Décès de Carolyn Cassady (1923-2013)


Carolyn Cassady, qui a été l'inspiration du personnage de Camille dans Sur la route, est décédée ce vendredi 20 septembre en Angleterre, à l'âge de 90 ans. C'est Brian Hassett, ami proche de Carolyn Cassady, qui nous a appris la triste nouvelle via son blog et un émouvant hommage.



Figure emblématique de la Beat Generation, Carolyn était l'épouse de Neal Cassady et une amie proche de Jack Kerouac et Allen Ginsberg. Ses deux mémoires, Heart Beat et Off The Road, nous en offrent un témoignage, comme sa récente participation au documentaire Love Always, Carolyn.


 


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Première image et bande-annonce de Big Sur !



Première image de BIG SUR, réalisé par Michael Polish. Comme vous l'aurait sans doute compris, le film est l'adaptation du roman de Jack Kerouac, Big Sur, publié en 1962.

Toujours autobiographique, Jack Kerouac est Jack Duluoz, interprété cette fois-ci par Jean-Marc Barr et Neal Cassady est Cody Pomeray, Josh Lucas à l'écran. On retrouve aussi Carolyn Cassady et Allen Ginsberg, mais également Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure ou encore Gary Snyder car l'histoire se déroule à San Francisco.



Pour rappel, un résumé du livre :
''Le héros de ce roman, Jack Duluoz ou Ti Jean, n'est autre que Jack Kerouac, l'auteur de Sur la route. Au bord de la folie, le Roi des Beatniks cherche à fuir l'existence de cinglé qu'il a menée pendant trois ans et part pour San Francisco. Il se réfugie au bord de la mer, à Big Sur, dans une cabane isolée. Après quelques jours de bonheur passés dans la solitude à se retremper dans la nature, Duluoz est à nouveau saisi par le désespoir et l'horreur. Aussi revient-il à San Francisco où l'attendent le monde, les beatniks, l'érotisme. Mais il ne retrouve pas la paix pour autant.'' (Folio)
      

Bande-annonce (V.O) :


Le film sera présenté au festival de Sundance en janvier et n'a pas encore de date de sortie fixée. 
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Compte-rendu de la projection de SUR LA ROUTE à Los Angeles.


Compte-rendu de la session questions/réponses en présence de Walter Salles et Garrett Hedlund qui a suivi la projection du film à Los Angeles, ce mercredi 5 décembre.


On y apprend notamment que le documentaire tourné en préparation du film et qui retrace cinq années de recherches sur les traces de la Beat generation, 'Looking for On the road', devrait être fini au ''début de l'année prochaine'', selon Walter Salles. 


Walter Salles and Garrett Hedlund at TheWrap's screening of On The Road.

'On the Road' Director and Star Talk Kristen Stewart, Steve Buscemi Gay Sex Scene
By Tim Kenneally


Jack Kerouac's seminal Beat Generation novel "On the Road" might revolve around the spontaneity of youth, but the film that it spawned certainly had more than its fair share of preparation behind it. 
After TheWrap's screening of "On the Road" at the Landmark Theatre in Los Angeles on Wednesday night, director Walter Salles and star Garrett Hedlund -- who plays iconic Beat Generation figure Dean Moriarty in the film -- discussed the long journey that went into bringing Jack Kerouac's novel to the screen.

In Salles' case, that included five years of retracing Kerouac's steps and tracking down surviving Beat Generation figures such as poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti for information. (Those efforts eventually yielded a documentary, "Searching for 'On the Road,'" which Salles hopes will be in a finished state "at the beginning of next year.")
For Hedlund, it meant driving from Minnesota  to Los Angeles for his audition, capturing his thoughts in a road journal that would help cement his casting when he read it for Salles. (The journal "was so akin to Kerouac's vision, and it so echoed the spirit of the book," the director recalled during the Q&A after the screening.)

