With a nationwide release Tuesday via Fathom Events, Emilio Estevez’s “The Way,” a movie about faith, hope and life’s unexpected turns, gets a rare second chance.
The way in “The Way” is the legendary Camino de Santiago, a nearly 500-mile pilgrimage route in France and Spain that’s over a thousand years old.
As director, co-star, writer and producer, Estevez, who turned 61 last Friday, made a personal film far from the Hollywood arena of “The Mighty Ducks” and “Young Guns” that made his reputation (and his fortune).
It was actually his son Taylor, then 19, who sparked the idea of a movie centered on various Camino travelers.
“He fell in love with a Spanish gal and they got married back in 2009, which was when we started shooting the film,” Estevez recalled in a phone interview from Cincinnati where he’s lived the last 12 years.
“I’d been going over there to visit him and I thought, ‘The only way I’m going to spend time with my son is to actually figure out how to make a movie justifying the plane tickets, the travel and all that.’”
That’s when Estevez called his dad, Martin Sheen (“The West Wing”) whom he calls Martin.
“Martin and I began to chat about what that film could be.” It starts with Sheen’s Tom notified his son (played by Estevez) has died in a freak accident on the Camino. “The son was an adventurer studying at Berkeley to be a cultural anthropologist. He leaves his PhD program, travels the world, and dies along the Camino. That’s a great start but were does it go from there?”
To craft his screenplay Estevez spent time on the Camino, meeting pilgrims along the way and created a quartet led by Sheen’s Tom who scatters his son’s ashes along the route.
“It really mirrors ‘The Wizard of Oz’ in some ways,” Estevez said. “The tornado in this case is the death of the son. The Cowardly Lion is the Dutchman. He meets the Tin Man by way of the Deborah Kara Unger character who’s brokenhearted. And the Irish writer is lost, suffering from writer’s block, looking for his brain. The Camino is essentially the Road to Oz.”
And while “The Way” is hopeful, it’s also realistic. “They are definitely transformed by the journey but only in a way that they have accepted themselves.
“They’re all the same broken people they were in the beginning, but they’ve come to that realization that it’s okay to be imperfect. Because we all are. No matter how you how much you try to change, you’re still who you are.”