Sean Penn / Eddie Vedder Interview, Into The Wild

MoviesOnline sat down yesterday with Academy Award winning filmmaker Sean Penn and Pearl Jam lead singer and lyricist Eddie Vedder at the Los Angeles press day for "Into the Wild,” written and directed by Penn and featuring the music and songs of Vedder. Based on a true story and the bestselling book by Jon Krakauer, the film features an award winning cast that includes Emile Hirsch, Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Jena Malone, Catherine Keener, Brian Dierker, Vince Vaughn, Zach Galifianakis, Kristen Stewart, and Hal Holbrook.

Freshly graduated from Emory University with a promising future, 22-year-old top student and athlete Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) walked out of his privileged life, abandoned his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity, and hitchhiked to Alaska and into the wild in search of adventure. What happened to him on the way transformed this young wanderer into an enduring symbol for countless people. Was Christopher McCandless a heroic adventurer or a naïve idealist, a rebellious 1990s Thoreau or another lost American son, a fearless risk-taker or a tragic figure who wrestled with the precarious balance between man and nature?

Each strand of his journey is woven into Sean Penn’s screen adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s acclaimed bestseller, "Into the Wild,” which is as much about the insatiable yearning for family, home and connection as it is the search for truth and happiness.

McCandless’ quest 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, he tested himself by heading alone into the wilds of the great North, where everything he had seen and learned and felt came to a head in ways he never could have expected.

In the course of his 2-year quest to better understand himself and his place in the world, Chris McCandless blazed through an entire lifetime of experiences. From the birth of a brand new, self-invented identity as he set out on the road; to his declaration of independence from the bewildered family he left behind; to an exhilarating process of gaining knowledge and wisdom from the amazing people and places that touched his soul; to the calamity that led to his own unplanned demise at the apex of his perspective-altering journey, these fragments form the emotional mosaic at the core of Sean Penn’s adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s bestseller "Into the Wild.”

Sean Penn has become an American film icon in a career spanning nearly three decades. He has been nominated four times for the Academy Award as Best Actor in "Dead Man Walking,” "Sweet and Lowdown,” "I Am Sam,” and most recently won the Oscar in 2003 for his searing performance in Clint Eastwood’s "Mystic River.” With his latest film, "Into the Wild,” he delivers an intensely personal, compelling and original film with a strong emotional core.

Eddie Vedder is a rock and roll visionary who brought the radical Seattle sound of ‘90s alternative rock into the mainstream, sometimes bucking traditional ties to it. Pearl Jam has sold nearly 60 million albums worldwide, including millions of live concert bootlegs. The band has released 8 studio records, 2 live records, a double-disc b-sides record, a double-disc greatest hits record, and most recently a 7-disk live box set entitled "Pearl Jam: Live at the Gorge 05/06.” Both Sean Penn and Eddie Vedder are incredible artists and fabulous people and we really appreciated their time. Here what they had to tell us about "Into the Wild”:

Q: You've made three movies about men trying to escape their past. Is that a conscious thing you like exploring? What attracts you to it?

SEAN PENN: I probably could give you a very long-winded answer that would have some truth to it, but I would say the basic nature of it is not very analytical in terms of something I looked at various things at various times. It's probably first and foremost being a man trying to come to terms with himself and his past.

Q: Can you discuss the significance of the Sharon Olds poem that sparked the narration and why it was incorporated into the production?

Q: Chris doesn't seem to have a very well thought-out exit strategy once he gets up to Alaska. I was wondering if you see any parallels to what’s happened in our current foreign policy?

SEAN PENN: No, I don't see a parallel in that way because Chris wasn't putting any babies at risk like that, for one. I think that intention counts for a lot, and I don't think ours competes in the level of purity. But also, I don't know that I entirely agree. There is no exit strategy from Mother Nature if she doesn't want you to have one so 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. I think that the exit that was necessary was an exit from inauthenticity. Then, you’re gonna see if you can handle the rest and if you get the luck and good fortune to do so.

Q: Can you guys talk about the dynamics of your friendship, both personally and creatively? What did you actually do on this film together? Can you talk a little about the melding process?

EDDIE VEDDER: First of all, don't feel like you need to ask me questions. I'm just happy to be sitting this close to who I consider not just a great human but (also) a master at what he does, in all the things he does. These are pretty good seats here (pointing to front row of press conference) but this one's even better (referring to his seat next to Sean). I couldn't turn down that opportunity. Where did we leave off?

