The Olympian
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. 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.” 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.