First Look: The Road

Dimension Films has released new production photos for John Hillcoat's upcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Road in USA Today.

Academy Award nominee Viggo Mortensen, Academy Award winners Robert Duvall and Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce and 12-year-old Kodi Smit McPhee star in the the story of a man (Mortensen) and his young son (Smit-McPhee) traveling through a desperate, post-apocalyptic world. The flap jacket on the book describes the setting as "burned America".

"Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other."

And where do you find this post-apocalyptic burned America? In Pittsburgh of course. Hillcoat didn't want to go the CGI route, and instead found abandoned coal fields, a deserted amusement park and an 8-mile stretch of closed freeway (some of which is seen above) in and around Pittsburgh. The photos look fanatically bleak.

The Road is scheduled to hit theaters in New York and Los Angeles in mid November and expand on November 26th 2008.