For decades people have said Jack Kerouac’s On The Road is unfilmable, but that hasn’t stopped people trying, most notably Francis Ford Coppola, who’s held the rights for decades, but has only now gotten the movie off the ground, with him producing and Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) directing.
A couple of months ago the cast started to fill out, with Garrett Hedlund (Tron Legacy) as Dean Moriarty, the wild travelling companion of the book’s narrator, Sal Paradise, to be played by Sam Riley (Control). Kristen Stewart meanwhile will be Mary Lou, the young first wife of Moriarty, while Kirsten Dunst is Camille, who eventually became his second wife.
Now, with filming getting underway on Monday in Canada, Deadline reports that Amy Adams and Viggo Mortensen have signed up to bring a bit of an older perspective to the film. Adams will play Jane, the emotionally damaged junkie mother of two children and the wife of Old Bull Lee, who’ll be played by Mortensen. Interestingly Bull Lee and Jane are analogues for Naked Lunch author William S. Burroughs and his future wife, Joan (who he incidentally accidentally shot and killed in 1951), who shared an apartment with Kerouac in the mid 40s.
While it’s still uncertain whether an On The Road movie can work, or if the younger cast members have what it takes to bring the beat book to life, Adam and Mortensen are interesting additions, so we’ll just have to see how the film pans out when it hits cinemas next year.