‘The Road’ ends on the North Coast

Published 5:00 pm Sunday, May 18, 2008

Cloudy conditions that dominate the North Coast’s skyline much of the year provided the perfect doom-and-gloom backdrop for filming “The Road” last week.

“The sun is the enemy in our film, as far as cinematography goes in trying to create that post-apocalyptic world,” publicist Emma Cooper said Thursday, as the crew finished four days working on the beach at Fort Stevens State Park in Warrenton and in a nearby warehouse. Filming will wrap in Portland early next week.

Starring Viggo Mortensen (“Lord of the Rings” trilogy, 2007’s “Eastern Promises,” 2005’s “A History of Violence”) and Academy Award-winner Charlize Theron, “The Road” follows a father and son as they journey across a post-apocalyptic American landscape in search of the ocean. The movie was adapted from author Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name.

The main characters are some of the only survivors in a world turned barren by an unspecified cataclysmic event and clouded with dusty ash. Aside from lawless, cannibalistic gangs, they encounter few refugees on their trek.

In scenes shot in the Astoria-Warrenton area, “This will be the first time the man and boy see the ocean,” Cooper said.

After spending months filming in Pennsylvania then in devastated areas around New Orleans, there were plenty of options for beach locations, said Buddy Enright, unit production manager. He helped select the Fort Stevens location during an October scouting trip, drawn by the vast shoreline and overcast weather conditions as well as the skeletal remains of the Peter Iredale shipwreck.

“We had a lot of choices all over America, and we found this one,” he said, adding that the beach’s “big scope, and the ocean and the climate conditions, which are generally overcast, made it something we could count on for our production value.”

“The tone of the picture is very gray and very overcast,” Enright said. “There are no bright, sunny days. We knew that the Oregon Coast, especially in winter and spring, had a lot of cloud cover. So does western Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh, a reason we selected that area as well.”

The beach was “dressed” with debris and waste, he explained, because “there’s basically nothing left living.”

“The idea is it’s the end of days. Anything in the ocean has washed up.”

When sun broke through the North Coast’s clouds Wednesday evening, the 125-person crew moved Thursday’s operations to a nearby warehouse to shoot indoors.

Enright said they had a lot of help with accommodations from the Astoria-Warrenton Area Chamber of Commerce and from local hotels and restaurants, which sometimes stayed open late to accommodate the film company’s schedules. Crew members stayed at the Hotel Elliott, the Cannery Pier Hotel, the Holiday Inn Express and the Red Lion Inn, and chamber staff helped them track down everything from laundromats and gas stations to compressed air.

In addition, water rescue teams stayed on hand during filming in case anyone ran into trouble in the ocean. State parks employees closed off part of the beach, so crews didn’t have to constantly rake sand to cover up tire tracks from cars.

“The crew is so happy here; we’ve had a long journey,” Enright said. “The community has been really great, very supportive. Having that kind of local presence is so important for strangers. It takes a long time to get up to speed if you don’t have someone helping you.”

Local movie buff Jerry Olson has witnessed a lot of productions filmed in the area, most recently when he checked out the Fort Stevens activity Wednesday evening.

He said the combination of rain and gradually rising temperatures had created a perfect haze offshore: “It looked like a pretty good scene to me.”

But there’s no way to know whether the North Coast imagery will make it through the film’s final stages of production, Olson said.

Sets throughout the region were mostly cut from “Into the Wild,” filmed in 2006, and several scenes filmed here never made it to the big screen in the “Ring II.”

With “The Road,” Olson said, “Hopefully we’ll get in the movie.”