Walter Salles on the road

“To do justice to the book, we sometimes had to diverge from it. A little bit like a jazz-musician who lets go of the melody only to find it all the better later on.” Perfectionist Walter Salles worked on the film adaptation of On the Road with heart and soul. It is one of the most influential books of post-war North-American culture.

In Cannes, On the Road was deemed too light to win any awards. The film, based on the infamous Beat novel by Jack Kerouac is neither spectacular nor unforgettable, but nevertheless compels admiration. With skill, passion, and insight, the Brazilian aesthete and king of road movies Walter Salles has translated the spiritual sex, drugs, jazz, and literature travels of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty into beautiful images.

How old were you when you first read On the Road?
Walter Salles: I must have been eighteen. The 1970s were half over and I was leaving for university. Brazil was still a military dictatorship. This book about being young had an overwhelming impact on me because it makes you think anything is possible. Living life to the full was more important than respecting rules. Drugs and sex could be instruments to understand the world or to heighten the senses. In Brazil, it was impossible just to hit the road – you would soon run into army patrols. But through the book, I was able to travel 
anyway.
How related are On the Road and Diarios de motocicleta, your well-received road movie about the journey that opened Che Guevara’s eyes?
Salles: The films are complementary. They are not explicitly similar, but they do reflect one another. In Diarios de motocicleta, the characters are confronted with an unknown country and population. It is a transformative experience. In On the Road, on the other hand, that change occurs within the group: in the car that is their house. “We were prepared to travel a thousand miles for a good conversation,” Gary Snyder, the Beat Generation poet, once said. They do not travel straight from New York to San Francisco, but make a detour to New Orleans to hear Old Bull Lee (William S. Burroughs) talk about Céline, Mayan codes, or interesting drugs. In their intellectual search, their wandering is different from that of Ernesto and Alberto. The biggest similarity is that in both cases, the turmoil of youth inspires the journey. Both stories are about 18 to 20-year-olds who reject the future that is offered them.

Is the Beat Generation characterised by the will and courage to fearlessly confront malaise?
Salles: They slaked themselves on reality and then adapted it to share it with humanity via books, poems, and songs. That’s how they marked a generation. They conquered the world: an attempt to understand where they were in order to offer something that clashes with the direction society had taken. On the Road was the harbinger of an enormous transformation in forms of expression, literature, music, and poetry. The beatniks predate living theatre, the new journalism of the Village Voice, the comic strips by Jules Feiffer, the humour of Lenny Bruce, and the action painting by Jackson Pollock. They announce an implosion in American culture and the impending dawning of a counter culture. They are the first rustling of movements that clashed with dominant North-American culture in the 1960s. The beatniks were unsatisfied, wanted to search for something else, didn’t know what they would find, slaked themselves on reality only to be able to spit it out.
But the establishment resisted. It took years for On the Road to be published.
Salles: Seven years to be exact. The book was not well-received. Confrere Truman Capote sneered: “This is not literature, this is dactylography.” John Updike ripped it to shreds. According to Gore Vidal, Kerouac and Ginsberg were not authors of significance. Critics were divided. The book elicited strong reactions. By the 1970s and 1980s, however, it was almost impossible to find in bookshops. Kerouac was hardly read anymore. Over the last fifteen years, interest has grown again. Two other films were made based on Kerouac’s work. Just think of Big Sur. Where does this renewed interest come from? I think Kerouac’s work, especially On the Road and Visions of Cody, testify to the need to live life to the fullest and to ignore strictures, and to try and push boundaries others impose. The culture of fear was as suffocating under President Bush as it was during the McCarthy era. The oeuvre was ahead of its time, and is now in sync with our own reality.
I was not surprised to see that Kristen Stewart can act, but Garrett Hedlund did surprise me. How did you end up casting the actor from the dull movie Tron?
Salles: The casting was done six years ago. Garrett Hedlund was one of the first to audition. He came straight from his farm in Minnesota; he’d had to take one bus after the other and had spent the night in nude bars. After two brilliant readings, he asked to submit a text about On the Road. We were struck dumb by his insights. He also made pertinent remarks about
wandering and the insecurity of youth.
Kristen Stewart was a lucky break. I ran into Gustavo Santaolalla, the composer of Diarios de motocicleta, and Alejandro Iñárritu, who had just seen the first edit of Into the Wild by Sean Penn. They claimed to have found my Marylou – a young actress I had never heard of: Kristen Stewart. I met her and she told me that she kept On the Road on her nightstand and that she knew Marylou intimately.

To hard core fans, On the Road is not just another book but a Bible.
Salles: We were all connected by passion. We didn’t care about audience numbers, we just wanted to transfer our passion for the book onto film reels. Without passion, it is impossible to survive a hundred thousand kilometres. Cities have become trivialised in the US. The centres are dead. Little communities have formed in the margins, but they are all identical. The “McDonald’s- and Wall-Mart-isation” of the architecture and geography of the US forced us to spend a long time looking for good locations. A small group of us travelled the whole route together so that in the spirit of Kerouac, we could look for the last boundary. Either consciously or subconsciously, the characters in the book are looking for what remains of the American dream. On the Road is about the end of the road and the end of territorial expansion. What still remains to be discovered? That is the big question. Jorge Luis Borges thought literature interesting when it named things that were not yet named. Those young writers and poets took to the road to find the as yet unfound.
 Sal makes notes of everything. Is there still land to be discovered? Are there still stories to be told? These questions are more relevant now than ever.

On the Road ●●●
US, 2012, dir.: Walter Salles, act.: Garrett Hedlund, Sam Riley, Kristen Stewart, 140 min.