Interview: Emilio Estevez on immersive travel, the road as church, and The Way
The 2010 film, which stars Estevez's father Martin Sheen as a lapsed Catholic on a pilgrimage in Spain, is coming back to theatres next week.
Emilio Estevez is on the phone to talk about The Way, the movie he directed over a dozen years ago that stars his father, Martin Sheen, as a lapsed Catholic who grudgingly finds community and maybe even a new sense of faith while walking the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage trail in northern Spain.
For many people, this film marked the first time they had ever heard about the Camino, and it spurred a lot of them to make the trek themselves. Now, Fathom Events is putting the film back in theatres for one day only—on Tuesday, May 16—along with a 20-minute post-show video in which Estevez, Sheen, and travel writer Rick Steves discuss the meaning of pilgrimage.
Estevez, calling me from his “adopted city” of Cincinnati, Ohio, describes the film as a celebration of “immersive travel”, and he says the film has found a new audience partly because the Covid pandemic—and all the lockdowns and self-isolation that went with it—have made people yearn for communal travel, and especially travel that can help them to process the trauma of the past few years.
“People are longing to get back out on the road, or they’re longing to travel back to Europe,” he says. “They’re still in the grieving phase of this horrible pandemic that we all suffered from, and I think that we’ve all been in these places of isolation.
“We were already isolated prior to the pandemic—we were already tribal, we were already tucked into our communities, but we were isolated—and now comes the pandemic, which is now a mandatory isolation on top of a self-inflicted isolation and tribalism. And now, it’s like, you really have to know who you are, if you’re going to be that isolated. . . .
“And I think that the movie celebrates our desire to get outside of ourselves, and get out there in the world and experience community, experience the road as church, and really dial back into what makes us all human—and what we need as human beings, and what we crave as human beings, is ultimately not isolation, not to be alone, but to be in community, be with others.”
The pilgrim statistics kept by the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela—the official endpoint of the pilgrimage trail—may indeed indicate that there is a deeper desire than ever to experience the road as church, now.
Before the film came out (overseas in 2010, in North America in 2011), it was rare for more than 100,000 pilgrims to make the trek in any given year. After the movie came out, the numbers consistently went above 200,000 or even 300,000, until the pandemic came along and everything plummeted—but then, in 2022, the number of pilgrims jumped back up and went over 400,000 for the first time ever.
With all that extra traffic comes other challenges, though.
“It cuts both ways,” Estevez admits, “because on one hand, [the movie] has brought a lot of tourism and business, and in fact, along the Camino, a lot of these businesses have experienced an uptick because of people being influenced by the movie. But it also comes with its own set of problems, too, which is oftentimes pilgrims are struggling to find a place to sleep or a place to eat, or they’re not really finding that solitude that they thought they would on the path, because it’s so crowded.”
In the post-show video, Rick Steves—who covered the Camino in his own PBS travel show several years ago—talks about how the movie’s audience gets to have a real sense of the Camino from the film, because they see Martin Sheen actually walking it. But did Sheen—and the film crew—actually walk the whole trail, I wonder?
Not exactly, says Estevez. “We have not done the full 500 miles,” he says. “We walked somewhere between 200 to 250 miles, which would still allow us to get our Compostela at the end—the official pilgrim’s passport—because I think you only are required to walk 100 miles. So we would still rate, but we do not have the complete passport stamped. And I long to do it. I would love to do it and not take one photograph, and perhaps in the future I’ll be able to do that.”
The Way was filmed in 2009, and watching it now, it is striking to see how certain things feel… not dated, exactly, but they resonate differently now than they would have back then.
Take technology, for example. The film was made only two years after the first iPhone came out, and smartphones don’t really figure into the story at all—though Sheen’s character, who still uses an older-style flip-phone, does complain that his son doesn’t have a mobile device.
Nowadays, says Estevez, the fact that nearly everyone has a small computer in their back pocket has given people “a lot more resources” to help them prepare for the Camino—and the existence of these resources, by extension, has contributed to the Camino being two to four times as crowded now as it was back then.
Then there are all the scenes in which Deborah Kara Unger’s character calls Sheen’s character “boomer”. Technically, Sheen is too old to be a boomer—he was born in 1940, and the baby boom began in 1946—and Unger, who was born in 1966, is barely a Gen Xer herself. But this film was made years before “okay, boomer” became a popular, dismissive catchphrase among millennials and zoomers.
