The Brag

On The Road
A Friendship For The Ages
By Alasdair Duncan

Jack Kerouac’s On The Road is a classic novel of two friends taking a road trip across 1940s America. A thinly veiled work of autobiography, it chronicles Kerouac’s meetings with counterculture figures, like William S Burroughs, and his adventures with sex and mind-altering substances. When young British actor Sam Riley (Control) was approached to play Kerouac stand-in Sal in Walter Salles’ film adaptation of the novel, he was nervous – mostly because he had never actually read it before. “I think it was ruined for me,” admits Riley. “I had friends who read it at the appropriate age, in their late teens, but I had never tried. I could see the attraction of the story and the characters, but at the same time, I was thinking, ‘Oh fuck, how am I going to do this?’ It kind of spoiled it.”

Before he began shooting, Walter Salles made sure that he completely immersed his cast in the culture of the ‘40s, gathering them together in what he called a “Beatnik Bootcamp”. Riley attended, along with his co-stars Garrett Hedlund and Kristen Stewart, and while he admits to being a little apprehensive at first, he quickly found himself caught up in the experience. “It was an educational process; it was a school where we learned everything about the time, and met a lot of people from the era,” he says. “We had biographers come along, and heard interviews that had never been heard before with some of the real-life people involved. We listened to bebop and learned to dance to it, watched movies from the era … in between dialogue lessons, typewriting lessons and French Canadian lessons. It was an insane program, really!”

For Riley, the language proved to be one of the most challenging aspects of the film. The character Sal, much like Kerouac himself, is of French Canadian background, whereas Riley is a native of Yorkshire, and has the thick accent to prove it. Playing Sal meant that not only did he have to learn an accent alien to him, he also had to sound convincing in a completely foreign language. “Walter wanted me to be able to improvise,” he explains. “So it’s one thing learning a line verbatim in another accent, but if someone says something to you and you have to spontaneously come up with something, you have to be as up on the dialect as you can. We had an expert with us all the time to help with certain aspects of the dialogue. At one point, I said ‘hey man’ to someone, and she said that people didn’t actually say ‘hey’ until 1950 or something. It was bizarre.”

On The Road was a document of Jack Kerouac’s travels across America, and in making the film and travelling to various locations, Riley found himself caught up in a similar journey. “Walter calculated how many thousand miles we travelled over the course of the film – I can’t remember how many exactly, but it was a lot,” he says. “We started in Montreal, and then we flew to the southernmost tip of Argentina to shoot some stuff in real snow, then we went to Louisiana, Arizona, Mexico, back up to the east coast and Canada, then back to Montreal, and finished in San Francisco. It was great because I’d never really seen America, outside of the big cities when I’d been doing press tours for films. My character was seeing America for the first time, and I was seeing it for the first time, and that was a real help. It was fascinating and fun.”

Many of the film’s key road scenes take place in a classic Hudson automobile, one of two such cars that Salles procured for the film. “Garrett did most of the driving, but he actually bought his own Hudson before we started, so he was great with vintage cars,” Riley says. “I only had a couple of chances to drive it, in Mexico, which I enjoyed very much. My character was meant to be driving drunk and there were no stunt drivers [there], so I was fish-tailing this car down the street with a little kid in the back.” Needless to say, the film’s insurers may not have been particularly thrilled with some of these on-set antics. “I remember at one point, one of the stunt drivers told us we’d never get a wheel-spin out of a Hudson,” Riley says. “So Garrett stepped in and fucking did one immediately himself! He was fantastic.”

Riley speaks glowingly of his co-star Hedlund, and it seems the two developed a very close friendship on set. “They had him locked in for the part of Dean, and tested a lot of other actors to play Sal, but I think one of the reasons I got the part was that we got on very well the first time we met,” he says. “We had rapport with one another, which was lucky, really, because we came from such different places – he’s a Minnesota farm boy, I’m a lanky Yorkshireman. It could have been a disaster because, you know, young actors can be egocentric and competitive and try to push themselves forward at everyone else’s expense, but he’s not like that at all. We got on quite well, and I’d love to work with him again. We used to joke that we’d make good partners in a buddy cop movie, but I think we’ll be mates forever.”

What: On The Road is in cinemas Thursday September 27