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The Road imagines a father and son journeying through a devastated world devoid of all life – except for a few gangs of increasingly desperate humans

Cormac McCarthy doesn’t tell us the cause of the apocalypse. What did you imagine it might be?

McCarthy told me it was some kind of environmental meltdown. He has an office at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, he loves hanging out there and a lot of his friends are environmental scientists, molecular biologists and physicists, so he’s coming at it from a very scientific point of view. It’s about what would happen if environmental meltdown continued to its logical conclusion: crops and animals would die, the weather would go out of control, there would be spontaneous wildfires and blizzards, you wouldn’t be able to grow anything and the only thing left to eat would be tinned food and each other. But I was anxious not to quiz him too much about what happened because we wanted to preserve the mystique of it.

Aside from the relationship between the father and son, the story is bleak, with almost no sense of hope. What made you think it would be suitable for the cinema?

I loved the boldness of McCarthy’s supposition that when the end comes it’s going to be an excruciating conflation of high horror and banality. On the one hand the world will lapse into cannibalism, rape and civil war, on the other there’ll be the numbing repetition of having to find food every day and worrying about replacing your shoes. Post-apocalypse films are often so concerned with the big picture that they miss the small details of what everyday existence would be like. McCarthy captured those beautifully: how you’re going to be endlessly waking from dreams about your past life and mourning the things that have gone, like apples.

Do you think the barbarism he depicts is realistic?

I think it’s a safe bet that people in that situation would turn on each other in a horrendous way, though it’s a strong theme in the book that not everyone is going to lose their humanity to such a spectacular effect. The man in The Road struggles to hold onto his, though at times he gives in to violence and retribution, which is understandable. The boy, on the other hand, has an intrinsic faith in people and goodness.

The boy was born after the cataclysm and has known only this horror-filled, primitive world. How do you think he has managed to retain his humanity?

McCarthy thinks humanity is intrinsic, that it is not learned behaviour. His other books give the impression that he thinks inhumanity is intrinsic. Those books are about the worst, the extent of man’s inhumanity. The Road is very much about the best. It seems to be very autobiographical – a clever love story about McCarthy and his son, who was eight when he wrote it – but thrown into this post-apocalyptic landscape.