And for both of them, it meant a cross-country trip in a 1949 Hudson -- the same model driven by Moriarty in the novel -- to capture additional footage after principal photography had wrapped. 
"We broke down eight, nine times across the country. We drove with no brakes from Cincinnati to Lexington," Hedlund noted.  
Such are the perils of pursuing a labor of love. During the question-and-answer session, which was moderated by TheWrap's editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman, Salles and Hedlund repeatedly discussed their decades-long love for the source material. According to Hedlund, the respect for Kerouac's work extended throughout the cast, which includes Sam Riley as aspiring writer Sal Paradise; "Twilight" star Kristen Stewart, who plays Moriarty's libertine teenage bride Marylou; Tom Sturridge as Allen Ginsberg stand-in Carlo Marx; and Viggo Mortensen as Old Bull Lee, a character based on "Naked Lunch" author William Burroughs. 
"We all shared a similar passion for the book," Hedlund said. "There wasn't a single person on this project who didn't feel completely holy and honored to be there."
Stewart, of course, has become known to screaming teenagers everywhere as Bella Swan, the conflicted lead female character in a little vampire movie franchise called "Twilight." The actress actually came aboard "On the Road" before the "Twilight" film series became a reality, with Salles becoming drawn to the actress via her part in the 2007 film "Into the Wild." While her performance in that Sean Penn-directed movie might have opened the door, it was her knowledge of the novel and insight into the Marylou character that sealed the deal.  (Stewart was scheduled to attend the screening but canceled at the last minute due to illness.)
"I met her and found someone who knew the book inside-out, and also understood that Marylou was 20 years ahead of her time," Salles recalled. "I think that Kristen in her life, she drifts toward these characters who expand or investigate territories that are forbidden a number of times, and she was very drawn to this." 
Despite the unanimous reverence for Kerouac's book, Salles wasn't afraid to deviate from the novel. That included referencing the original, famously scroll-like manuscript that unspooled from Kerouac's typewriter. 
"The published version in 1957 was quite different and tamer than the original that Kerouac had written," Salles noted. "Even that first line was different. The 1957 book starts, 'I first met Dean not long after I divorced my first wife,' and the scroll starts, 'I first met Dean not long after my father died.'" (The film version employs the latter.)
"[We were] trying to be faithful to the very freeform, jazz-infused quality of the text, but at the same time, try to find a complexity in each of the characters," Sallas said of the film adaptation. 
Particularly challenging for the actors was the fact that "On the Road"'s characters are based on people who themselves became public figures. Separating the two could be particularly demanding, Hedlund noted. 
"That was probably the most difficult part of this, the stripping-away process," Hedlund said. "[T]here's so many videos of Kerouac, or there's videos of Neal Cassady when he's older ... It was Walter that said, 'Strip it all away, you're not playing Jack Kerouac, you're playing Sal Paradise,' and to me, 'You're not playing Neal Cassady, you're playing Dean Moriarty.' Because half of this was through life experience that Kerouac was writing, and half was through imagination." 
That wasn't the only stripping-away process that might have tested the cast's mettle. Befitting the free-wheeling spirit of its source material, "On the Road" is rife with sex scenes, particularly for Hedlund's sexually omnivorous Moriarty. A particularly jarring coupling in the film occurs when Moriarty, hard-up for cash, partners with Steve Buscemi, who plays a traveling salesman who gives Sal and Dean a ride -- and has a fondness for Dean. 
As it turns out, Buscemi was as devoted to his role as the rest of the cast.
"Steve was wearing underpants the color of skin. In the rehearsal, in the camera they can see Steve's skin-colored underwear popping into the frame and they're like 'Steve, can you just slide them down a little bit?'" Hedlund recalled. "And he's like, 'Oh, no; I'll just take them off. You don't mind, do you?'"



Source : vrvm.com
Via : @charlegillibert
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Interview de Garrett Hedlund pour Interview Magazine.





