I’m going to work with the scene early in the novel where they come upon a supermarket and the father finds a coke and gives it to the son. The first issue I’d like to address is the landscape in general. The novel’s descriptions are so clear in often defining it as gray and covered in ash. I’d like to really accentuate the grayness of the landscape. I thought about the idea of filming in black and white so that it would have no choice but to be gray, but I’d rather film in color and really concentrate and bring attention to the grayness and the ash. I think this is important as the ash represents what once was and its complete destruction. The general color scheme exemplifies the doomed mood of the story.
I would want the supermarket to have the same, dull, abandoned feeling and appearance of the landscape in general. As they are sifting through the drab rubble and refuse, the Coca Cola can would flash a bright glimmer of red for just a second until the father anticipatingly dug it out of all of the surrounding trash.
The boy drinking the soda would be one of the few soft moments in an overall hard and relentless story. It would be a touching scene, perhaps the lighting would become softer and some slightly sentimental music would cue. This scene would be representational of the small possibility of hope for some sort of future in this desolate and supposedly hopeless world. The father and son’s simple dialogue would be spoken softly and tenderly. The scene would fade out showing the boy sitting on some sort of surface, perhaps a chair, or even a box, and the father crouched next to him, enjoying and savoring the boy’s enjoyment of the cola.