Weinsteins Nearly Cut An Hour From “The Road”

The film adaptation of the late Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” hit in 2009, a 111-minute film starring Viggo Mortensen that the Weinsteins once attempted to slash by nearly an hour.

The film follows a father and son traversing a post-apocalyptic Earth after an undetermined event obliterates human civilisation and ravages the biosphere.

“The Proposal” and “Triple 9” director John Hillcoat helmed the film and has spent the last few years trying to adapt McCarthy’s novel “Blood Meridian” for the big screen.

Sadly, there’s no real update of late on how that’s progressing, but Hillcoat did recently share an interesting story about his “The Road” film on the Team Deakins podcast (via The Playlist) – turns out Harvey and Bob Weinstein were secretly editing the film behind his back.

The Weinsteins were notoriously hands-on with edits and had fought with filmmakers over edits in the past. Turns out neither of them was familiar with McCarthy’s novel:

“[I did feel] a little bit [compromised], to be brutally honest. I fought them [the Weinsteins], and I felt like I essentially saved the film.

We put back the release a year just because I had to fight them for a whole, full 12 months after the film was fully completed, because they did not understand the film, of course, and Harvey, I don’t think, ever read the book.

He couldn’t understand why, when they got to the coast, the ocean wasn’t blue, full of fish, and why the sun wasn’t beaming down on them.”

So, the Weinsteins hired an editor to assemble an alternative cut without Hillcoat’s knowledge. Hillcoat found out who it was and tracked them down:

“Apparently, [it] was something they did with most films. And being an editor myself, I even found out who their editor was. And their editor was ahead of us when they edited. So I had an interesting dinner with, I secretly got in touch with their editor. But they did a version of, I think it was 54 minutes. They tried to cut it down because Bob wanted to see if there was any version that would not drag or be bleak.”

He says so much of the way the film was shot was in camera with very minimal green screen, so the Weinsteins couldn’t interfere with the film’s visual look. After a year of fights, he got to premiere the film he wanted. It scored fairly positive reviews but fizzled at the box-office – pulling in $27.6 million from a $25 million budget.