SEAN PENN: We left off at once I called you on this.

EDDIE VEDDER: If you go back to the poet, Sean had some resources. People call him back immediately because of the amount of respect that he's gained and earned over the years. I was just another one of those calls and immediately I responded, and said goodbye to what I thought was going to be a vacation after doing a long stretch with the band. Our friendship 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. [laughs] To work with him is to work with somebody. With Sean, that's where you get into the good stuff beyond "Hey, how ya doin'? How's the family?” That's all great but to really work with somebody and get into it, I really enjoy that. That’s great and that seems to further the friendship. It just gets deeper. The work is really where it gets exciting. As this has formed and now it seems to be done, it was a real gift. I'm really glad that he heard my voice in all that because it's been a real gift.

Q: There are so many gorgeous shots of the outdoors in this film. Have either of you felt a call to the wild to get away from all the fuss of the city?

SEAN PENN: I can say yes, and I think he'd tell you the same to varying degrees, in different ways. But I also feel that one of the things that made me so interested in this story that is true, and I've been wrong about these perceptions before, but I feel the way I made this movie is from the idea that it's true of everybody in this room and everybody outside this room too, that this is a very universal thing, this wanderlust.

EDDIE VEDDER: And for me, if I'm not on tour or if I’m not in the studio or something, I'm in nature somewhere, usually some kind of ocean. 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 surrounded by nature. I have a three-year-old daughter now. I'm glad I did things in my 20s that were more reckless because at some point you realize you have a responsibility more beyond yourself and your need for adrenaline. I'm still looking for bigger waves and I still think I’ve got a few more. You know, I can jump up a few more feet before I go back to the longboard. I'm glad I did that stuff at the time. For people who see this movie, if they haven't done that in their life, I think it's going to hit them pretty hard.

Q: Sean, how did you discover Chris McCandless’ story and why did you want to make it into a movie?

SEAN PENN: I read the book when it came out. I read it twice in a row and I started trying to get 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 and was then embellished by my collaborators later. But the structure, the skeleton of this thing, was... Jon had me 75 percent towards the movie that you saw already, and I had 25 percent of making cinematic what he had made in literature, and to do that with my partners. I could answer the question in boring length, but I think that the movie should answer it for me. This is what I intended to make. This is the movie. It would be very fair for somebody to criticize something they don't like in the movie or that they felt more intelligent than, or more heartfelt than about something, or more whatever they felt about it. It would be factually wrong for them to say that I hadn't succeeded in telling the story as I intended. So I would say that I feel very complete in that it answers it for me.

Q: What particularly struck me was Chris McCandless’ destruction of his former self. What is your take on that?

SEAN PENN: There’s a thing Eddie said last night, we were talking to some journalists and some people last night, and he said they talked about "a healthy rebellion." The way that Walt McCandless described his son to me was that Chris didn't want to burn down the building, he just dismissed it. I don't think he wanted to burn down Chris McCandless in terms of where he’d started and the fraudulence he thought he was carrying on his back. I think he just wanted to dismiss it and that, in most ways, Chris was a young man who, way ahead of his time, knew who he was and just had to find a place that would accept him. Once he did that, he would have the muscles to offer something back to a community, to a family, to a woman, to whomever. It was always on that basis that I approached him.

Q: This is such a diverse cast. In particular, we haven’t seen Hal Holbrook in years. Can you talk about how that came together?

SEAN PENN: Hal Holbrook was in one of my first television movies when I was about 18 or 19. He'd made such a strong impression on me and a lasting one in terms of what being an actor was. He’s a man of great gifts. One of the things, despite [the fact] that there's no such thing as a better actor than Hal, there's something inherently moving about the integrity in a man. I had wanted to work with Hal on all kinds of things and I snuck his name into the ears of directors along the years that I was working. You know, tried to think of things maybe to direct and so on. When this fit, it just fit, so I called him up and the extent of my direction was pretty much "action” and "cut” with him. Hal Holbrook made that performance and he did it and he's great.

Q: Sean, I love your metaphor with Stephen Colbert. Do you have any new metaphors that you might use to describe this film?

SEAN PENN: I'm having separation anxiety on this movie. I've never had that before because I always like to have at least 10 people who relate to my movies, and I always had to be the 10th on the others so I could never let them go. This one is more what I like to say is everybody's movie. It was when I started it; it was before I started it. Chris' gift is too generous for me to claim it. I just would like for it to answer for itself every time it can.

