Since Cormac McCarthy has only given something like four interviews in his forty-plus years of masterful writing, when the man speaks, all humanity quiets, soldiers in war agree to a temporary cease-fire, and even the gods listen eagerly from afar. I was delightfully surprised when I discovered that the Wall Street Journal made a trip to San Antonio, Texas to catch up with the notoriously private 76-year old author, and was even more ecstatic when I read it and realized they didn’t waste such a rare chance like Oprah did when she had him on the show a few years ago to discuss his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road.
You need to read the entire interview, because other than arguably Philip Roth, he’s probably the most important living writer of fiction in America today. I’ll break down the interview for some highlights here below though:
On what causes the apocalyptic disaster in The Road:
A lot of people ask me. I don’t have an opinion. At the Santa Fe Institute I’m with scientists of all disciplines, and some of them in geology said it looked like a meteor to them. But it could be anything – volcanic activity or it could be nuclear war. It is not really important. The whole thing now is, what do you do? … From different people you get different answers, but it could go in another three to four thousand years or it could go on Thursday. No one knows. [See R3's The Road review]
On John Hillcoat adapting The Road:
I’ve seen John’s film ["The Proposition"] and I knew him somewhat by reputation and I thought he’d probably do a good job in respect to the material. Also, my agent [Amanda Urban], she’s just the best. She wasn’t going to sell the book to somebody unless she had some confidence in what they would do with it. It’s not just a matter of money.
On the film adaptation of All the Pretty Horses:
It could’ve been better. As it stands today it could be cut and made into a pretty good movie. The director [Billy Bob Thornton] had the notion that he could put the entire book up on the screen. Well, you can’t do that. You have to pick out the story that you want to tell and put that on the screen. And so he made this four-hour film and then he found that if he was actually going to get it released, he would have to cut it down to two hours.
On Blood Meridian being unfilmable due to the content:
That’s all crap. The fact that’s it’s a bleak and bloody story has nothing to do with whether or not you can put it on the screen. That’s not the issue. The issue is it would be very difficult to do and would require someone with a bountiful imagination and a lot of balls. But the payoff could be extraordinary. [See article on Blood Meridian adaptation]
On originally writing No Country for Old Men as a screenplay:
I showed it to a few people and they didn’t seem to be interested. In fact, they said, “That will never work.” Years later I got it out and turned it into a novel. Didn’t take long. I was at the Academy Awards with the Coens. They had a table full of awards before the evening was over, sitting there like beer cans. One of the first awards that they got was for Best Screenplay, and Ethan came back and he said to me, “Well, I didn’t do anything, but I’m keeping it.”
On the book he is working on currently:
I’m not very good at talking about this stuff. It’s mostly set in New Orleans around 1980. It has to do with a brother and sister. When the book opens she’s already committed suicide, and it’s about how he deals with it. She’s an interesting girl. This long book is largely about a young woman. There are interesting scenes that cut in throughout the book, all dealing with the past. She’s committed suicide about seven years before. I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years. I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.
We’re huge fans of McCarthy around these parts. Mike has created an entire mixtape dedicated to the man’s work and a couple of years ago I had dissected all of his books that I had read at that time. We’ve shown much love for No Country for Old Men, an almost verbatim adaptation of his novel, and awaited eagerly for The Road over the years. Let’s hope if they are eventually going to adapt Blood Meridian, they do it like Cormac suggests: with a lot of balls.
Some credit needs to be given to the folks at Summit fore releasing this at the peak of Robsession. As the New Moon crew runs through the promotional ringer and RPattz and KStew are everywhere, they release the first full length trailer for Robert Pattinson’s newest film Remember Me.
