How director Walter Salles filmed the unfilmable: A racy adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’
ARNOLD WAYNE JONES| Life+Style Editor
Almost all Beat Movement literature is not adaptable to any form other than its original, precisely because the nature of Beat is about rhythm and mood and place, more than narrative or structure. Allen Ginsberg’s revolution prosey poem Howl recreates the feverdream of drug addiction and the emotional reaction of those touched by it — how to you keep the language and put the experience on film?
And so it has been with Jack Kerouac’s “unfilmable” masterpiece, the hipster chronicle On the Road, written without paragraph breaks on a continuous scroll in 1951 as a stream-of-consciousness riff on Beatnik culture. It commemorates the choppy, slackerish adventures of aspiring writer Sal Paradise and his charismatic friend, the iconic anti-hero Dean Moriarty (avatars for Kerouac himself and friend Neal Cassady) and their travels (often sexual) across post-war America.
But it took Walter Salles — the Brazilian-born director of The Motorcycle Diaries and Central Station — to find a way of adapting a book no one else has been able to.
“I was confronted with a similar problem adapting Motorcycle Diaries,” he says in a phone interview. “It was a book I loved when I first read it in the mid-‘70s in Brazil, back when there was censorship of art. The characters were in search of all forms of freedom, and they became very emblematic of what we were doing ourselves.”
Love of the source material is one thing; resolving the storytelling hurdles in a way that made narrative sense while staying true to the book was another. So just how did a foreign-born director and writer find the solution to that most American of books?
“I didn’t feel ready to jump into this immediately when we first discussed it [in 2004],” he says. “We criss-crossed the country for five years and met with the people who [inspired the character] that were still alive, as well as Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure. It was so inspiring, understanding the cultural and social background that fed the story and the complexities of the characters and how they could eventually become film characters. Jose Rivera [took on] an impressionist structure [with the screenplay], adding layer by layer, not following a traditional three-act format. It took 20 drafts before we reached the end — altogether, eight years.”
Salles added a jazz underscore that carries the narrative along like a surfboard following the undulations of a wave.
“I was impacted by the jazz-infused quality of the text. Music is suggested directly by Kerouac, but we had to create a soundtrack that could match the music that had been composed in the late ‘40s — the kind that was decades ahead of its time.” Salles explains. He hired Oscar winner Gustavo Santaolalla (Brokeback Mountain) to score the film with jazz great Charlie Hayden.
“They would riff on themes Gustavo had written for hours,” Salles says. “I wish I had recorded those sessions. It’s hard to describe in words, where the jazzman and his instrument were one. This frail old man because a giant once the instrument was in his hands. It was really quite remarkable.”
During the time they were writing the script, Salles even cobbled together a wish-list of actors he wanted to work with, getting commitments from them as long as five years before filming started. That’s how hot commodities like Kristen Stewart, Garrett Hedlund and Amy Adams all ended up in this low-budget indie film, which opens today at the Magnolia. And what about the presence of Steve Buscemi?
“I believe no independent film can be made without Steve Buscemi,” Salles deadpans. “We said to him, ‘Pick your role — whatever you’d like to play.’ I thought he picked the perfect Steve Buscemi choice [that of a car salesman anxious to have sex with Hedlund’s Moriarty]. In shooting the dialogue that proceeds the scene where Dean and he are in bed, Steve was so hysterically funny that I could not stop laughing and kept ruining the take. Then the whole crew started to laugh at the same time.” But Salles got the ultimate in indie approval from Buscemi. “He said, ‘Don’t worry — the Coen Brothers do that all the time.’”
That scene, though, is hardly the only one with gay sex in On the Road — the film is filled with them … more, even, than fans of the book might recall. But that wasn’t exploitive, Salles says — it was authentic to the nth degree.
“We had access to the scroll version — the original manuscript — in 2004 and 2005, three years before it was published for its 50th anniversary edition in 2007,” Salles confides. “The original version by Kerouac is way rawer and sexually daring that the tamer version published by Penguin. That’s the one we were faithful to.”
Salles himself was struck by the nonjudgmental quality of Sam, the narrator. “Most of the time he is talking about acts that were extremely daring for the times and relaying them without adding commentary. This, for me, is very contemporary as well and what we tried to do.”
It did not require any convincing to get Hedlund — a rising young star whose sun-dried, caramel baritone and easy sexuality light the screen on fire — to go all the way in exploring that side of Dean.
“Garrett was so enamored by the role — he understood it so well that for him, doing those scenes was just the way to be faithful to the inherent freedom Dean represented. Dean is the ignitor of the story, the young man who leads the others into territories they never would have explored if he hadn’t been there. Garrett understood that perfectly. He also understood the importance of breaking those frontiers then and expanding on those frontiers today. He’s a very free-spirited, informed, articulate guy. He did all those scenes with the same abandonment and freedom. It was quite moving to see that. Sometimes when you are doing scenes like those, you may bump into actors who are inhibited — he wasn’t at all. Even during [screen] tests he would go quite far into that territory.”
It’s that freedom that comes through in On the Road and give us — finally — a film that matches its original without missing a Beat.
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition March 22, 2013.