'' It's funny that I got to do On the Road. I was very inspired by the book and this spirit of Dean Moriarty and how envious we all are of somebody who can be that carefree. ''

BRIDGES: So tell me about On the Road. That was kicking around for a while and went through some directors, didn't it?
HEDLUND: Yeah. I remember, at first, looking it up and seeing that Francis Ford Coppola was attached to the film, and I was like, "Shit. I'll never get a chance at this." But then, like, eight years later, I was on set doing it. I remember all of us kind of pinching each other and saying, "Man, we're filming On the Road." But I think there were a number of different incarnations of what the movie was gonna be, from Jean-Luc Godard filming it, to Gus Van Sant doing it, to all these other directors who were rumored to be involved—I think Roman Coppola was even going to direct it at one point. There were also a bunch of different versions of the script: one that Barry Gifford had written and one that Roman was planning to write. But I think it was after Sundance, the year that Walter [Salles] was there with The Motorcycle Diaries [2004], that he was approached about possibly doing the film. Obviously, Walter had just come from doing a road film, so I think he was like, "Well, if I'm gonna do this"—which he was unsure of at the time—"then I'm going to have to immerse myself in it." So he ended up going across the country for five or six years doing research before they'd even completed a script, which José Rivera, who worked with Walter on The Motorcycle Diaries, eventually wrote. So it was a long time in the making. I also think that since Walter is Brazilian, he maybe didn't feel like he was the right person to make this movie unless he'd really absorbed it all. I mean, he'd read the book at a young age himself and was very inspired by it. 
 
BRIDGES: Were you familiar with the book before you did the movie? 
HEDLUND: Yeah. I'd read it in high school. It's funny that I got to do On the Road because the thing that had the biggest impact on me growing up was reading books. I was very inspired by the book and this spirit of Dean Moriarty and how envious we all are of somebody who can be that carefree. I also always thought of myself as more like the Sal Paradise character—you know, being a listener and writing about a conversation more than being the one that others listened to. So it was interesting that I got to play Dean. I actually signed on to do On the Road before we started on Tron, but we were in flux for a while, just sort of playing the waiting game, trying to get the right budget and the right cast. I think I first met with Walter in March of 2007. But I told Walter that I wouldn't do another film until we did On the Road, so I had a lot of time to do my own research—to go up to San Francisco to City Lights bookstore, to watch video interviews of Neal Cassady with Allen Ginsberg, to sit in Vesuvio [Cafe] and visit Jack Kerouac Alley, to go to the Beat Museum and things. We had time, so Walter and I also did road trips and talked to people, be it family members of some of the people who were around the Beats or other writers. But it was really just about finding something that we could add to the story beyond what was on the page, even if only from life experience. I mean, I grew up around country roads, but this was a different route that these guys took. Eventually, though, it all came to fruition.




Robbie Fimmano
Karl Templer




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Interview de Kristen Stewart pour Awards Daily - par Craig Kennedy.




