Will John Hillcoat ever fulfill his dream of adapting Cormac McCarthy‘s novel “Blood Meridian“ for the big screen? The “Triple 9” director didn’t have any concrete updates on that project when he stopped by the “Team Deakins” podcast for a recent episode. However, Hillcoat did have an intriguing anecdote about his other McCarthy adaptation, 2009’s “The Road,” and how he discovered that Harvey and Bob Weinstein had started to compile a secret parallel edit of the film behind the director’s back.
Hillcoat’s issues with the Weinsteins were one of several difficulties he had while making “The Road.” “It’s hard, especially since this was my first American film, and there was, you know, the crews were three times the size of Europe or Australia,” the director started. “So, it was a big learning curve. I also had the monumental task of dealing with the Weinsteins, on my first film in America.” As the founder of Dimenson Films, the producer of “The Road,” Bob Weinstein was very hands-on throughout the film’s production, with both he and Harvey having an explicitly different vision of what the movie should look like; one that stemmed from, coincidentally, neither of him being familiar with McCarthy’s novel at all.
“[I did feel] a little bit [compromised], to be brutally honest,” Hillcoat recalled about the Weinstein’s influence on the picture. “I fought them, 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.” This anecdote will prove particularly humorous to those who have read “The Road,” about a father and soon traversing a post-apocalyptic Earth after an undetermined extinction event obliterates both civilization and the biosphere.
The Weinsteins were so perturbed by Hillcoat’s dailies that they hired an editor to assemble an alternative cut of the footage without the director’s knowledge. “Apparently, [it] was something they did with most films,” Hillcoat explained. “And being an editor myself, I even found out who their editor was. And their editor was ahead of us when they edited.” Obviously, Hillcoat tracked that editor down. “So I had an interesting dinner with, I secretly got in touch with their editor,” he continued. “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.”
Luckily, Hillcoat’s dailies were all on film, which didn’t allow the Weinsteins to interfere with coloration too much. “That’s when I realized, actually, it was in the DNA of the rushes that was its main protection,” the director continued. “And had we had green screen elements and all these other things, they could have really messed with it in a whole different way, whereas so much was in camera.” So, despite the Weinsteins’ meddling and the one-year delay of the film’s release, Hillcoat got to premiere “The Road” as he always intended; a frustrating experience, to be sure, but his vision ultimately won out.
But now Hillcoat remains steadfast in his ambition to make “Blood Meridian.” If he does so, it’ll be his first movie since 2016’s “Triple 9.” But, as noted earlier, there’s been no major update on the planned adaptation since McCarthy passed away in 2023, outside of Oscar-nominated screenwriter John Logan being hired to work on the script. Will some other news emerge this year? We’ll see.
Listen to John Hillcoat’s entire interview on the “Team Deakins” podcast below.
