CANNES, France, May 23, (Agencies): Fifty-five years after its publication, Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” is finally burning on the big screen.
Everyone from Marlon Brando to Jean-Luc Godard to Brad Pitt has circled the classic 1957 novel over the last six decades, but Walter Salles’ adaptation is the first to actually get made. The wait isn’t for lack of desire: Kerouac passionately wanted to see his book made a film, even writing Brando a letter promising that he could turn the book’s lyrical road trips into a “movie-type structure.”
“On the Road” premiered Wednesday at the Cannes Film Festival, far away from the American roads crisscrossed by Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, the characters modeled on Kerouac and Neal Cassady, respectively.
“Unless you revive it by rereading it, re-imagining it, performing it, it’s a dead thing,” said Viggo Mortensen, who plays the William S. Burroughs character in the film. “You have to reread it to make it live again.”
The pun is inevitable: It has been a long road for “On the Road.” Though there was interest in a Hollywood adaptation as soon as it was published, nothing came of various negotiations and attempted screenplays. Francis Ford Coppola purchased the novel’s rights in 1979, and he, too, failed to grasp an interpretation.

Released
It’s his son, the director Roman Coppola, who’s producing “On the Road,” which is being released in various international countries over the next few months, with a US release prepared for late fall by IFC Films and Sundance Selects.
The Brazilian director Salles became involved after making another road movie: 2004’s “The Motorcycle Diaries,” which chronicled a South American trip by a young Che Guevara. The “On the Road” screenplay is also by the writer of “The Motorcycle Diaries,” Jose Rivera.
Both films, Salles said in a press conference for the film Wednesday, are about “a social and political awakening.”
“It’s about the search of that last frontier that they will never find,” Salles said. “It’s about also discovering that this is the end of the road and the end of the American dream.”
Much of the problem in adapting “On the Road” is its meandering narrative in which Paradise (played by Sam Riley) and Moriarty make a series of cross-country road trips in post-World War II America, where their intellectual, passionate bohemian ways (and copious amounts of cigarettes, booze and marijuana) sometimes clash with a more conservative society. There are many girls along the way, who are played by Kristen Stewart, Kirsten Dunst, Elisabeth Moss and Alice Braga.

“On the Road” gets the group’s passionate, carnal camaraderie, but it struggles more (as was perhaps inevitable) to capture the white hot pulse of Kerouac’s book, which was famously written in three weeks on a long scroll (though that story underestimates Kerouac’s earlier notebook writing).
Kerouac writes: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.”
“Those characters in the book had the courage to experience everything in the flesh,” said Salles.
But to make the early days of the Beat Generation (Tom Sturridge plays the Allen Ginsberg character) alive again, Salles went to great lengths for realism. He spent five years making an unreleased documentary on the book and says the entire process of making the film covered nearly 100,000 kilometers (more than 62,000 miles).

Inspiration
Descendants of the book’s real-life inspirations were also consulted and Salles held a four-week “boot camp” for the cast before starting shooting in Montreal to soak up Beat history. Stewart, who plays Moriarty’s girlfriend Marylou, says she poured over audio tapes of Luanne Henderson, her character’s inspiration, and met with Henderson’s daughter.
“I genuinely felt like I could look up in a moment where I wasn’t getting somewhere or a moment where I was feeling like I was reaching too hard or too desperately,” said Stewart. “I felt her. And I would have never had that without her daughter or those tapes.”
Whether “On the Road,” the film, will seem as relevant to audiences now remains to be seen. Mortensen suggested the story bears particular contemporary resonance in a time of youthful protests over the economic collapse and in the Arab Spring.
Said Mortensen: “I think it was worth the wait.”

Holy cow. The most rapturous audience reception at the Cannes Film Festival has gone to “Holy Motors,” a disorienting, whirling dream of a movie by French director Leos Carax.
Starring Denis Lavant as a man who adopts a dozen wildly different personas during the course of a long Paris day, the film includes surrealist scenes, tender moments, a song by pop star Kylie Minogue and the unexpected appearance of bonobo monkeys.
The film, which has its red-carpet gala on Wednesday, drew whoops and cheers at the end of its first press screening — but left other baffled viewers shaking their heads.
“This is what we have all come to Cannes for,” said The Guardian newspaper’s ecstatic five-star review. Screen International was less impressed, judging the film “a self-conscious upmarket weird-out.”
“Holy Motors” is Carax’ first feature since the experimental romance “Pola X,” which screened at Cannes in 1999, to equally divided opinion. “Holy Motors” is one of 22 films competing for the festival’s Palme d’Or.

