Into The Wild

[MacGuffin]

Trailer here.

Release Date: September 21st, 2007 (limited)

Starring: Emile Hirsch, Catherine Keener, Vince Vaughn, William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden 

Directed by: Sean Penn 

Premise: Based on a true story of one young man's tragic 'return to nature'. After graduating from Emory University in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless bandons his possessions, gave his entire $24,000 savings account to charity and hitchhiked to Alaska to live in the wilderness. Along the way, Christopher encounters a series of characters that shape his life.

[john]

I've been excited about this for a while and the trailer did nothing to diminish that excitement.

Partly because I read the book a few years back on my mother's unending recommendation and enjoyed it quite a bit... if enjoyment can even be the right word for it.

But mostly because it's a new Sean Penn film and his filmography has been pretty much spotless. I was just thinking about The Indian Runner yesterday, actually, and how absurdly underrated that film is... though the same could apply to his other two, as well.

Doesn't hurt that the cast looks tops...

Zach Galifianakis and Patton Oswalt both ended up in good movies this year, which is nice.

[72teeth]

Zach Galifianakis and Patton Oswalt both ended up in good movies this year, which is nice.

And Paul F. Tompkins.... dont forget about Paul F. Tompkins...

and Posehn was in Fantastic 4...!

dont stone me.

[john]

Ha! I forgot about Tompkins... it's the trifecta.

And I might have to rent Fantastic 4 just for the strange geek synergy that occurs when watching a comic book nerd in a comic book film, as a former comic book nerd who enjoys the work of the comic also happens to be the comic book nerd. Or something to that effect.

[Redlum]

I remembered this film just this morning, when I came across the book on my shelf. Just thinking about the whole sorry affair sent a shiver up my spine. A 'Grizzly Man' kind of shiver.
I'm not entirely sure that this film is going to capture that aspect (I'd imagined the bus to be treated with a bit more reverance and not like Runaway Train with Jon Voight).

...But the trailer doesnt entirely rule out the possibility of this being somethingelse.

[mogwai]

Eddie Vedder to score Sean Penn film

Pearl Jam frontman pens several original songs

Eddie Vedder has reportedly written several original songs for a film directed by Sean Penn that is due out this fall.

The Pearl Jam frontman wrote almost an entire album's worth of songs for 'Into The Wild', which also features contributions from Academy Award-winning composer Gustavo Santaolla (Brokeback Mountain, Babel), reports the Playlist.

Vedder will also have a small role in the film, which stars actor Emile Hirsch and is based on the John Krakauer novel of the same name.

It is Vedder's first acting role since 1992's 'Singles'.

The film is due to be released in the US on September 21.

[polkablues]

This just catapulted to Best Non-Dedicated-Xixax-Forum-Directed Film of the Year (So Far).

[Bethie]

Suddenly, I'm interested.

[ProgWRX]

the trailer looks great, thats for sure.

[elpablo]

I was pretty excited when I first heard about this. I had to read the book in high school and enjoyed it a lot. The trailer made the story look a lot more positive and hopeful than it really is. Along with Grizzly Man, I really like the stories of these guys who just don't fit in in a normal society, and the argument of whether they're crazy or just different. I really hope that Sean Penn manages to capture that the way Krakauer did in the book and the way Herzog did in Grizzly Man.

[Pubrick]

Along with Grizzly Man, I really like the stories of these guys who just don't fit in in a normal society, and the argument of whether they're crazy or just different. I really hope that Sean Penn manages to capture that the way Krakauer did in the book and the way Herzog did in Grizzly Man.

but grizzly man was crazy.

[elpablo]

That's true (arguably). But Christopher McCandless is more in the middle, if not more "just different" (arguably). That's why I hope Penn portrays this properly and opens up discussion the way the book does.

[Redlum]

http://www.aintitcool.com/node/33589

An extremely positive review by Moriarty.

INTO THE WILD, based on the non-fiction book by Jon Krakauer, is an emotional powerhouse, a film of great wisdom and real experience. It's also the arrival of Emile Hirsch as a movie star, and I think it may well change the way the industry thinks of Penn as a filmmaker. It should, anyway, and I hope this one finds as broad an audience as possible. He's pulled off something very difficult here, taking a frustrating, potentially depressing story and turning into a film that feels celebratory, uplifting, exhilarating at every turn.