Kristen Stewart: The “On the Road” roundtable
awardsdaily I recently sat down to a couple of one on one interviews for the upcoming adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. The first was with the film’s co-star Garrett Hedlund (Tron: Legacy) and the second was with screenwriter Jose Rivera and director Walter Salles who had previously collaborated on the highly acclaimed The Motorcycle Diaries (2004). Those interviews will be coming shortly, but in the mean time I wanted to pull out some of the more interesting responses from the roundtable with Kristen Stewart which took place on the same day. 
Stewart of course is on everyone’s mind right now as the last chapter of the Twilight Saga rakes in cash at the multiplex, but it’s easy to forget that she’s also carved out a nice niche for herself and done some of her best work in smaller scale films like Into the Wild, The Runaways, Welcome to the Rileys and now On the Road. 
In front of cameras and in front of the media since before she was even a teenager, a lot of ink has been spilled about Stewart and her personal life so it’s not all that surprising she’s kind of a guarded presence. She has a reputation for being a difficult interview, but I don’t blame her. This is what happens in a world where a young woman’s behavior can be trumpeted as a “scandal” in tabloid headlines even when whatever it is all falls well within the boundaries of the law. We’re a society that seems to need to build people up and tear them back down again and it can’t be easy being buffeted by those forces at an age when a lot of people are still trying to figure out what they want to do with themselves. 
So, it’s not all that surprising Stewart seemed a little bit nervous sitting down to a table full of microphones and people waiting to dissect her. Beyond the nervous energy though (a lot of toe tapping), Stewart’s enthusiasm for her character and the project won out. She spoke in stops and starts as the words tried to keep up with the thoughts in her brain, but this is clearly an intelligent person who has spent a lot of time getting inside her character Marylou. It was interesting too how much love and respect she has for the character. My take on Kerouac’s story and this adaptation especially is that it’s dominated by the men Sal Paradise (Sam Riley) and the free-wheeling Dean Moriarty (Hedlund) while the female characters (Stewart’s Marylou and Camille played by Kirsten Dunst) kind of got the raw end of the deal. It’s pretty clear though that Stewart at least sees her character very differently and she made me think about her in new ways. 
On her character Marylou:
I really had to dig pretty deep to find it in me to play a person like that. It took a long time. I couldn’t say no. I would’ve done anything on the movie. I would’ve followed the movie in a caravan had I not had a job in it. I was like 14 or 15 when I read the book for the first time and 16 or 17 when I spoke to Walter for the first time. It was easy to connect the dots after having really gotten to know the person behind the character and what you would need to pull off a lifestyle like that. That didn’t happen until deep in the rehearsal process. At first I was just attracted to the spirit of it. I’m the type of person who needs to be pushed really hard to be able to let it all hang. I think that Marylou is the type of person you can’t help but be yourself around because she’s so unabashedly there and present all the time, like this bottomless pit of really generous empathy. It’s a really rare quality that makes you capable of living a really full, a really rich life without it taking something from you. You couldn’t take from her. She was always getting something back. She’s amazing. 
On LuAnne Henderson, the real woman behind Kerouac’s character Marylou:
I think that LuAnne would’ve been ahead of her time now. I think generally people’s expectations for their lives are in a personal way not all that different. It’s a really fundamental thing to want to be a part of a group. We are pack animals. In a way she had very conventional ideals as well. She had this capacity to live many lives that didn’t necessarily mess with the other. She was ultimately not above emotion. She was above jealousy, but not above feeling hurt. She felt hurt but not slighted. 
Maybe if this movie was made back in the day as opposed to now, people would be shocked by the sex and the drugs and they would actually miss what the movie is about. Whereas now we’ve just seen a little bit more of it so it’s not shocking to stomach. It’s easier to take. I mean, sure, times have changed, but people don’t change. That’s why the book’s never been irrelevant. There will always be people that want to push a little bit harder and there are repercussions. Knowing what happens to all the characters afterwards is really interesting. She knew Neal to the end of his life and they always shared what they had. They never left their hearts even though their lives changed monumentally. 
On whether On the Road is appropriate for Twilight fans:
I think that probably depends on your parents. I read On the Road when I was 14. My parents never really wanted to shelter me from the world that we live in so I think that I’m probably not the right person to ask (laughs).