Q: Eddie, the music industry has changed so much. I remember the days when Ticketmaster was a big problem. What do you think about iTunes being a way for music to be distributed today?

Q: Sean, how did you decide how objective you could be about Chris? The movie won me over. I really cared for it. But a park ranger said what Chris did wasn't particularly daring but just stupid, tragic and inconsiderate. Also, there was a hand operated tram a mile away from where he tried to cross the river that any decent map that most hikers would carry in a National Park would have shown. So it’s as though he picked and chose what he wanted to abandon in society. Did you make a conscious effort to avoid romanticizing what he did?

Q: Like the Coast Guard, the National Park ranger would have to go out and rescue him.

SEAN PENN: You just told me the guy said he wasn't in any hazardous condition. What's the big deal of driving his four-wheeler out and rescuing him then? He didn't bring anybody into hazard with what he was doing. We don't live our lives to avoid bureaucratic mandates of what your job description is to go in and do something or not do something. Put it on yourself. You're going to sit there and tell me... Do you have children?

Q: Yes.

SEAN PENN: You never corrupted them or fucked them up in any way with any of your shit? There's no such thing as that. Alright, so who's a bigger fuckup: Chris McCandless for hurting himself or you for hurting your kids? We've all got our shit, and me too, by the way. I'm not attacking you. I'm saying that the point of this thing is the heroism of this will and this courage that this young man had. All the rest of it is somebody else's folly for me.

Q: I don’t want you to misunderstand me. I was criticizing him more than the movie.

SEAN PENN: No, I understand and fair enough because I don’t argue that he isn’t a flawed person and I think you’re misinterpreting the movie to say that. Again, that’s not what this movie is about and I don’t think objective and subjective applies to a poem, and I think that’s what he left behind.

Q: Eddie, what would you say in 20 years if your daughter wanted to go on a trip like the one Chris McCandless took? What kind of support would you give her?

EDDIE VEDDER: Well, the initial reaction is to send a security guard along, keeping him 50 yards away to keep an eye on her at all times. I can only encourage that at this point. I know that no matter what I do, and already she's 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 these places six, seven times, and she's already beyond me as far as her comfortability around other people to this day for me. So with all that, even though I think she's going to have a really great upbringing and I'm trying to break any kind of 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 just encourage that.

Q: Has the family seen the movie and have they shared their insights and emotions felt after watching it?

SEAN PENN: Oh yes, I can't go to the point of disclosing private conversations with them. I mean this was an incredibly selfless and brave thing in my view for them to allow his story to be shared, but at the end of the day I'm always aware that 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 they loved dying, so this is not a pleasant experience for them. I hope that it will be a healing one and I know that they're very supportive of it. It's one of the trickiest things involved in making a movie like this. It’s the double-edged sword of making speculations about someone you didn't know, Chris, and about being trusted in the hands of his parents on such a triumphant but difficult story. So I like to think - they're people that I - in my time with them, which was a different time in their life, a different stage, these are people I consider friends of mine and I have a great respect for a very intelligent, very caring people. I did have their help throughout, and I would call it all to the degree a partnership with Carine, Chris' sister.

Q: What qualities did Emile have that made you trust him with such an important role?

SEAN PENN: He's got a love talent. You used to be able to get some pretty intriguing brooders you know out of the young generation, or whatever that was, and then today you can get the clever and the witty and the sexy and the charming and the this and that, but none of those things happen to be the proper tool for this kit. I needed somebody who had a talent and a mug and a will, and also to photograph somebody going from boy to man, so you're catching somebody on that cusp. So it was all those things that Emile had that I don't know another who has.

Q: Why did you choose to show the brother-sister bond so strongly and have her narrate the story when he never contacted her during his entire journey?

SEAN PENN: Because I knew it to be so from the letters that he had written her previously, from memory -- letters that are not copied in either the movie or the book, things that remain private. But it's not an idle claim that she - it in my view represents what the relationship was. I think that the answer is in the film. I think that in the narration she answers it, but it seems to me that that was the closest I could get to the truth of what that relationship was.

Q: What were the physical challenges you faced directing this movie?

