The Long Road

It's like familiar 18-year-olds' rite-of-passage: reading On The Road. And so it went for Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles, on whom Jack Kerouac's beat generation landmark left a “profound impression”, given how it contradicted with life under a military rule in 1974 Brazil. “What it talked about was the exact reverse angle of what we were living,” he recalls. “I was immediately taken by those characters, who were seeking different forms of freedom. I'd never seen a narrative where sex and drugs could be tools to expand our understanding of the world.”

Yet, even as he became a filmmaker, “the book was so emblematic to me that the idea of adapting it for screen never occurred to me.” Then in 2004, American Zoetrope, Francis Ford Coppola's studio, approached Salles aboutdoing just that, the company having optioned the book in 1979, and had been searching since for someone to adapt it. Salles had just come off making The Motorcycles Diaries, a rousing road-movie tracing Ernest Guevara's coming-of-age trip across the South American continent on his way to becoming Ché.

The link makes sense, these twin bildungsroman travelogues both being about iconic symbols of 20th century counter-culture. “They're both about the transitions from youth to adulthood, and all of the pain and discoveries and exhilaration that comes with,” Salles explains. “They're also about the initial steps of what would eventually become a cultural or socio-political revolution. They're about that moment before the eruption, about what's boiling under the surface, about to explode.”

Yet, when approached about making On The Road, Salles initially baulked. He was fresh, as pointed out, from the “insanity” of The Motorycle Diaries' 30,000km journey, which went from 20 degree temperatures in Patagonia to 47 in the Peruvian Amazon, and unsure of tackling a text that meant so much to him. So, instead, he made the documentary Searching For On The Road, a simultaneous study of the book and its possible adaptation, which featured interviews with beat-era poets like Michael McClure, Diane Di Prima and Amiri Baraka, and travelled the text's journeys three times over.

After returning to his native Brazil to make 2008's Linhe De Passe, Salles finally set out to adapt Kerouac's “jazz and bebop-influenced” writing, where improvisation and intuition create abstract, expressive rhythms in text. “It has this freeform quality that is very difficult to translate to screen,” Salles admits. “It is anything but a traditional narrative, with these arcs that are very identifiable.”

The film finds Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund as the leads, with the supporting cast filled with an array of notable names: Kristen Stewart, Amy Adams, Kirsten Dunst, Elisabeth Moss, Steve Buscemi and Viggo Mortensen. It became a sizeable production — a $25mil budget — due to its two huge logistical hurdles: this a late-'40s/early-'50s period piece that is about journeying into the American frontier, a frontier which, in the 2010s, no longer exists. “There's been a homogenisation of the geography, and that obliges you to go further,” Salles says. “If you just stick to the highways, you drive for a thousand miles just to find the exact same food chains and Wal-Marts that you saw when you left. You have to take the backroads and go further into the hinterlands, to find places that haven't been touched by the brands yet.”

Opening nationally Thursday 27 September