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Sean Penn Takes Us Into the Wild
By Fred Topel | Image property of Paramount Vantage.
Into the Wild
Penn on Into the Wild
"I'd read that poem some years before," Penn explained. "It really stuck with me and got me into reading her stuff entirely. She's a great writer. That one just struck me for some reason because I'm a lucky boy with parents. I'm in a supportive, loving family in that way. But I'm going to [guess] 92 % of my friends throughout growing [up] and today didn't have [that]. It seemed so acute to have that sense of want."
McCandless died in 1992 and Krakauer's book was published in 1996. Penn combined many creative forces in developing the film. "When I started to write, the poem had probably been in my head for about five years but the book had been [for] about 10 years. When I started writing it, I got to about page three and that poem just jabbed me. So it was a way into something early in the picture. Then I quickly wanted to make sure I could use it if I was going to go on that road. So I called my partner, Art Linson, we'd bought the rights of the book together, and said, 'Can I get in touch with this poet Sharon Olds and see if we could get the rights to it?' I called him right back and said, 'As long as she's a woman and a great writer, I might to see if I could get her consultation on the narration at the end when I'm in post-production.' I'd written the narration already but by that time but I knew I was going to want a woman's touch, and in particular, that woman's, if I could get it. So we made an overall deal with Sharon. I finished the script and then came back at the end when I'd recorded all of my original narration with Jena [Malone] prior to shooting, with timings and so on. Then I got Jena and Carine McCandless and Sharon and myself in a recording studio in San Francisco and we did our final kind of spinaround. Got it to be better and more with a woman's voice."
The framing device involves Carine McCandless telling her brother's story, lamenting that despite their sibling love, he chose to abandon all contact with his entire family. "I knew it to be so from the letters that he had written her previously, from memory. Letters that are know copied in either the movie or the book, things that remain private. But it's not an idle claim. It in my view represents what the relationship was. I think that the answer is in the film, I think that she in the narration answers it, but it seems to me that that was the closest I could get to the truth of what that relationship was."
Penn also let music inform McCandless's journey, hiring Eddie Vedder for the film's soundtrack. "We go back quite a ways, back to Dead Man Walking. It may 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 his voice. On this thing, I'd written a script to be, in part, told by song. So I'd left out narrative in those transitional sequences knowing just the seed of what I needed from the songs to close those gaps. It was about halfway through shooting really through Emile's performance that I started feeling, this is it. This is Eddie's voice. This is the musical soul, the voice of what Emile was bringing."
Into the Wild opens to theaters on September 21st.
For the trailer and more movie info, go to the Into the Wild Movie Page.
Fred Topel
Sources: Image property of Paramount Vantage.
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