Cormac McCarthy

‘A man of miracles’: The Road director

John Hillcoat on Cormac McCarthy
The film-maker, who is also set to adapt Blood Meridian,
reflects on his friendship with the late author, ‘a monumental
artistic force’

John Hillcoat
Fri 16 Jun 2023 13.05 EDT

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Cormac McCarthy and John Hillcoat in 2009. ‘He was a man of miracles, one who created lasting
miracles for us all.’ Photograph: Jim Spellman/WireImage

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
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with the Weinsteins that included trying to get these crucial lines back into
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the movie. Cormac saved the day, and we went on to a glorious five-hour Papers whistleblo
lunch. aged 92

Cormac was not only a great raconteur but also a great joke-teller. Of course,
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dark, yet a superb sense of humor. Finding something funny within the the Fox News bann
direst of circumstances was always on the agenda, especially the cosmic
joke.
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Our mutual deep love for our sons brought us more and more together over people are so angr
the years. And the meals went on for even longer and likewise the calls that want to blow up th
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 Every Louisiana d
Francis sounded as if they were from The Road. license holder exp
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Cormac was a fierce outsider who championed outsiders all through his work Focus of war shifti
and life. He never suffered fools, he shunned the trappings of Hollywood, he towards Mariupol
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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.

Viggo Mortensen in The Road. Photograph: Dimension Films\2929 Productions/Allstar

Cormac was dismayed by the demise of art and culture, the ever-increasing
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 all of 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.

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I was hoping you
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