So, has the film found a new audience among millennials, now that they are reaching middle age and, perhaps, facing some of the same issues that the movie’s middle-aged characters were facing? “That kind of remains to be seen,” says Estevez—who, for the record, was born in 1962 and is thus right at the tail end of the baby boom himself.
“It seems to me that they’re less preoccupied with thinking about life’s bigger questions—and that just may be a horrible broad stroke that I assign, but we’ll see,” he says. “I’d like to believe that millennials are thinking about their futures, that they’re thinking that the future is not as dystopian as they’ve been led to believe. But then again, maybe it is! I don’t know. I just don’t know, man.”
Interestingly, The Way is not the first major film to take place on the Camino. Decades earlier, in 1969, the Spanish-Mexican surrealist Luis Buñuel directed The Milky Way, which is named after one of the trail’s nicknames and follows a couple of vagabonds on the trail as they basically travel through time and come across figures from across Catholic history, going all the way back to biblical times.
The sensibilities of the two films couldn’t be more different: where Estevez focuses on personal spiritual growth in a realistic context, Buñuel takes an absurdist look at the history of theological arguments. But it turns out Estevez—who calls The Milky Way “a really sort of mediocre acid trip”—had Buñuel on the brain as he was making his own film.
“Before we set out to shoot The Way, I insisted that my whole family gather in my living room and watch The Milky Way,” he says, chuckling at the memory, “and after about half an hour, my dad just looked at me and said, ‘What is this?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s Buñuel, and you know what you’re getting into with his movies,’ and I think he made it maybe halfway through the film. And then he questioned me and said, ‘Well, this isn’t the sort of movie you’re thinking of making…?’ And I said ‘No, no.’”
But Estevez did put a subtle nod to Buñuel in his movie. In one scene, Sheen asks an innkeeper if she has ever walked the trail herself, and she replies that she was too busy to do it when she was young, and now that she’s older she’s too tired. The actress who plays that innkeeper is Ángela Molina, who appeared in Buñuel’s final film, That Obscure Object of Desire, very early in her career, in 1977. “So there’s a loose, loose homage to Buñuel in casting Ángela,” says Estevez.
Estevez’s film, like Buñuel’s, also makes reference to the conflicts of the past, as the characters turn their meal breaks into arguments about the wars that were fought in that region several centuries ago.
“They’re arguing about it as if it happened last week, something that happened centuries and centuries ago,” says Estevez, “and only in Europe do you find yourself in the middle of those conversations where they’re talking about historical aspects of how Europe came together or fell apart—but again, they talk about them as if they were there. And I love that aspect of European culture and European history, it’s almost as if it’s still evolving.”
I note that there’s a paradox to the Camino—a paradox the film hints at—between the trail’s violent history and the role it now plays in helping people to find spiritual healing, and Estevez agrees.
“The Camino shaped from out of those conflicts is now this peaceful pilgrimage,” he says, “but on that pilgrimage, you think about the Knights Templar, and you think about the Moors, and even in the Cathedral of Santiago, there are depictions of St James with a sword, cutting off the heads of all the Moors—so you get there, and you realize that the Camino is indeed a road that is paved with blood, and centuries of blood shed, and it’s now this quiet contemplative stroll and pilgrimage [where] people are finding themselves and faith and their peace. It is ironic, to say the least!”
Estevez has talked about making a sequel for years, and he’s evidently thinking of telling a story that goes far, far beyond this one pilgrimage trail. Ten years ago, he said filming would take place “throughout Europe and East Asia”, but now, he tells me he’s thinking of a story that would begin in Nigeria and take Sheen’s character all over Europe before landing him back in Spain. “So it’s a much bigger canvas than this film, but I think it’s a worthy companion piece,” says Estevez.
And about that Fathom Events release date… My sister, who is a fan of the film, noticed that May 16 happens to be the feast day for Brendan the Navigator, an Irish saint who is also one of the patron saints of travelers. Was that intentional?
“That is an absolute coincidence, I’m going to look that up right now,” says Estevez. “He’s an Irishman?”
After checking with someone at his end of the line, Estevez starts to laugh. “That’s wonderful. That’s an absolute coinkydinky, as we like to call it. Oh, that’s hilarious. It means that we have to be in a pub that night.”
Why? I ask. “Why not? I mean, don’t we have to find an Irish pub, to celebrate?”
Sure, why not, I say. Maybe they’ll bump into “Jack from Ireland”—the character played by James Nesbitt in the original film—and give him some more stories to put in his book. “Exactly,” says Estevez, still chuckling.
— The Way is playing in theatres on May 16. See Fathom Events for more details.