By Christina Radish
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Sean Penn at the premiere of Into the Wild held at the Directors Guild of America in West Hollywood, Calif. on September 18, 2007.
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Based on Jon Krakauer’s acclaimed bestseller, the Paramount Vantage film Into the Wild follows recent college graduate Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch), as he walks out of his privileged life and into the wild, in search of adventure. The 22-year-old McCandless’ set out on a quest that took him from the wheat fields of South Dakota to a renegade trip down the Colorado River to the non-conformists’ refuge of Slab City, California, and beyond. Along the way, he encountered a series of colorful characters at the very edges of American society, who shaped his understanding of life and whose lives he, in turn, changed. In the end, McCandless tested himself by heading alone into the wilds of the great North, where everything he had seen, learned and felt came to a head, in ways he never could have expected.
Each strand of McCandless’ two-year journey is woven into Academy Award winner Sean Penn’s screen adaptation, which is as much about the insatiable yearning for family, home and connection as it is the search for truth and happiness. Having worked for nearly a decade to bring McCandless’ story to the screen, Penn also served as the film’s director and producer.
“Chris McCandless spent 113 days alone in the most unforgiving wilderness that God created,” Penn tells MediaBlvd Magazine, when talking about why this young man’s story haunted him for so long. “This is a guy that wanted to challenge himself in a way that for us to judge would just be ridiculous. When I buy a Nikon camera, I have no tolerance for the instructions. I’m ready to make some mistakes using it, and get some bad pictures back, until I’ve figured it out for myself. I guarantee that, if you do it that way, by the time you learn it, you’ve learned it better than any instructions will tell you. You go and challenge yourself the way that you want to challenge yourself. This film is about somebody who had a will that is so uncommon today. He had a lack of addiction to comfort that is so uncommon and so necessary to become common, or humankind won’t survive the next century.”
First published in 1997, Krakauer’s book became an instant wilderness classic. The book riveted readers of all backgrounds with its probing investigation of the life and death of 24-year-old McCandless, an affluent young man who renounced his wealth and attempted to shed his former identity, in order to try to find the real meaning of freedom and wilderness, only to vanish into a rough country from which he would never return. The details of who McCandless was, where he journeyed and how he came to spend time in the wilds of Alaska with only bare supplies, became an unforgettable story.
“I read the book when it came out, and I read it twice in a row,” says Penn. “I started working on getting the rights to it, the next day. The impression that Jon Krakauer’s book made on me, and that Chris McCandless’ story made on me, was the movie that I made. That’s what I read. I then embellished with my collaborators later. Jon had 75% of the movie, and I had 25% to make cinematic, what he’d made in literature.”
Structuring the screenplay into a series of chapters that cover McCandless’ two-year journey from his home in Atlanta to the abandoned bus in Alaska, Penn tells the entire arc of a life, from birth to death, all crammed into the period from when he left home to the time that he died, with the result being a very dynamic portrait of a human journey stripped bare. “There is no exit strategy from Mother Nature, if she doesn’t want you to have one,” says Penn. “You can go to any lengths you want. The degree to which he wanted to challenge himself is the degree to which he made a stripped-down trip. The exit that was necessary was the exit from authenticity. Then, you can see if you can handle the rest, if you have the good luck and good fortune to do so.”
The appeal of McCandless, in Jon Krakauer’s book, extended beyond his physical adventures to his distinctive intelligence, enthusiasm and likability, as well as his drive to separate himself, with a sense of nobility, from the warring and unhappiness of his parents. To play the role, Penn sought an actor with the same sort of disarming, fresh-faced idealism as McCandless, and one who also might bear some physical resemblance to the handsome and charismatic young man, seen in the haunting photographs left behind. More than that, he needed someone willing to give a 100% unflinching commitment to what would clearly be a performance that make or break the film. He found all these qualities in 22-year-old Emile Hirsch (Lords of Dogtown, Alpha Dog and the upcoming Speed Racer), who is one of today’s most promising leading men.
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Eddie Vedder performing with Pearl Jam at the San Diego Sports Arena in San Diego, Calif. on October 25, 2000.
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“You used to be able to get some pretty intriguing brooders out of the young generation,” explains Penn. “Today, you can get clever, witty, sexy and charming, but none of those things happened to be the proper tool for this. I needed somebody who had a talent, a mug and a will, and that I could also photograph, going from boy to man. I had to catch somebody on the cusp. Emile had all those things, and I don’t know another who does.”
With a script and an actor finally in place, Penn admits that the biggest challenges he faced during filming were all physical challenges for the production. “I was so exhilarated making this movie. I trusted that what would energize me was not just going to be an indulgence, but it was going to be what this journey should be, and that would fall onto the film. The physical challenge was like, if you woke me up at 7 o’clock on a football field and said, ‘Go hike!’ That would have been a problem, except that we were warmed up before we went to start. We would be in a boat, going down the Grand Canyon, and my crew would start to giggle as soon as they saw the most impossible cliff side to climb, knowing that we would have to go up and shoot from there.”
