Today’s interview is from MovieFill.com with British playwright and screenwriter Joe Penhall, who adapted the Cormac McCarthy novel “The Road” for its screen treatment. Here is an excerpt from the interview:

Q: Can you talk about your first reactions reading the book and some of the challenges of bringing it to a visual medium?

Penhall: I read the book very late at night, in a hurry, and uh … the last kind of twenty pages really sort of moved me to um … to tears cause it wasn’t long after my own dad had died, weirdly in a very similar way. Not in a post-apocalypse landscape but of a lung condition. So … some of the things that were said in that final exchange were uncannily similar, and the rest of the book I just thought was extraordinarily adventurous in its … proposition. You know, when the end comes, it’s going to be very convincing so I was hooked immediately, and then when I wrote it a similar thing happened: I found it very exciting to write, because some of those propositions are just mind blowing, and, embarrassingly, when I wrote the last fifteen pages I was again quite teary and it was the same when I watched what Viggo was doing with it. So it was a great thing to do, it felt very pure, and was from the heart as well as being intellectually challenging and exciting, which is always what you want when you are doing the work, something that genuinely stretches you.

We’ve talked previously about the importance of a writer having some sort of emotional connection to the story they want to write. Clearly Penhall had one with The Road. Here is the trailer for the movie:

The Road opens this weekend. If you’ve seen the movie, please weigh in with your thoughts about it in comments.