It’s a dramatic return — but don’t ask Carax what he wants the public to take away from the film.
“I don’t know. Who is the public? All I know is that it is a bunch of people who will be dead very soon,” said the director, waving an unlit cigarette at a Cannes press conference. “I don’t make public films, I make private films.”
Minogue ventured that the film is about “how we present ourselves in the world in different moments.”
It also brims with scenes that evoke other movies, from horror film “Eyes Without a Face” to “Blade Runner.” Asked if it was partly a film about the history of cinema, Carax said: “Every film is.”
Carax said he “conjured this (film) up out of my imagination” for Denis Lavant, who has been appearing in the director’s films since the 1980s.
In “Holy Motors,” Lavant portrays, among other characters, a beggar woman, a dying old man, a knife-wielding killer and a filthy gnome dragging a supermodel (Eva Mendes) through the city’s sewers.

Comedy
Cannes veteran Ken Loach brought the rain-soaked Riviera a burst of sunshine Tuesday — and jolted a few consciences along the way — with a bittersweet comedy about whisky, kilts and the scourge of joblessness.
The 75-year-old Loach, who took the Palme d’Or in 2006 for “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” about Ireland’s independence struggle, is back with an 11th film in competition, a record for the Riviera festival.
“The Angel’s Share,” set in Glasgow, tells the story of Robbie, a jobless youth from a broken home stuck in a rut of violent behaviour, who sets out to change his ways after his girlfriend gives birth to a baby boy.
Sentenced to community service for a vicious assault, Robbie — played by the street-cast Glaswegian Paul Brannigan — is set to work under the benevolent eye of Big Harry, who introduces him and his motley crew of young offenders to the art of whisky-tasting.
When Robbie discovers he has a nose for the peaty, smoky, spicy aromas of a fine malt, he lands on a way to break out of a dead-end life, and prove he can be a worthy father.
Despite the backdrop of poverty, hopelessness and violence, Loach drew delighted laughs at a press preview of the film — brightening a mood dragged down by days of unseasonable rain — ahead of its evening red-carpet screening.
“If you want to tell the truth about people, you’ve got to have a smile in there,” the director told AFP in an interview.

“These are very dark times, obviously for most people across Europe, for a lot of young people particularly, because of the mass unemployment and no prospect of living a secure life,” he said.
But in bringing the lives of poor, jobless Glasgow kids to the screen, Loach and his screenwriter Paul Laverty also “wanted to break the stereotype that poverty equals misery.”
“Spend some time with them and you spend your time laughing, because they are funny, and they are witty, and they are surprising. And what a waste for that generation.”
Through the whisky storyline — which sees Robbie and his dropout chums don highlander kilts to blend in at a prized whisky auction — Loach skewers the social inequalities in modern-day Britain.
“There is a lot of pretension about whisky, like there is about wine,” he said. “People will pay huge amounts for a rare whisky, which shows there is colossal wealth set against grinding poverty.
More broadly, Loach has fun pitting tourist cliches about Scotland — the whisky, shortbread and kilts — against “the reality, which is pretty harsh.”
While researching the film, screenwriter Laverty met Brannigan, its young star, at a community centre in Glasgow and approached him for the part.
The 25-year-old told a Cannes press conference the film had saved his life.

Carefree
Hollywood star Kristen Stewart said Wednesday that after the “Twilight” vampire movies, she had thrown herself into the carefree sexuality of her new role in the Cannes contender “On the Road”.
Stewart, 22, said that after Twilight’s innocent Bella, baring it all as the uninhibited Marylou for giddy depictions of free love in the screen adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s classic novel had been a breath of fresh air.
“I love pushing, I love scaring myself. I think to watch genuine experience on screen is just so much more interesting,” the Los Angeles-born star told reporters.
“The reason I wanted to do the job is because, you know, you read something, you’re provoked on some level and then it’s just taking that further and being able to live it and I always want to get as close to the experience as I possibly can.