[MacGuffin]

Quest of a lifetime
After a long wait, Sean Penn gets 'Into the Wild,' his vision of a tragic, triumphant nomad. And one adventurer takes on another.
Source: Los Angeles Times

*READ AT OWN RISK*

FACED with an intractable movie project, producers typically rely on a number of familiar strongarm tactics. Some throw money -- tons of money -- at the problem. Others play the celebrity card -- "Brad Pitt's gonna star!" -- confident a big name will somehow get things moving. A few will simply grind away for as long as it takes, beating all obstacles into submission. Sean Penn tried a different tactic when he set out to bring "Into the Wild," the extraordinary and heartbreaking biography of a young wayfarer, to the screen. "I was willing," Penn says, "to take no for an answer." Penn's diplomatic patience ultimately prevailed. When the parents of Christopher McCandless, a 24-year-old who died of starvation in the Alaskan wilderness in 1992, finally decided it was time to let Hollywood tell their son's story, Penn got the call. The resulting film (opening Sept. 21), which Penn wrote, produced and directed, not only brings to visual life Jon Krakauer's bestselling 1996 book about McCandless but also offers up a more sympathetic view of the young man at its center.

If Krakauer in some measure depicted McCandless as a stubborn romantic doomed by blunders of inexperience at best and arrogance at worst, Penn isn't interested in his mistakes. Instead, he gives us a modern-day John Muir, a determined young man enthralled by nature's powerful beauty.

"I think the movie is more representative of the spirit of who he was," says Emile Hirsch, the 22-year-old "Lords of Dogtown" star who plays McCandless in Penn's film. "It doesn't judge him."

As the adventure journalist Krakauer recounted in a 1993 Outside magazine story and his subsequent bestseller, McCandless grew up in a wealthy but troubled Virginia family; when his parents weren't fighting, they were working around the clock. After graduating with honors from Emory University in Atlanta, McCandless donated nearly $25,000 of his life savings to Oxfam, ditched his car and most of his possessions, cut off ties to his family and hit the road.

It's impossible to pinpoint a specific incident that prompted his break. McCandless had been devastated by his father's philandering and was equally upset over his parents' -- and the world's -- capitalistic obsessions. His sister Carine says Chris craved truth and purity but couldn't locate either in his own suburban surroundings. "But he was confident he could find them in nature," Carine says.

Calling himself Alexander Supertramp, McCandless crisscrossed the southwestern United States by hitchhiking, jumping freights and kayaking, always searching for what he considered authentic living and relationships -- "ultimate freedom," in his words.

Influenced by the books of Leo Tolstoy, Jack London, Henry David Thoreau and Boris Pasternak, McCandless came to believe that risk and contentment were resolutely intertwined; nothing good came without sacrifice.

"So many people," he wrote in one letter, "live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity and conservatism, all of which appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future."

As the decisive test of his own convictions, McCandless in early 1992 hiked into the rough country not far from Alaska's Mt. McKinley. He intentionally traveled with few provisions and no good map, eventually making his home in an abandoned school bus. Had he not eaten poisonous wild plants, he might have made it.

When a group of hunters discovered his emaciated body four months later, McCandless had with him a report of his more than 110 days in the wilderness, an often joyful journal of discoveries and setbacks that also revealed a personal -- but sadly unrealized -- epiphany. Rather than continue to live separately from the world, McCandless concluded, he was now ready to be a part of it. Highlighting a passage from Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago," the last book he ever read, McCandless noted, "Happiness only real when shared."

The long wait

NOT surprisingly, Krakauer's mesmeric account of McCandless' wayfaring life and final days attracted a flood of filmmakers and producers, many of whom -- Penn included -- came calling on Walt and Billie McCandless to try to obtain rights to their son's story. The parents, Penn says, weren't interested, especially Billie.

As Penn and Carine McCandless say, Billie interpreted a dream she had about Chris as a message that he didn't want a movie made. "That shut it down," Penn says while steering his Shelby GT around Mill Valley, near where he lives and edited the film. "I took that for an answer, telling her that if I didn't respect dreams, I wouldn't make movies."

