The actor Emile Hirsch crash-dieted and allowed
himself to be abandoned in the Alaskan wilderness for a film that
its director Sean Penn fought for 10 years to make. Craig McLean
talks to Hirsch about the true story that became an obsession.
Photograph by Patrick Hoelck
A 22-year-old hunches by his car on a riverbed in the Mojave
Desert in Nevada. Last night, as he slept inside, a flash flood
buffeted the old yellow Datsun. The secondhand banger had seen him
through high school in Virginia and university in Georgia. But this
morning he is unscrewing the licence plates and burning a small pile
of dollar bills. He has already donated the remainder of his college
fund – some $24,000, to have seen him through Harvard Law School –
to Oxfam. The acoustic guitar his mother bought him when he was a
baby lies abandoned on the car's back seat.  | | Emile Hirsch: ‘I wanted to give everything I could to
try to capture elements of what has become a very controversial character’ |
It is July 1990, and Chris McCandless, thrilled rather than
daunted by almost being washed away in a flood, is about to walk off
into the American wilderness. He doesn't want to be found, and
he doesn't want any help. McCandless, a literature-loving
romantic and dreamer, wants to live on no one's terms but his own. For two years he hitchhiked and camped his way around America,
eking out a hand-to-mouth existence. He even took a new name,
Alexander Supertramp. But this adventure was just the preamble to
his real adventure. In April 1992 McCandless, a disciple of Jack
London and Henry David Thoreau's prelapsarian tract Walden,
backpacked to Alaska. His dream: to live a life of simplicity, at
one with nature, living off what he could forage or kill. He took
neither map nor basic life-saving equipment. Four months later he
was dead, seemingly poisoned by the wild plants on which he had
struggled to survive. McCandless trekked into the wild and never
came back. 'If Chris McCandless had had a rough family life and had
decided to make trains in a basement for the rest of his life by
himself, no one would have cared,' says Emile Hirsch, the actor
who, in a career-making performance, plays McCandless in the
director Sean Penn's film Into the Wild.
'It's not the flight,' the 22-year-old Californian
continues, 'it's what he's pursuing that people, I
think, really identify with. It's the wanderlust.' Penn has been obsessed with McCandless's extraordinary story
since reading Into the Wild, the journalist Jon Krakauer's
account of the young man's life and death. Krakauer had
originally written about him in an article for Outside magazine; the
1996 book, for which he drew on McCandless's journals and
interviews with his family and the people he encountered on his
travels, became a bestseller. 'I thought the story was
instantly indelible and deeply cinematic in its characters and its
landscape in every way,' Penn says. 'It hit the same nerve
with me that I think it hit with most people who read it.' It would take Penn the better part of 10 years to secure the film
rights to McCandless's story. For most of that time
McCandless's family were too grief-stricken to contemplate
seeing their son's final journey on the big screen. But
finally, in mid-2005, his parents relented. Then began Penn's search for an actor who could play his
troubled hero, someone who had to fill an awful lot of screen time,
often on his own, often with no lines of dialogue, who possessed the
spirit and the physical toughness to ride out what would be a long,
arduous shoot. 'I needed somebody who had a talent and a mug and a
will,' Penn has said of his trawl through the ranks of young
Hollywood actors, '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.' Over breakfast in a New York hotel, Hirsch offers this take on why
Penn picked him: 'I think probably the ultimate reason why I
got the part had nothing to do with me being good at reading lines
or anything like that. I think Sean knew that I responded to the
story so strongly that I was going to be ready to commit to it in
the way that he was committed to it. That I was going to be ready to
go through a lot of dangerous stuff, to do all the physical
requirements. I wasn't going to shortchange what we both
thought could be a really special story.' Hirsch began preparing for the role in January 2006. He ran,
lifted weights and dieted. He read Krakauer's book, as well as
authors that meant a lot to McCandless, including London, Thoreau,
Tolstoy and Pasternak. He also read Jack Kerouac's On the Road.
'Into the Wild is like On the Road without all the
Benzedrine,' Hirsch chuckles before revealing that he has just
auditioned for a part in the long-mooted film adaptation of the Beat
classic, to be directed by Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries)
and produced by Francis Ford Coppola. | 
