Into the Wild
Alaska calling….
Sean Penn’s new film Into the Wild, is catching on all over the country. Its about a young man (Emile Hirsch) who decides to step off the grid after graduating college — hitchhiking his way to Alaska to live, and die, in the wilderness. It went on limited release September 21st.
Based on the book of the same name, Into the Wild
McCandless was an adventurer who celebrated his college graduation by destroying his driver’s license and his social security card. Hitting the open road, and intending to turn his back on his family, he later abandoned his car, burned all his money, and set out on foot to traverse the continent. He kayaked down the Colorado River to Mexico, hopped trains and hitchhiked back north up the coast, then trudged beyond the outer limits of civilization to spend more than 100 days in the rural northern territory of Alaska. His body was discovered in the Alaskan wilderness by two buffalo hunters in 1992.
Rites of Passage
Some early audiences were divided in their reactions to McCandless’s character, disputing his choices and motivations despite the fact that the film is based on real events and McCandless’s actual writings about his rite of passage. Penn told Time magazine: “I really think that we shouldn’t just accept rites-of-passage opportunities as they come, because what we’ll find is that they don’t come in our world anymore. And we shouldn’t look at them as a kind of luxury or romantic dream but as something vital to being alive. McCandless quotes somebody else in the movie: “If just once you put yourself in the most ancient of circumstances …” This is where nature comes into it–and I think that every sober-minded person of any belief would probably agree that the biggest issue is quality of life. You’ve gotta feel your own life to have a quality of life, and our own inauthenticity, our corruptions, get in the way of that. The wilderness is relentlessly authentic.”
McCandless had turned his back on the world, a sentiment to which Emile Hirsch, who prepared for the role by pursuing his own form of solitude, tried mightily to relate.
“When you start spending a lot of time alone, you discover this new sense of morality within yourself, a morality you would never find when you are constantly comparing your morals to people around you,” Hirsch said at a film festival press conference. “You start to make your own choices, you decide where it is that you want to go, and certain things finally come into perspective. What you care about starts to become really apparent, and it’s really kind of exhilarating to be set free of expectations.”
In the case of McCandless, as is obvious from his journal entries and from the commentary of his sister, which Penn inserts into the film almost as a counter-narration, his sense of morality involved a closeness with nature, a rejection of society’s superficiality, and a freedom from all things monetary. Hirsch said McCandless’s story rebuffs many of today’s conventional attitudes.
Sense of Adventure
“There’s this sense for adventure that we all crave, but we live in a culture today where these rites of passage are hard to come by,” Hirsch said. “It doesn’t surprise me that, in this world of technology and rules, people are really intrigued and divided by something so deeply rooted in nature - something so different from how they live. Our survival instincts aren’t being put to use enough, and that’s what I’ve felt in my life, this wanderlust to challenge myself, which Chris must have felt too.”
Hirsch found the challenge he was looking for during the film’s arduous, lengthy shoot, which whisked him across the continent and tethered him to a supportive but fiercely demanding director in Penn. With a shooting schedule of more than 100 days, including four trips to Alaska, kayaking in the Grand Canyon, and an intimidating scene involving a grizzly bear, Hirsch said there was an informality to the cast and crew, as they journeyed together between the Alaskan snow and the 120-degree desert heat of Nevada, that he found refreshing. He also said the grueling trek - following the same route that McCandless took during his journey - helped him connect to the character in ways that working on a set would not have allowed.
“It’s kind of like Marlon Brando, who famously said during ‘On the Waterfront’ that, in a freezing Hoboken, New Jersey, it was ‘too cold to overact,’” he said. “Nature is so authentic that you can’t help but be a little more authentic when you’re in it.”
Personal Journey
Penn told Time magazine: “ My Uncle Bill, who was dying–with 13 cousins that he had all with my Aunt Joan, they had a great, happy marriage for all their years. So there he is on his deathbed. He’d been in a coma a couple of days, and a priest has come in to give last rites. This was the first time, Irish that they are, that my aunt let a tear fall, trusting that his coma would make him unaware of it. Well, open come the eyes, and he sees. He catches her–she can’t get away with it. And his last words were “What’re ya crying about? You’re gonna die too.” Chris McCandless lived too short, that’s true, but he, in my view, put an entire life from birth to the wisdom of age into those years.
The filmmakers originally looked to set up shop in places they could use as production bases — Vancouver and/or Salt Lake City — but it wasn’t clicking for Penn.
“Sean finally decided that no, this movie has to take place in Alaska,” said John Kelly, unit production manager and an executive producer on the film. “And we’re going to go to South Dakota, we’re going to go to Emory University (in Atlanta), we’re going to shoot these places the way they happened.”
Making of “Into the Wild”
Using the book as a guide, the filmmakers went to the locations it described. They studied photos that McCandless took — photos discovered by his family on undeveloped film after his death — and matched up mountains and ranges as best they could. And as much as they could, they went to the same spots as McCandless did, experiencing the harsh desert conditions of Lake Mead, Nev., and the swamp-muck of springtime in Alaska.
The movie shot last year from late April-November in a schedule that tried to balance the seasons described in the book and Hirsch’s weight loss as McCandless starves.
But reality also seeped into the movie in another way: The real people whose lives were touched by McCandless ended up involved in the film, on and off screen. In Alaska, McCandless was dropped off on a road named the Stampede Trail by a fellow named Jim Gallien.
“Sean had us go find (the real) Jim Gallien, and he plays himself in the movie and drops (Hirsch) off at the same spot he really dropped (McCandless) off,” Kelly says.
The production went to Carthage, N.D., where McCandless spent time working for Wayne Westerberg (Vince Vaughn). In Carthage, Westerberg ended up working as a driver on the movie.
In Yuma, Ariz., at the same border crossing McCandless traversed 15 years earlier, Penn — who had secured permission from the government to shoot there — engaged as an actor a guard who had worked at the station back when the real young man had crossed the border.
The production used actual homeless people for the downtown Los Angeles shelter scene, giving the transients food and a fee and making a donation to the area. At a hippie commune McCandless resided at called Slab City, the production engaged locals as extras and actors.
Not everything, however, could be done the way McCandless lived it, especially the Alaska-set abandoned bus sequences, which presented many logistical challenges. While the actual bus still exists and has become something of a pilgrimage site for hard-core hikers, the production located a similar site where, after getting the OK from a tribal council and federal officials, they brought in a duplicate bus discovered in a backyard.
But just as the journey touched the soul of McCandless, the journey of making this film all over the country touched the filmmakers. Penn, Kelly and others ended up keeping in touch with many of the people they came across, and they were saddened to learn that Insane Wayne, one of the Slab City commune members, died Sunday of a heart attack.
“That’s the magic of this movie: It was so very un-Hollywood,” Kelly said. “It was a group of people doing their own small film, but on a grander scale.”
Concluded executive producer Frank Hildebrand: “It mirrored (McCandless’) trip in many way and his trials. It was well worth it, and we came away with a healthy respect for what he did. In the path of what we did, he led us to these magnificent locations. And while it was challenging logistically, it was visually stunning and we saw some of the most beautiful parts in America.”
The back-to-nature film has generated good buzz and also stars Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Hal Holbrook and Catherine Keener.