“As long as you’re always being really honest, there’s nothing ever to be ashamed of.”
“On the Road”, Kerouac’s autobiographical tale about his wandering years in the late 1940s and early 1950s, presents his alter ego Sal Paradise, who is mesmerised by a charismatic drifter called Dean Moriarty.
Stewart, who also appeared in Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild”, plays Moriarty’s free-spirited and outspoken wife who becomes his long-time mistress after they divorce while she carries on dalliances with Paradise and others.
“Obviously I love Marylou — the character is very vivid and she jumps right off the page, she smacks you in the face, you know, with her tongue,” she said.
She noted that the women in the story get more attention in the film than in the novel and said that one can see Marylou, who leaves the carousing Moriarty to marry a sailor, as the picture’s central figure.

Debut
“Don’t give up the day job” was the critics’ blunt message to British rocker Pete Doherty, whose debut film role in 19th century love story “Confession of a Child of the Century” has had its premiere at the Cannes festival.
Based on an autobiographical novel by Alfred de Musset about his affair with writer George Sand, Doherty’s casting in the lead role makes plenty of sense.
The character he plays is a Parisian libertine living the wild life, mirroring the Babyshambles and Libertines frontman’s own history of alcohol and drug abuse.
In Britain he was a frequent fixture on the tabloid front pages due to his run-ins with the law and on-off relationship with supermodel Kate Moss.
French director Sylvie Verheyde had those similarities in mind when she cast Doherty in the English-language period drama, in which he stars alongside French actress Charlotte Gainsbourg.
“He (Doherty) was the figure of the poet now, like Musset was a figure of a romantic poet at this time,” she told Reuters in an interview. “Just like Musset, he has this share of innocence and debauchery.”
Doherty, whose character Octave is a disaffected, world-weary dandy wearing top hat, tails and a cane, said he had no hesitation in accepting the role.

“I couldn’t not do it, really,” he told Reuters in Cannes.
“Things come along in your life, where it’s a certain melody, or a certain person and you can’t not be involved because you regret it and you’ll be sorry and you’d be really jealous if someone else does it.”
Performance
Most critics in Cannes, where the film screened in the “Un Certain Regard” section for up-and-coming directors, did not spare the 33-year-old’s feelings.
“Based on his debut performance ... the Libertines and Babyshambles singer shouldn’t even think of giving up his day job,” wrote Megan Lehmann in the Hollywood Reporter trade magazine, apportioning some of the blame to the director.
Baz Bamigboye, writing in the Daily Mail newspaper, opined: “Pete Doherty was collared for possessing ... cocaine ... now he has been done at the Cannes Film Festival for not being in possession of any acting talent.”

Gerard Butler is at the Cannes Film Festival, but he’s avoiding the famous red-carpeted stairs.
The Scottish actor was sitting on a yacht in the Rivera harbor Sunday, ready to chat about his upcoming revenge thriller, “Motor City.”
Shooting starts in September, and Butler is about to start “beefing up” for the role.
He says he won’t be seeing any of the movies premiering at Cannes because he doesn’t want to upstage the other actors.
Butler says: “You can’t really go down other people’s press lines. You have to make sure you’re politically correct. It’s a bit of a bummer.”
“Motor City” will be directed by Albert Hughes and co-stars Gary Oldman.
Who cares about the audience? They’ll soon all be dead anyway, French auteur Leos Carax told Cannes without a blush on Wednesday, saying he makes his films for himself.
“Who is the public? All I know is it’s a bunch of people who will be dead very soon,” the director replied when asked for some clues to understanding his film “Holy Motors,” one of 22 racing for the festival’s Palme d’Or top prize.

“I don’t make public films, I make private films,” Carax told a press conference in English. “I’ll let whoever wants come and see it.”
Dubbed both “heartbreaking” and “completely bonkers” by reviewers at the Riviera festival, Carax’s experimental parable on life’s futility, co-starring Kylie Minogue and Eva Mendes, has shot to the front of the Cannes race.
Starring French actor Denis Lavant in no fewer than 11 roles, the visually powerful film tells of a man who slips actor-like between shifting identities, in a succession of tableaux alternately wacky, serious and moving.
It notably features a flame-haired troll carting off a fashion model played by Mendes to his underground den, a duo in motion-capture suits miming a sex scene, and an intermission by a band of jamming accordionists.
Asked for the meaning of the troll sequence — which sees the grunting, goateed imp clothe Mendes in a makeshift burqa before lying, aroused and naked, on her lap — Carax replied: “How would I know?”