12 Supposedly Unfilmable Films That Actually Got Made

11. On The Road (2012)

Why It Was 'Unfilmable': Jack Kerouac's On the Road lacks much in the way of a straightforward narrative; it's more a retrospective journal of Kerouac's adventures with his friend Neal Cassady throughout the late 1940s, telling of a series of hedonistic road trips they took together across America. And while Kerouac himself suggested a condensed version of his book be made into a film (one road trip as opposed to the book's three), starring himself and Marlon Brando no less, the On the Road movie wouldn't be realised in his lifetime. Francis Ford Coppola considered tackling the project, as did Gus Van Sant and Joel Schumacher (*shudder*), but none of them could crack it. It remained just out of reach, until Walter Salles got a greenlight in 2008, over 50 years since Kerouac had sent Brando a letter asking him to be his Neal Cassady/Dean Moriarty on film. That version then also fell through. How It Got Made: Salles went full-Beat and shot the film guerilla style, is how. Working with $25 million as opposed to the $35 million he was promised for the aborted 2008 attempt, Salles spent 2010 filming all across both North and South America, encouraging improvisation from his cast and often shooting scenes handheld. Salles was surprisingly faithful to Kerouac's vision and, after a long post-production process, finally edited the footage into a whole for a 2012 release.