On the importance of being on the road:
When you can literally Google anything and see it, you feel like you don’t have to go see it in person. You can do a lot of travelling in your bedroom, but you’re not touching anything. You’re not feeling it. 
On doing her first nude scenes and how her parents handled it:
I think everyone was really happy that it took a few years for the movie to get made (laughs). My mom came to Cannes. She loved it. She was really proud. I haven’t talked to my dad about it yet (laughs). 
Welcome to the Rileys was probably a more difficult movie for a parent to watch. I was so sensitive after that. That character really found its way into me. I was so overtly sensitive about anything, not just overtly sexual, but anything about a young girl. It just rocked me and I think my parents could probably feel that as well. So it was just not something that we engaged or talked about. 
It’s hard to step outside of it. I know it’s funny to talk about it from an outsider’s perspective, like “Oh, it must be weird to sit down and watch your ass with your mom” or whatever, but it’s so weird being on the inside of it. I genuinely don’t feel like… I don’t want to say that I’m watching another person at all because what I love about my job is aspects of life that you relate to but you didn’t quite know you had in you can shock the shit out of you and so the process of making the movie is finding out why you responded that way. So, I don’t feel like you’re every playing a different person, but you’re taking care of another person and you have such a responsibility to that person. It’s easy to be mature about it. It’s easy to place it in a context and feel protective of it. 
Advice for young actors who might be starting out in a major franchise like Twilight:
You’d better love it or don’t do it. To be on one project for 5 years, I have the exact same feeling that I had when I first started it. The only difference is that now finally I have that weight lifted, but I want it back. I don’t have to worry about Bella anymore, but I’m like “Really? It’s so weird. Where is it? She’s not like tapping me on the shoulder anymore.” So, yeah. I would say “love it.” 
Walter Salles’ adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road starring Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund and Kristen Stewart opens in limited release on December 21, 2012. You’ll be hearing a lot more about it in the days and weeks to come including my interviews with Hedlund, Salles and Rivera so stay tuned. 

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Kristen Stewart parle de Sur La Route dans une interview pour Backstage.





Kristen Stewart parle de Sur la route
(extrait de l'interview du magazine Backstage)


(C) Traduction effectuée par Ontheroad-themoviefr, 
veuillez créditer avec lien si vous reprenez cette traduction. Merci! (C)



Stewart a rencontré Salles en 2007, après que le réalisateur ait remarqué sa performance comme adolescente mélancolique dans Into the wild, mais il a fallu quelques années supplémentaires pour que le film se fasse. Un laps de temps dont Stewart est reconnaissante. "Le rôle était vraiment trop complexe pour moi à ce moment-là'', déclare-t-elle. ''J'aimais le personnage, et j'aurais fait n'importe quel petit job pour être impliqué dans ce film. Mais je suis repartie en conduisant toute tremblante parce que je me disais : ''Mon Dieu, je pense que j'ai le rôle, et je ne sais pas si je peux le faire!'' 

Jouer quelqu'un sans complexe comme Marylou, qui a une idylle en même temps avec son petit-ami, Dean (Garrett Hedlund) et l'autre protagoniste du film Sal Paradise (Sam Riley) a demandé à Stewart de s'exposer, au sens propre comme au figuré. La nudité n'a pas intimidé Stewart, qui a joué une stripteaseuse dans Welcome to the Rileys (2010), bien qu'elle était consciente que ce serait cette fois-ci quelque chose dont les média se saisiraient, anticipant des gros titres tels que ''La gentille fille de Twilight montre tout!'', imagine Stewart. ''Je sais que c'est étrange de dire ça, mais cela ne m'a pas inquiétée. J'aime réellement faire tomber les barrières. Je ne voulais pas me cacher, particulièrement en tant que Marylou - c'est la dernière personne qui se cacherait.'' En fait, c'était une simple scène de danse qui effrayait le plus Stewart. ''Mais dès que j'avais des doutes, je pouvais parler à Walter, et toutes mes appréhensions partaient, déclare-t-elle. Elle commence alors à faire une longue éloge de son réalisateur avant de s'arrêter et de reprendre : ''Ce que je peux dire - il est foutrement génial.'' Salles en retour n'a que des compliments à son sujet. "Kristen est vraiment une actrice talentueuse qui nous surprendra de nombreuses fois dans le futur'', dit-il pendant un appel du Brésil. "Elle a la possibilité de faire à peu près ce qu'elle veut, et elle choisit des rôles qui sont des choix très courageux - des personnages que vous ne vous attendriez pas à la voir jouer.''