Penn thus had to shelve his initial casting plans -- Leonardo DiCaprio as Chris and Marlon Brando as Ron Franz, a father figure Chris met near the Salton Sea -- and bide his time. He and the McCandless family exchanged the occasional holiday card over the years, but an "Into the Wild" movie appeared unlikely. Then after nearly a decade had passed since the book's publication, a lawyer for the family called Penn, wondering if he were still interested. Of course he was.

"Ultimately, there is something very selfless about their decision to do it," Penn says of the family. "It's one thing to lose a son. It's another thing to hold yourself accountable to being a part of that."

Hirsch was in elementary school when he saw a "20/20" segment on McCandless and Krakauer. "I was probably 9 years old," Hirsch says from Berlin, where he's nearly done filming "Speed Racer." "It made a huge impression on me -- the idea of someone going out alone and dying alone. It's kind of hard to comprehend as a kid. It was a terrifying thing at the time. I never forgot it."

The ABC news magazine also included a not widely circulated photograph of McCandless (which is not in Krakauer's book). It is a picture he took of himself just days before his death, and in it he is holding up his farewell note and seemingly waving goodbye. "I have had a happy life and thank the lord. Goodbye and may God bless all," the note read.

The picture doesn't appear in the movie either, but it very much guided Penn's script and direction. "It's a beautiful picture," Penn says over lunch. "But it's also disturbing. His fingers are as thin as a concentration camp survivor's. He is so gaunt -- truly emaciated. But there is a light in his eyes that is truly startling. It influenced the whole movie." Rather than see McCandless as a victim of his own naivete, as did many readers of Krakauer's writings, Penn viewed him as a brave young man at peace with his own accomplishments.

In trying to capture the serene character of McCandless' wanderlust, Penn decided that he had to retrace as much of McCandless' two-year sojourn as possible, rather than try to shoot the movie in and around Utah, as was first considered.

Over the course of seven months (with some breaks, especially so Hirsch could shed more than 40 pounds from his already lean 156-pound frame for the final scenes), Penn and his relatively small crew hit Cantwell, Ala.; California's Anza-Borrego Desert State Park; Sonora, Mexico; and two dozen points in between. For a fleeting shot of a dolphin swimming underneath McCandless' kayak, Penn's cameras went to Catalina Island for a day.

Carine McCandless had shown Penn many of her brother's possessions, some of which he photographed, including a leather jacket that hangs in her closet. When Carine visited the "Into the Wild" set in South Dakota, Hirsch approached her, wearing an exact duplicate of the jacket. "He was Chris," Carine says.

"Sean in his heart was not going to do things for any other reason than to get at the truth as he saw it," says Art Linson, one of the film's producers. Indeed, Penn invented few scenes; one exception is McCandless almost calling home from the road. "I don't think there's anything in that scene other than something I feel very strongly about," Penn says. "And that is that this person had very strong attachments and was working very hard to shed those things."

But unlike Krakauer's book, which Penn feels errs on the side of being sensitive to the parents' concerns, Penn's movie is more unflinching toward them, particularly in what role they might have played in their son's decision to renounce them.

"I think they should be very pleased with how kind Sean was," Carine says of her parents, who could not be reached for comment. "It's impossible to be fair to Chris without being critical of my parents. But [Sean] had to walk a fine line. He had to be fair to Chris but also respect Mom and Dad, because they let him do this movie."

'Ups and downs'

PENN says the first screening for the family went well but that the second showing (in which the film had changed somewhat) was difficult.

"It was an open consultation from the beginning to the end," Penn says of his relationship with the McCandless family. "They had their chance to tell me what they thought of it. It wasn't very easy. There were upsetting things. We had our ups and downs. But I stand by what I did, because I think it's truthful. I think you would be hard-pressed to find a more authentic adaptation of a book in the last 10 years."

Hirsch says his access to the parents and Carine was critical in shaping how he depicted Chris McCandless. "It's easy to pigeonhole him. There are impressions of Chris that are not fully correct -- that maybe he was this hippie-like dreamer," Hirsch says. "He had a lot more anger than people kind of ever knew. I think he had a dark side -- but he was so positive because he was trying to overcome that. He had demons."