A final element that weaves through the entire film is the music, which was on Penn’s mind from the very beginning, with specific songs written directly into the script. Ultimately, the score utilizes original songs and music from Eddie Vedder, whose voice Penn felt, was the soul of McCandless.
“We go back quite a ways, to Dead Man Walking,” reveals Penn, of his friendship with the Pearl Jam frontman. “It may even be before that, in a hello backstage kind of way. I’m 47, so there’s not too much music that comes after ‘68 that doesn’t feel like it’s been done before. And then comes Eddie’s voice, as a songwriter and a singer. I was pre-disposed to wanting him to like me, when we met. It didn’t work out too well the first time, but as it went along, I felt a creative connection. I’d even asked him to play the lead in a movie that I’d written, at one point. With this, I’d written the script to be, in part, told by song. I’d left out narrative in those transitional sequences, knowing the seed of what I needed from the songs, to close those gaps. About half-way through shooting, through Emile’s performance, I starting feeling that this was Eddie’s voice. It’s the musical soul of what Emile was bringing.”
Vedder recalls Penn calling him up and asking him to come see the just-completed movie. “People call Sean back immediately because of the amount of respect he’s gained, and earned, over the years. I was just another one of those calls, and I immediately responded and said goodbye to what I thought was going to be a vacation, after doing a long stretch with the band. My friendship with Sean is incredibly important to me. We’ve had some really memorable times, whether it’s running rapids or having coffee. It’s amazing how those things with Sean can be really similar. I enjoyed working with him and really getting into it. That seemed to further our friendship. It just got deeper. The work is where it really got exciting. I’m really glad that he heard my voice because it’s been a real gift.”
Once he committed to scoring the film, Vedder says that he approached the songwriting process in a variety of different ways. “I don’t know how, but it just grew organically. I might have been intimidated if Sean were to have said, ‘We need this. We need a theme. It would be nice if it were structured this way, or that way. And then, it revisits this, at the end.’ None of that happened. He just started finding places to put the songs. As closely as Sean was paying attention to detail to tell an exacting story, being so responsible to Chris, he also gave Emile the freedom to be that person. And, with the music, he basically allowed me to write my own lines and include a couple of cover songs, so that was nice. He gave me a lot of freedom. The trust was unspoken.”
“The story is so inspiring, and the images were inspiring, which made it so easy to focus,” continues Vedder. “It really became an out-of-body experience. It went real quick. Instruments were being handed to me, and we just did all the takes real quick. Then, we’d send it to Sean and he’d find places for it, and ask for a couple more. It just grew that way. I don’t know if I’d want to do this again, though, because I know it wouldn’t be as good as this experience was. I could just leave it at this. This was great.”
Both Penn and Vedder admit that they’ve felt their own call to the wild, in varying degrees, in their lives. “One of the things that made me so interested in this story is that wanderlust is a very universal thing,” says Penn.
“If I’m not on tour or in the studio, I’m in nature somewhere, usually by some kind of ocean,” adds Vedder. “Playing music has afforded me that. It’s not lost on me that it’s a tremendous opportunity to be able to spend your life being surrounded by nature. I have a 3-year-old daughter now. I’m glad I did things in my 20's that were more reckless because, at some point, you have to realize you have a responsibility beside yourself, and your need for adrenaline. But, I’m glad I did that stuff, at the time. For people who see this movie, if they haven’t done that in their lives, it’s going to hit them pretty hard.”
When his own daughter grows up, if she decides she wants to go on a trip like this, Vedder jokes that his initial reaction will be to want to send a security guard along. “I’ll have him stay 50 yards away, keeping an eye on her, at all times. I know that, no matter what I do, she’s already been provided a life of travel. I didn’t get to New York until I was 25, or to Europe until I was 26. She’s been to all those places, six or seven times. And, she’s already beyond me, as far as her comfortability around other people, to this day. Even though I think she’s going to have a really great upbringing, and I’m trying to break any chain of negative parenting that I might have survived, I know that she’s going to go through a time when she’s going to have to assert her independence, and I’m going to have to encourage that.”
After taking years to hand over the rights, the McCandless family entrusted Penn to tell their son’s story. “It was an incredibly selfless and brave thing, in my view, for them to allow his story to be shared,” remarks Penn. “At the end of the day, if you take away all of the flaws of the family, you’ve still got two parents who are watching the story of their lost child, that they loved, dying. This is not a pleasant experience for them, but I hope that it will be a healing one. I know that they’re very supportive of it. Making a movie like this is a double-edged sword of making speculations about someone you didn’t know, and about his parents trusting me with such a triumphant, but difficult story. These are people I consider friends of mine, and I have a great respect for these very intelligent, very caring people.”
