Film interview - Into The Wild – Sean Penn Interview part two

Sean Penn discusses why he feels travelling should be a rite of passage for every young person and why working with the likes of Terrence Malick and Clint Eastwood has helped him to shape his own directorial path…

Do you view the film as a kind of call to arms to go travelling, especially to the younger generation? Do you see travelling as an essential rite of passage?
Sean Penn: Yes, I do think it's essential. I'm not going to recommend recklessness but somewhere just short of it – testing yourself and proactively pursuing a rite of passage has become necessary because in Western developed countries we've become very comfort-addicted. You can live to 80 years old on Facebook every day and be dead all 80 years, or you can go out and maybe even risk your life and really f***ing live it. I have children and I don't want them to be reckless but I'm for it. I hope we encourage kids to go out and do it.

Is one of the subtexts of the film that this is an America most of us will never see – and here's a chance to see it?
Sean Penn: It's a foreground of my feeling. That place moves me. And I don't mean my country; it's part of our shared natural world that happens to be particular to a sense of wherever my storytelling inclinations come from and my own history of kind of being a road rat and travelling. But part of the way the film looks stems from the fact that I found a partner in [cinematographer] Eric Gautier who was almost the sophisticated, artful and talented version of taking your kid out on the highway on a road trip for the first time. He'd never seen America between the coasts before, so you have this incredible artist coming in who gets to take all of his skills and just see it with a baby's eyes. I'd have this notion sometimes but he'd say: "And this... look at that!" That was exciting to do.

Do you feel you have managed to adopt new skills as a director from the time you've spent working in front of the camera and seeing other filmmakers at work?
Sean Penn: Look, here's the thing. The advice you give to young directors for sure is to go out and become some version of a successful movie actor. Do that first and say yes to people like Terrence Malick and Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen when they come and offer you movies. It's a great front-row seat to filmmaking [laughs]. Whatever I was able to do with those experiences certainly contribute to whatever I'm able to do as a director. The corruption in that is that most of what I acted in the last 10 years was to steal film school time from these guys. Those were the people I thought I could learn from as a director.

In the 15 years since Christopher McCandless has died he's become a legend. Do you see the film as building on that legend or rather more looking at the humanity of this guy and his courage?
Sean Penn: Well, I'm pretty anti-legends – I just don't think they're useful. So that certainly wouldn't be my intention. But will it contribute to that? Sure. Any medicine can be misused. But I think there is a great courage, innocence and magic to him that more than [making him] a legend is about connection. It's the legend of who we are in our shared time between all of us. This is a part of my vocabulary that I knew if I f***ed it up, or fulfilled it in a way that connected or didn't connect particularly in a massive way, the story itself was something that in its heart I was not alone in responding to. There's a wanderlust in everybody that makes this a very universal kind of tale.

Will it be 10 years before you direct another movie?
Sean Penn: I don't think so. I think this movie, more than anything I've done, made me know what it is I'm looking for. I like to use the analogy of if what you're looking for is love, then if you're looking for it every night in bars in Los Angeles you're lucky once every five years to find it. You'll have affairs – but in movie-making, affairs with a piece of material are just not going to cut it because you've got to stay in love for years to get through it. So, I think I know more about what I'm looking for in that love, and so I'll probably be a little faster to identify it and force it into submission [laughs].

Interview: Rob Carnevale
Photo: Paramount