Nick Cave and Warren Ellis on The Road

By Georgie Rogers
6 Music News reporter

Cave & Ellis penned the soundtrack to The Assassination of Jesse James

Nick Cave and bandmate Warren Ellis of The Bad Seeds are behind the soundtrack to the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's acclaimed novel, The Road.

The movie stars Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee as a father and son, journeying through a post-apocalyptic world.

Director John Hillcoat revealed it was a unanimous decision to get Cave and Ellis on board to write the score.

"We didn't want a big, orchestrated, heavy soundtrack," he said.

"It would weigh the movie down. It needed to be almost slight, dare I say it," explained the director, who worked with the pair on his previous film, The Proposition - which Cave also scripted.

The Road hit UK screens last Friday (8 January) and follows the protagonists in a desolate landscape of cannibalism, 10 years after an unnamed cataclysm has destroyed civilisation.

'Earth in turmoil'

Multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, of The Dirty Three, Grinderman and The Bad Seeds, described how the soundtrack worked with the film's story.

"One side of the music should support this beautiful story between the father and son and the other side that we wanted was the earth in turmoil - this constant feeling of 'it's falling to pieces,'" he told BBC 6 Music.

"We had two very different types of music going on."

Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee embrace in The Road

However, despite the film's bleak tone, Hillcoat said the soundtrack needed a light touch: "It didn't need to be overwrought and big and important, it would have made the material pretentious.

"We talked about the fear stuff, which is something these guys can do in a nanosecond, with their eyes closed, because they are very adventurous with sound, disturbing sounds.

"Yet, there's the beauty and the lightness as a counterpoint, which was also needed."

"There's a looseness to it," he said, of Cave and Ellis's technique. "There's a kind of intuitive, instinctual quality."

Turning to his next soundtrack project, Warren Ellis was a bit coy, but said he would definitely be keen to work with Cave again.

"We don't have anything concrete at the moment but there's offers coming in and we just take them one at a time," he said.

"Hopefully there will be something else next year."

McCarthy's book was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006.