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Most films today are released with a targeted demographic in mind. It is rare to find a four-quadrant film that the whole family can enjoy. So many might find it surprising that The Way, a road comedy with heavy tinges of drama and starring Martin Sheen, might be one the year’s few films where all generations will be found in the audience. Sheen plays a walled-up dentist, who at the spur of the moment travels the “El camino de Santiago” (a trek from France to Spain) in honor of his son (played by his real-life son and the film’s director-writer-producer Emilio Estevez), who died in an accident on the trail. “We thought it was going to be all AARP,” said Estevez in a roundtable interview last week in Boston with Sheen, “Then the young people started responding, ‘How did you do that? Where is that Camino?’”

After debuting The Way in the 2010 Toronto Film Festival (the film has since been re-cut), the father-son team has been traveling the states to promote the shot-on-location, independent film. In the interview the two talk about shooting on film, capturing the beauty of the Camino, and who came up with the idea for the film.

Emilio, I loved that you shot The Way with 16mm film, because it just gave the movie a documentarian feel, where you are there with the characters. It didn’t have a gloss that separated the viewer. So can you talk a bit about making that decision?

EE: When [producer David Alexanian] and I were in Spain, we spent about two months in country prior to shooting, and we met with a couple of [Directors of Photography] on how to shoot it and a lot of the DP’s said, “Let’s use the RED one and go digital.” We got nervous, because you never know what you have; it’s all on a little digital card. We knew that if we shot on film, we would have an exposed negative or something in the can. We also thought the light in Spain at that time of year would be better captured using Super 16.

The cameras themselves are smaller. As we met with crewmembers we would first say, “How’s your English?” and second, “Are you fit?” because we were going to make this journey as a group.

I really liked how beautiful the film looked. Not because the backgrounds were lush or green, but because the land had this otherworldly look to it.

EE: It’s great [our crew] kept asking why we are using all of these wide lenses, and I said, “Because I love the country.” Most Spanish directors are like in here (making a small window with his hands), because they take the country for granted. They are in all of this beauty and architecture all day long, so they weren’t interested in those shots.

MS: Most of the crew had never been to the cities we were at. They knew Spain, but they didn’t know the Camino. … Also we filmed after the harvest, because where we were walking, if we filmed a few weeks earlier, you wouldn’t have seen us with the crops. And that changed the light too.

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