Sean Penn: interview

Dave Calhoun and Sean Penn talk journalism, movie authenticity and politics as the writer-director prepares to reveal ’Into the Wild‘ to the UK

Sean Penn is disappearing into an oversize chair in a Soho hotel room and wriggling around the subject of his fourth film as a writer-director, ‘Into the Wild’, a celebration of rampant individualism and the American wilderness. It’s the story of Christopher McCandless, a Virginian graduate who abandoned his straight-laced family in 1990 and went wandering across America only to be found dead in a remote part of Alaska two years later at the age of 24. His life inspired a book by Jon Krakauer and a cult following.

The night before we meet, I interview Penn, Emile Hirsch – the film’s lead – and two of the film’s producers on stage at the London Film Festival and Penn makes it clear that he’s only willing to go so far in explaining how far his film and McCandless’ story match his view of the world, even if there’s an obvious affinity between filmmaker and subject.But what is Penn’s view of the world? His actions allow us the odd clue. There he was two years ago filing reports from Iraq for the San Francisco Chronicle. There he was in October 2002, paying a reputed $56,000 to publish an open letter to George Bush in the Washington Post asking him to reconsider ‘this country’s mistaken and pervasive belief that its “manifest destiny” is to police the world’. There he was in a boat floating down a flooded New Orleans street in 2005 and trying to rescue some of the victims of Hurricane Katrina. He may invite scorn – see ‘Team America’ – but at least Penn gets his hands dirty. Has he been writing more journalism?

‘I just went down to Venezuela to meet Hugo Chavez.’ To interview him? ‘Yeah, both to interview him and to observe him.’ For the San Francisco Chronicle? ‘No. I’ve offers, but I’m freelancing at the moment.’

Penn’s not very chatty. But the more we talk, the more it’s obvious how far ‘Into the Wild’ taps into something personal. To make the film, he and his crew, which included Eric Gautier, who shot ‘The Motorcycle Diaries’, travelled across America, from California to Alaska via the fields of South Dakota. McCandless, as played by Hirsch, is the film’s focus – an idealist who invites empathy and scorn – but it’s the landscape in which Penn takes equal delight.

‘I’ve been a road-rat since I got my driver’s licence at 16, so I’ve probably gone across America 20 times,’ Penn says. ‘The landscape always kind of spoke to me. And Eric had not ever been between the coasts – my cinematographer was discovering it like a little boy.’

Take a look a the photo – it’s Penn, camera on his shoulder, shooting Hirsch with an up-close intensity. McCandless interacts with a number of folk on his journey – a hippy couple played by Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker and an elderly man played by Hal Holbrook – but he is often alone in front of the camera, whether trekking through a desert or ripping a moose to pieces. Did Penn shoot a lot of the film himself?

‘Oh yeah, I was operating the camera every day. We shot everything. We kept shooting all the time. If Emile had to change clothes, we just kept shooting whatever was interesting.’

The film’s buzzword is authenticity. Did they recreate McCandless’ journey? ‘No, that was impossible because we were shooting a two-year story in multiple weather systems,’ Penn explains. ‘I refused to shoot a glued-on beard. Then there were the weight issues of Emile’s development [he looks like a skeleton by the end], so we were on the move the whole time. It was a task to try and keep a sense of the flow.’

You can’t help but wonder where Penn fits in with all this free-as-a-bird material. We know he is an independent thinker, we know that there’s something of the outlaw about him, and when I ask if he’s a fan of Byron, whose lines open the film – ‘There is society where none intrudes… I love not man the less but Nature more’ – it’s the one time that he smiles.

‘I choose not to explain it, and not by matter of policy so much,’ Penn says. ‘I feel very accomplished in this movie. I was able to get it the way I wanted it. It’s there for people, and I do feel it’s unfair to maintain a position on it.’

What did he think of McCandless when he read Krakauer’s book? He spent years securing the rights and negotiating with the McCandless family.

‘Again, this is the kind of thing I think the film expresses. He provoked very necessary things in me. We’ve let the blade of our innocence dull over time and it’s only in innocence that you find any kind of magic, any kind of courage.’

Does he think that his representation of McCandless’ parents is harsh? There’s an uncomfortable sense of sneering towards their suburban lives.

‘All those interpretations are fair, but it would be a mistake to consider it an indictment of them. This is much more a celebration of his sensitivities. He was determined to feel his life in a very real way and not be jaded by ugliness and inauthenticity and so he went to the place of the most beauty and the most dramatic authenticity, which is the natural world, and there’s a great tradition of doing that. I think that’s the focus of my film.’

You wonder whether Penn sees his film – which works more as a nature film than as a character portrait – as a call-to-arms: a call for more engagement, a call for more individual expression. In that sense, you wonder whether he sees it as a political film?

‘Yeah, but you see: I don’t think that I’m directly political – not politically. For me, it’s which tool in your tool-box is the one you use to express something in your life? It’s all one house that you’re building, whatever you do, whether film, journalism, raising children…

‘Putting something in a movie because it’s in the news doesn’t make it political to me. If you’re not going outside the same old, same old, if you’re not pushing the envelope, then you’re not doing anything. A good movie is a political thing.’

‘Into the Wild’ opens on Nov 9.

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