Producer Bill Pohlad, the "Brokeback Mountain" backer who co-financed "Into the Wild" with Paramount Vantage, agrees with Hirsch's assessment. "I don't think the film goes overboard in trying to make Chris a hero," he says. "No one is ever going to know what actually was going on with Chris. The book takes a journalistic approach, whereas the film takes a very personal approach -- it singles out Chris' story."

As he drives back from lunch in his muscle car, Penn either doesn't have the words or doesn't want to say why McCandless moved him so deeply that he was willing to wait for "Into the Wild" for a decade. But it's clear he admires how much the young man accomplished in just two dozen years walking the earth.

"His triumph," Penn says, "is that he lived a full life."

[MacGuffin]

Vedder, sans Pearl Jam
When Sean Penn asked for soundtrack help, the sparks ignited for the Pearl Jam frontman.
Source: Los Angeles Times

TORONTO -- The soundtrack to Sean Penn's "Into the Wild" is Eddie Vedder's first solo album, but he can't take all the credit. True, he played most of the instruments, sings nearly every note and wrote nine of the album's 11 songs. But when he tries to remember where the songs came from, he draws a blank.

"I don't remember a damn thing about it," he says over coffee and cigarettes at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the film recently had its world premiere. "It just kind of flew out. It felt like other things were at work. Things came through, musically and lyrically, that I really didn't have to do too much work on. It felt more like just grabbing sparks around my head and putting them on the fire."

What began with Penn's request for a handful of songs to fit into his nearly complete film grew almost by accident into a brief but cohesive album that recapitulates the movie's journey in miniature.

"Into the Wild" is based on the true story of Chris McCandless, the young Virginia man who starved to death in the Alaska wilderness two years after giving his life savings to charity and severing all ties with his family. Although the Pearl Jam frontman more often retreats to the surf than the wilderness, he connected deeply with McCandless' prickly idealism. On "Long Nights," he channels McCandless' Thoreau-inspired desire to exile himself from the evils of the world, singing, "Have no fear, for when I'm alone, I'll be better off than I was before."

Vedder was struck early, and forcefully, by similarities between McCandless' life story and his own. When he was 18, McCandless discovered that his father, Walt, was already married when he married his mother and had fathered another child with his first wife after Chris' birth.

At 17, Vedder's nuclear family imploded when he learned that the man he had been raised to believe was his father was in fact his stepfather and that his real father had died several years earlier. (The revelation is recounted in "Alive," one of Pearl Jam's early singles.) Although he declines to revisit the past in detail, Vedder makes it clear that he drew on his own experience to inform McCandless' inner monologue. "I had things that I hated having gone through as a young adult that just happened to serve me very well for this job," he says.

When he began to record the music for "Into the Wild," Vedder assumed that his one-man-band versions would eventually be fleshed out. But the songs fell into place with so little time and effort that soliciting outside contributions seemed unnecessary, even counterproductive.

"I thought we'd call in real musicians at some point," he says. "But there's something about not having to explain the part to somebody, not just the part but the direction, the meaning, the soul of whatever the song was. You'd just grab the bass and do it."

Rustic, intimate and compact, the "Into the Wild" soundtrack is a marked departure from Pearl Jam's stadium-size rock, embellished with banjo, mandolin and pump organ, a sound inspired by the movie's outdoor settings. But despite its sparseness, the album has room for intricate textures, like the chiming 12-string guitar of "Setting Forth" and the tribal thwack of the drums on "Hard Sun," which also features Sleater-Kinney's Corin Tucker on harmony vocals. Vedder drew inspiration from Pete Townshend's oft-bootlegged demos for "Who's Next," which he listened to obsessively as a teenager.

When lead singers start releasing solo albums, the rest of the band traditionally starts double-checking their retirement plans. But Vedder points out that he is the last of Pearl Jam's five members to release his own record. "I was the holdout," he says. "We've been a group for a long time, and we will continue to be so, I hope, for a really long time."

But with Pearl Jam lying dormant while two members care for newborn daughters, Vedder is mulling the possibility of playing a few shows on his own, preferably at venues more intimate than the band's usual arenas. "If you surf 50-foot waves all the time, you can't try too many new things, because 50-foot waves are kind of life and death," he says. "Playing big shows is like that. So you want to take on some smaller waves to rework or refine what you do, and then take it back to the big surf."