Eruption’s effects just right for film

TACOMA – With a few cosmetic tweaks, Mount St. Helens provided the right devastation to serve as a backdrop for scenes in John Hillcoat’s film “The Road.”

Production crews spent a day in July 2008 filming scenes from the post-apocalypse movie on the east side of the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument.

While the devastation from the 1980 eruption provided the stark landscape sought for scenes, crews also took advantage of a washout on the road to Windy Ridge.

The process began in 2007, when location scouts first visited the monument, said Rod Ludvigsen, recreation special use specialist for the monument.

“The (Washington) Film Bureau took them on their first show-me trip in the fall 2007, on a really cloudy, rainy day,” Ludvigsen said. “They liked what they saw.”

In June 2008, location staff returned to look at more sites.

“They wanted locations that represented devastation,” Ludvigsen said. “The areas they liked were where trees were uprooted and root wads were showing, trees where the tops were snapped off from the eruption.”

It also helped that portions of Forest Road 99 had been washed out during recent flooding.

The crew spent a good portion of the day in that location, filming stars Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee. In this adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, Mortensen plays a father leading his young son through a landscape torn apart by some unnamed cataclysm that destroyed civilization and most life on Earth.

Film crews dragged logs on the road, spread rocks and gravel to make the area look more devastated. Artificial snow was used to create snowdrifts blocking the actors’ path for one scene.

“They were a little disappointed because it was a little greener than they expected,” Ludvigsen said. “But they said they could take care of that back at the studio.”