Last night, Somerset House hosted the UK premier of the hotly anticipated film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road – a film that inspired the current issue of Another Man, featuring pin-up Garrett Hedlund as its cover star...
"The only ones 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 who never yawn or say commonplace things, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars" – Jack Kerouac, On The Road
Last night, Somerset House hosted the UK premier of the hotly anticipated film adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On The Road – a film that inspired the current issue of Another Man, featuring pin-up Garrett Hedlund as its cover star.
Brazilian director Walter Salles’ interpretation of the iconic novel has been realised more than three decades after Francis Ford Coppola first bought the rights to the film in 1979, that was not seen into fruition – until now. The adaptation stars Sam Riley as Sal Paradise, Kristen Stewart as Mary Lou and Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty, a thinly veiled version of Kerouac’s best friend Neal Cassady. He is survived by wife Carolyn Cassady, who described him as “energetic, instinctively brilliant and self-educated”. The film follows the trio on their journey through sexual liberation, loneliness, drug experimentation and spiritual discovery.
Garrett Hedlund, a long time aficionado of Kerouac reveals in the current issue of Another Man, “I was a kid living with my mother, land-locked in the middle of nowhere, wondering how the fuck I would ever get a shot a life”. On the inspiration that he took from the novel, he continues, “Kerouac’s beautiful poetry kicks in early on in the book and it just hooked me.”
Literary iconoclast Kerouac is arguably the most famous of his generation, counting Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs amongst his peers of the Beat Generation. Russell Brand, in the current issue of Another Man, pays homage to Kerouac, describing his first reading of the novel aged 19, as “thrilling…that people lived in that sort of glitter, and twitched their way through an excitable life”.
Text by Natalia Christina
The film is part of the Film4 Summer Screen at Somerset House, showcasing contemporary, classic and cult cinema, including another road movie Wim Wender’s Paris, Texas and runs until August 27.
