People are saying The Road is all depressing because it’s about the end of the world, but to me getting to see Viggo Mortensen survive the wasteland is a must see. Viggo sees the good in the story too, even though he had to wither away to starving nothing. He expressed such perspective in a roundtable interview with press at the film’s junket.
Q: What was your first experience reading the book?
Viggo Mortensen: I read it the same day that I read the script because I thought, “This is a really good script. A tough story but beautiful, and strangely kind of uplifting at the end.” I went through a lot of things reading the script. I couldn't believe how much my emotion was condensed into it, and visually what it could be, you know? And so I ran out to the book store and I was happy to see that this was a very faithful adaptation of the book.
Q: That’s a pretty intense day though.
Viggo Mortensen: Yeah, I was worthless by the end of the day. I was at my mother's house actually visiting her and she said, “So what do you want to do for dinner?” I said, “Dinner? How can I eat now?”
Q: How did you prepare for being so thin?
Viggo Mortensen: I didn’t do that [eating chips]. It took a certain amount of discipline and fortunately I had enough time to get there.
Q: How much time?
Viggo Mortensen: I don't know. Well, I mean you can always use more. It was as I was traveling and doing other things, promoting Eastern Promises actually. It was that period. Even at the Oscars for example, that was like a day before shooting our first day. It was bizarre to go to this ceremony when we'd been already preparing, seeing this world and thinking that way, and suddenly I leave the winter of Pittsburgh and this weird area of town that we're in and then I'm suddenly on the red carpet in Hollywood. It was really weird. I felt strangely calm because I said, “Well, how bad can it be? It's fine. It's nothing compared to what I'm going to be doing the next couple of months. I can handle these photographers. They're not cannibals, as far as I can tell.” Maybe they were.
Q: You couldn't party or have the lavish dinners.
Viggo Mortensen: Well, I also had to leave. I had to be on a plane, so no.
There was a chocolate shaped Oscar at the Governor's Ball with gold wrapping and I remember I ate the head off of that.
Q: You have a really close relationships with Kodi Smit-McPhee in the film. He's young, how much could you do before hand and what was it like on set?
Viggo Mortensen: Well my first worry when I said yes, which is always what happens to some degree, you say yes when you're fortunate that you’re offered this role and then you think, “Oh no, now I've got to do this. How am I going to do this?” And in this case more than usual because in talking to the director I knew that he was going to, in principle, do things right as far as the look, shooting in real places and not green screen. The places we were going to shoot in were going to look right. The people he hired as far as other actors and the crew were all really good. So if we had some luck with the weather and so forth, we might have a chance to make this look right. But, I felt like I had a burden that I hadn't had before on an emotional level to constantly have this sort of turbulence under the surface and regret and all these things mixed together. How am I going to do that believably? Once I saw the landscapes I thought well if this is so raw and so real, and you can look at it as a measuring stick, we can't be any less real in our feelings and how we do things. So I was worried about that. But then as worried maybe even more worried because I was so dependent on whoever played the boy. I said to the director, “You know, if we don't find a genius kid to do this part, we can only do so much. The movie can only reach a certain level. It doesn't matter how well it's done, how well designed, or how hard I work or am able to be honest and emotional. We're limited.” It really has to work, that relationship, and we're lucky we found him because he was able to give as good as he got.