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Next month will see Stewart in one of her most challenging roles to date, as 16-year-old free spirit Marylou in “On the Road,” director Walter Salles’ screen adaptation of the beloved Jack Kerouac novel.
Stewart actually met with Salles in 2007 after the director caught her performance as a melancholy teen in “Into the Wild,” but it took several years for the film to get made. It’s time that Stewart is grateful for. “The role was so beyond me at that point,” she says. “I loved the character, and I would have done craft services to be involved with that movie. But I drove away shaking because I was thinking, ‘Oh, my God, I think I’m going to get the job, and I don’t know if I can do it!’ ”
Playing someone as uninhibited as Marylou, who romances both her boyfriend, Dean (Garrett Hedlund), and the film’s protagonist, Sal Paradise (Sam Riley), required Stewart to be exposed, figuratively and literally. The nudity didn’t intimidate Stewart, who played a stripper in 2010’s “Welcome to the Rileys,” though she knew it was something the media would latch on to, anticipating headlines like “ ‘Twilight’ Good Girl Bares All!” says Stewart, “I know it’s an odd thing to say, but it didn’t worry me. I really do love taking walls down. I didn’t want to hide, especially as Marylou—she’s the last person who would hide.” As it turns out, it was a simple dance scene that frightened Stewart the most. “But whenever I had doubts, I was able to talk to Walter, and all my apprehensions went away,” she says. She starts to praise her director at length before stopping herself and saying, “What can I say—he’s fucking awesome.” Salles has nothing but kind words for Stewart in return. “Kristen is a seriously talented actress who’s going to surprise us many times in the future,” the director says in a phone call from Brazil. “She has the possibility to do pretty much whatever she wants, and she opts for roles that are very courageous choices—characters you might not expect her to play.”



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Interview de Garrett Hedlund par le magazine HUCK.




Article written by Matt Bochenski for the HUCK Magazine (Issue #35)  

Plus d'infos sur le magazine et comment se le procurer. 
( NB : dispo en français!)

 Garrett Hedlund The Man and The Muse 
He’s the Dean Moriarty of Walter Salles’ adapation of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. Which makes him a caricature of a caricature of Neal Cassady, America’s most fabled rebel muse. But Garrett Hedlund is still his own man.


Garrett Hedlund is not the same kid who grew up on a cattle farm in the remote outerlands of Wannaska, Minnesota. At twenty-eight, he’s found his footing in Hollywood with the easy confidence of a child superstar born and bred for life on the Hills. His bio glistens with big-screen hits, from Troy and Tron: Legacy to Friday Night Lights. He can share a spotlight with Brad Pitt without fading off into the shadows. And now, as rugged, rebel muse Dean Moriarty – the larger-than-life caricature of the already larger-than-life Neal Cassady - he’s taken Walter Salles’ adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and made damn sure that all eyes are on him.
But groomed for this life, he was not. At fourteen, Hedlund found himself in Arizona with his divorcee mom, busking tables after school, knocking on every talent agent’s door, and hitching rides to LA auditions, 800 miles away. He studied hard, graduated early, and, with a breakout part in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy, landed in Hollywood on both farmer-boy feet. But there are hints of Wannaska in that Hollywood smile – least not when he’s quoting Tennessee Williams on the fly.
HUCK caught up with Hedlund during the red-carpeted globe-trot that was always bound to follow in Cassady’s wake, and found the gooey-eyed optimism that keeps a kid from Minnesota a kid from Minnesota for life. 

