Cast sit down to talk about 'The Road'

(8 Mar 2011) STORYLINE: Venice, 3 September 2009 30 mins approx 1. Sitdown interview with scriptwriter Joe Penhall 2. Wide shot Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee arrive 3. Mid-shot Kodi Smit-McPhee 4. Mid shot Viggo Mortensen signing autograph 5. Various, Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee posing for photographs 6. Sitdown interview with Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee including the following soundbites: Mortensen: "I did think a lot about my son and in fact there's a lot of qualities that Kodi has that reminded me of my son, who's now 21, when he was Kodi's age, and it reminded me to some degree of the character that Kodi was playing. Someone who has a rich fantasy life and who, to some degree, has to be self sufficient emotionally and wise beyond his years, like that. But after a while it wasn't about my son or about us being blood relatives in the story it was just about two people spending all their time together and getting along sometimes and sometimes not getting along, right?" Mortensen - on the hardest part of filming: (to Smit-McPhee) "What was the hardest stuff, what was the stuff that it helped to be friends on, you know?" Kodi Smit-McPhee: "The hardest stuff was the water, the coldness that was really bad. But also like you said before, how we, the cold weather helped us because you were supposed to act like you were cold and it wasn't that hard because it was freezing but by the time it got a bit warmer you had to remember what it was like when it was cold, and that was a little bit difficult." Viggo Mortensen - on changes in personality during filming: "I do think that there's something that happens that you can't explain scientifically where, what you want to happen, what your mind focuses on will take you there. To some degree it just happened, that I became actually weaker as we were shooting. It was a strange thing and I didn't necessarily notice that I was eating less or anything, I became what I needed to be and think there is something to that, the power of suggestion, auto-suggestion, you can get there sometimes. Like when you had to do emotional scenes that were difficult you just put your mind in the right place." Smit-McPhee: "For me it was a diet of cheetos and matte." Mortensen: "That was pretty much it. And chocolate" Smit-McPhee: "And chocolate, because of him. He brought chocolate to the set, like a whole bag, every day. Dark chocolate, mostly, " Mortensen: "I had to, because we ate the whole bag everyday didn't we?" 6. Sitdown interview with director John Hillcoat including the following soundbites: "It's essentially a love story between a father and son and it's set in a very extreme world and very extreme circumstances. So it taps into our deepest fears about dying, about the planet dying, it does this fantastic balancing act between a big epic vision and very intimate personal truthful kind of character journey. " FURTHER RESTRICTIONS: NONE 0 USED FOR STORIES # :618449 TAPE FORMAT: DVCAM Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork Twitter:   / ap_archive   Facebook:   / aparchives   ​​ Instagram:   / apnews   You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/you...