‘On the Road’ director to speak at IU Cinema today

Walter Salles, director of the highly anticipated adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” will give a lecture at 3 p.m. today at IU Cinema. The film was screened Wednesday evening.

Salles’ lecture is part of the Jorgensen Guest Filmmaker Lecture Series throughout the semester.

IU Cinema will also screen his Oscar-winning 2004 film “The Motorcycle Diaries” at 7 p.m. today, followed by “Foreign Land” at 9:30 p.m. Friday and “Central Station” at 7 p.m. Saturday.

Salles will lecture about the genre of road movies — for which he is popular — and the making of “On the Road,” cinema director Jon Vickers said in an email.

The cinema might even screen a short documentary Salles made, Vickers said.

The long process in making “On the Road” was not a traditional movie-making process.

Francis Ford Coppola owned the rights to the film adaptation for more than 30 years before handing it to Salles in 2007, according to the release.

Since then, Salles has made a five-year, cross-country journey in search of every last surviving beat writer, artist, expert and character who inspired the fictional alter egos.

In 1957, soon after the book was published, Kerouac mooted the idea of an adaptation.

He tried to get in touch with Marlon Brando to play Dean Moriarty, Sal Paradise’s wild friend. Paradise is the book’s main character.

Brando never got back in touch with Kerouac, and since Coppola owned the rights to the adaptation, Kerouac’s attempts at adapting fell through.

Later attempts to adapt the film also failed, until now.

“This is kind of, as far as the films go, this might be the cultural event of the year, actually, because Jack Kerouac’s novel is influential,” Vickers said in a previous interview. “It was influential for me as well.”

Salles, born in Rio de Janeiro in 1956, spent his childhood in France and the U.S. before returning to Brazil as a teenager, according to the release.

In the late 1980s, he began filming music documentaries, such as “Chico — Oh País da Delicadeza Perdida” and “Marisa Monte,” before turning to fiction in 1991 with the thriller “A Grande Art.”

“On the Road” stars Garrett Hedlund as Dean Moriarty, Kristen Stewart as Marylou, Moriarty’s girlfriend, and Sam Riley as Sal Paradise. The film is scheduled for a limited theatrical release on Dec. 21.

- Jaclyn Lansbery