Interview: Emilio Estevez on immersive travel, the road as church, and The Way

Interview: Emilio Estevez on immersive travel, the road as church, and The Way May 11, 2023

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.

Continue reading at Thoughts & Spoilers…


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