Kerouac is said to have wanted Marlon Brando to play the role of Dean Moriarty. And Dean, meanwhile, is a caricature of Neal Cassady. That’s a lot of personality, right there. How do you channel the influence of icons like that when approaching a role like this? 
Between Walter [Salles] and I, it was about finding the voice of the man who said it for the first time and not the repeated soul. Unfortunately, the only video footage we really have of Cassady, which is when he was older, are YouTube clips when he’s driving the bus for The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test [with the Merry Pranksters]: he’s a motor mouth and super high on acid. At first glance, you’re like, ‘Man, I can’t wait to play this character.’ But really it’s about finding that soul which is experiencing it, verbalising it for the first time, what he really felt about this and that, and not the motor mouth that was the last figure at the museum. He was the one on display. He was the one voicing the inspiration and wonderment. He was the one saying, ‘Wow, Sal, look at that. Man, everything that I see is so whole and complete and we have to get some of this…’ It was about playing someone experiencing something for the first time with such electricity and such amusement and wonderment at life and the world that it was infectious to Kerouac and Marylou and Ginsberg.


How did you develop the chemistry with Sam, who plays Jack Kerouac’s alter-ego Sal Paradise, and Kristen Stewart, who plays your teen wife Marylou? 
Sam I feel is, in a way, my brother, my life. And Kristen is, I don’t know if it’d be unfair to say, like, my sister in a way. She’s very much that close. We would punch each other in the shoulder and say, ‘I can’t believe we’re fucking working on On the Road! It’s insane!’ Then we’d snap back and get back to our priorities and our obligations creatively. But, I mean, the wonderful thing about Kristen is that she was so devoted to playing this character. It was as important to her as it was to all of us. And Sal was as important to Sam as it was to each of us. […] Everybody had the same level of devotion no matter if you were in four scenes or forty. It was such a wonderful family to be part of creatively because nobody was going to come to work late. It’s such a rarity.


Did you have any doubts? Was there a little voice in the back of your mind questioning whether an adaptation could really work? 
No, not at all because when I read the script I thought it was so wonderfully done. What Jose [Rivera] had done in terms of capturing some of the most pertinent moments of the story, from the most influential to the most inspirational bits were all in there. And then you’d see other bits of the book that you thought were great and we’d get all those down. I mean, from what we shot in comparison to what’s in the film, there could easily be a six-hour film out there. And the Beat enthusiasts like myself or like a lot of the other people involved on the film, or like a lot of people ranging from San Francisco to all around the world, they would be happy to watch that six-hour film. I think a lot of people that haven’t read the book or have no idea about On the Road are just gonna, you know… I think hopefully they’ll watch it and get the inspiration to get out and drive, the way the book enthused a lot of Beat enthusiasts. 


Why do you think now is the right time to do this adaptation? When Jean-Luc Godard was asked to do it, he left a message for Kerouac saying, ‘There are no new routes in America.’ This is a book about freedom and opportunity, but it feels like those things are curtailed now more than ever. So what can On the Road tell us today? 
I guess for Walter Salles there’s an optimism that says, ‘There are plenty of new routes in America.’ Walter has driven across country twice, interviewing people – film legends like Wim Wenders and all these other cats, family members, Al Hinkle and other guys who were on these journeys, all the wonderful people involved. I think he was so inspired by the book, what it said about American culture, the freedom coming off - not necessarily the freedom, but the ambition of these characters coming off the back of a World War, the way that jazz influenced the story. I think Walter was so inspired by this project that he wanted to share that feeling, that ambition with everyone. It takes someone that’s actually affected by it rather than someone who’s just trying to push for a film to be made. Walter’s been involved with this for over five years, you know? He’s already made a documentary about trying to find this project, where he interviewed everybody I mentioned plus the likes of Sean Penn and Johnny Depp and guys that were potentially going to be involved in the project. He asked them at the end of the day, what they expected from the finished product. The stuff ranged from, ‘I don’t want it to be black-and-white’, ‘I don’t want it to feel like a period piece’, ‘I don’t want it to feel contemporary’, all the way to Sean Penn saying, ‘I would like it to be well acted.’


