenda, especially the cosmic joke.
Our mutual deep love for our sons brought us more and more together over the years. And the meals went on for even longer and likewise the calls that also helped me navigate and get me through so many life struggles. He was a great mentor and everything to me. His conversations with his son John Francis sounded as if they were from The Road.
Cormac was a fierce outsider who championed outsiders all through his work and life. He never suffered fools, he shunned the trappings of Hollywood, he shunned the spotlight in general and all the ego-sickness that fame too often brings. When attending the Oscars for and with his son, he said one of the highlights of the evening was his discovery and subsequent long conversation with a “seat filler” for the broadcast who was dressed up and hired to fill his empty seat.
Cormac was dismayed by the demise of art and culture, the everincreasing fragmentation and addiction to distraction or like TS Elliot foretold: “Distracted from distraction by distraction.” His son once gave him a cellphone but by the end of the day he calmly placed it behind his car wheel and then reversed over it. His new iPad and new laptop sat upon his bed never once used next to piles of books and papers while his $20 manual typewriter never failed him and sat there by his side supported by a wooden board ready to go until the very end.
I recently asked him if the internet was an externalization of our collective mind dominated by the id that was now forming a black hole which would swallow us all. He responded that he had certainly been hearing the deafening roar of a great “sucking”.
Cormac told me he never experienced boredom. His writing reflected his true stoic self as it carried his expansive curious mind together with the cold-steel precision of a scientist and the prose of a great poet. No matter how disturbing a subject may be, he was unflinching with life’s uncomfortable truths and its taboos. Cormac’s prose has the power to give you genuine shocks of reality that jolt you into a fleeting moment of clarity. It was so stripped of illusions, it stirred the imagination. At no time had he shrunk from staring directly into the abyss.
He was never nihilistic in the bleakness that he confronted. Something Paul Schrader once put so well: “I think one is stung into progressive, positive behavior by an awareness of the great lure of negative thought; it’s the awareness of prejudice inside you that spurs you on to rid yourself and others of it. One of the things you should do in art is lift up the rock and look at those things inside you.”
We shared a love of music and agreed with some of the newest science that believes music predated language, the sense that language came out of music.
With the theatrical release of The Road in the US, the distributors went out of their way to bury the film. Ironically, remarkable success came via pay TV. Since then Cormac and I have discussed at length how to crack Blood Meridian to make it work as a movie, which he felt was indeed possible, just not allof it. He also had to finish his last great novels.
Sadly, he started to slow down as age and health issues gradually took hold. His family stayed close and rallied around him. We got him to finish the novels. He started the screenplay of Blood Meridian but slowed down again. Now the final slowdown has come. I somehow did not think it possible. He was just too much a force. Sometimes he was called “the camel” since he rarely if ever drank water. He was a man of miracles, one who created lasting miracles for us all.