SEAN PENN: The physical challenges were production physical. The older and older that I’m getting, I was so exhilarated making this movie. We ran this movie in a way where if we were on the day searching out a location, because something shifted in the weather from what I’d planned, we got pretty quickly to the point where my crew, with me in the front of a boat, going down the Grand Canyon - my crew behind me would start to giggle as soon as we saw the most impossible mountain or cliff side to climb, because they knew that we have to go up there and shoot from there. I was going to trust that what energized me was not just going to be an indulgence, but it was going to be what this journey should be for us making it and that would fall onto the film. And so I pursued those things. If we got a giggly shoulder looking at something, and now we had 572 pounds at least of equipment to get up there, well that's what we were going to do. But that was exhilarating. So the physical challenge was not - it's like if you woke me up at 7 o'clock this morning and I woke up on a football field and they said, "Hike, go!,” that would be a problem, but we were pretty much warmed up before we went to start.

Q: What would you like an audience to take from this film?

SEAN PENN: Whatever they want to, good or bad.

Q: Eddie, what is the most gratifying part of fatherhood for you and how has it changed or affected you?

EDDIE VEDDER: I'm still thinking about the other question about what would I do if she wanted to go on our own. I don't know what I'm going to be able to say when she's going to see pictures of me hanging 30 feet off a raft or over a crowd. There's nothing I'm going to be able to say, and I think she'll survive all that just like I did. I think when I had a child everyone was going to tell me I was going to see the world through her eyes and everything was going to get this nice gloss to it, hazy images and butterflies were going to look more Technicolor and I kept waiting for that to happen and then thought there was a real problem with me that it wasn't. And then I realized that I was getting more angry, that it was the exact opposite, and maybe it's because of the times and what was happening three years ago and what's still happening. As a band we've maintained a level of activism as citizens of our country and tried to point out things that we thought were - point out injustice and see if we could get other people to act, but it was based on how we felt as band members and what we thought was wrong. And all of a sudden I saw the world as it was her world that they were fucking with. It was her world and that really pissed me off. So it was a different reaction. It wasn't the glowy, lovey-dovey. It fueled my anger. Strange.

SEAN PENN: Meanwhile I'm sitting here thinking of what that Viagra commercial could be and I come up with, "What do you call it Johnny?” "I call it Jeremy.” (sings) "Jeremy's spoken.”

[Laughter]

EDDIE VEDDER: There's another one too - (hums a melody that continues to increase in intensity)

[More laughter]

Q: In both the book and the movie, Chris’ time in Mexico is left sort of vague. Is there a reason for that?

SEAN PENN: One of the significant things about it to Chris, from what I can put together from the book and whatever I followed up with, was just his disappointment in the natural flow of things being interrupted, the damming of the river, braiding it off into these irrigation canals, and all of that. And I think that in the flow of it I didn't question it all that much. It was just a piece of the story that was part of the fabric that hit me and stayed in. That's all.

Q: It’s obvious you have much to say as a person and as an artist. How carefully do you have to dance and decide at which level or to what extent you want to articulate your views both artistically in your films and as a visible member of the entertainment industry?

Q: Eddie, do you have any plans to perform this live and are you planning a solo tour?

EDDIE VEDDER: I'd like to play I think - there might be a few requests for these songs that might come in. No plans, like I said making art with Sean was I feel like a gift, but I might just take some time off. You know, it's like if you afford yourself to buy a nice chair, what's the point if you never get to sit in it? So I might just take some time with my kid.

Q: What was your song writing process on this film? Were you given cuts of the film and did you write the music for specific scenes or did you just have the theme and went for a general mood? And how long did it take you to knock out the soundtrack for it?

Q: If Alaska hadn't been the climax of Chris' life, what would have come next? What would he be doing now?

SEAN PENN: For what it's worth, what I think, my romantic vision of it is he's doing what John Krakauer is doing. He'd be writing, he'd be adventuring more and writing about it more, but your guess is as good as mine beyond that.

EDDIE VEDDER: One of the directions that Sean gave me on - he's leaving the bus before he gets to the river and the river is overflowing -- just a short little note he sent up, and he said, "On this scene, don't be afraid to be too literal with the lyrics. He knows he's leaving, he knows he's leaving the bus, and he's not going back to his parents, and he's not going back to fuck the 16 year old girl” and then in parentheses "I don't know why.”

[Laughter]

SEAN PENN: (laughing, pointing to the journalist who brought up the Park Ranger in an earlier question) I know you're going to quote that one.

Q: I was impressed how you honored the book, but were there areas where you felt you had to stray from it?

"Into the Wild” opens in theaters on September 21^st