Do you think that the Beat spirit lives on or has an analogue today? 
No. [But] I think the spirit of freedom and yearning to journey and wanting to get out and breathe and see lands that no other man has seen is such an ongoing compulsion within everybody ranging from the youth all the way to parents that are dealing with work in the morning and kids going to school. Everybody just wants to get up and leave sometimes. I think, within the expression of this, when you’re in your early twenties, everything in life is possible and also, later on, depending on how your mind formulates or depending on what obligations drag you down to slow that. But as long as you’re always motivated and you never lose touch with your wonderment, there’s always going to be something to drive you. And these were guys that, just coming off swing into the jazz era, just coming off wonderful writers like Wolfe and Twain, got into this wonderful Beat feeling. Almost like reading to be heard not to be read, in a way. That’s how much to the beat it was. There was a rhyme to it, there was a rhythm. It was kind of new and now they want to extend those boundaries but there’s no way to extend them but to go out and experience life and to live it to where you could shed that gained knowledge into your work. That’s what this was. It was all about pushing your own ability further. The experience of drugs and sex and music was only to lengthen your own self-encyclopedia of life; to know about not just the world but the solar system, not just the heart but the whole body itself. That’s what I thought was most wonderful. It wasn’t to destroy or to suppress or sedate yourself because of what you were internally going through; it was to expand what you were internally going through. That was the wonderful thing about it, I think. 


Is this how you imagined movie stardom would be when you were nine years old? 
Ha. Fuck. No because, you know, when I was on the farm, none of this ever seemed fathomable; none of it ever seemed reachable. I always think about it in terms of if my parents had stayed together. My parents divorced when I was under a year old, my mom took off. Now, if they were together I probably would have never left the town, everything would have been right there and all right and hunky-dory. But in terms of, the nine or fifteen-year-old me I guess I would have to have that same sense of wanting to achieve my ambitions. I think a lot of people can be driven by what you don’t have and then when you have it, your ambition is sort of redirected in terms of what’s next, instead of, ‘How can I start?’[…] Now, the ambition is redirected towards, ‘How can I enhance? Or how can I go bigger or deeper or more powerful?’ Rather than, ‘How can I start?’ So yeah, I’m sure… I wouldn’t really be able to fathom it if you’d told a nine-year-old me that one day, in about seven years time you’ll read a book called On the Road and the 27-year-old you will have just finished filming the movie adaptation to it, I’d say, maybe, ‘Bullshit, but try me.’ 


What do you love about movies? 

Jesus. Um. What do I love about movies? Right off the top, it’d be the ability to escape. I think Tennessee Williams in The Glass Menagerie captured it the best with Tom Wingfield being able to leave his job at the factory, his mother and his insecure sister to go to the movies and to get away from his own reality. That’s what I’ve found myself doing and I constantly find myself doing. When I want to escape present time troubles and tribulations and trials and joys and vicissitudes, you go to the movies and you get to be away from your present problems.


Source : Huck Magazine.
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Numéro spécial ON THE ROAD par le Magazine HUCK.



HUCK, magazine bi-mensuel spécialisé dans le surf, skate et snowboard a consacré son 35ème numéro à SUR LA ROUTE, ce qui n'est pas sans nous rappeler l'excellente édition spéciale de Little White Lies. Avec sa présentation travaillée, il se situe dans la catégorie magazine de collection pour ceux qui suivent le film Sur la route et s'intéressent à la Beat Generation.





Au programme :

'The Big Beat Debate
Is beat culture still relevant today?
Merry Pranksters
Ken Kesey and the acid tests
Garrett Hedlund
Being Dean Moriarty 
Anywhere Road
Girl skate photo documentary special
Plus...
Underground Vegas
Eric Koston
Forest Sun
Ben Gibbard
Band of Horses





Infos pratiques :

Vous pouvez commander le magazine pour un total de 8.25€ (frais de port compris). Et gros plus pour les moins bilingues d'entre vous : le magazine est également disponible en français.


Via @HUCKmagazine
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