Quest of a lifetime

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.”

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john.horn@latimes.com