Sean Penn Directs Into The Wild
Penn Puts Jon Krakauer's Best Selling Novel on Film
Sean Penn directed, produced and partly filmed the 2007 movie Into The Wild. A movie about a young mans escape from modern society.
For ten years Sean Penn had a vision of a movie he wanted to produce but couldn’t get the rights to make. In 2006 his dreams became reality when the parents of an extraordinary young man finally decided to allow Penn to make the film Into the Wild, based on their son’s life.
The Story
Christopher McCandless was a young man struggling to find his identity and place in society much like many other college students. Unlike other students he decided, right after graduating form Emory University, to stage his disappearance from civilization to begin a journey across the country.
In 1992 his adventures tragically ended when Alaskan moose hunters found the body of 24-year-old McCandless in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness. The autopsy following his death showed he died from starvation. In the two years preceding his death McCandless influenced and befriended many people he met on his travels. These people, along with diaries McCandless kept, tell the story of an extraordinary man determined to abandon all the comforts of modern society for a life on the road.
The Movie
Sean Penn’s movie, based on the 1996 bestselling book Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer, could easily have become a depressing portrait of a young man struggling to fit in to modern society. Instead Penn manages to transfer Christopher McCandless’ travels across the country to his final resting place in Alaska, into a beautiful, inspiring, life-confirming movie about a young man determined to escape society. His goal: to realize a dream of living in the Alaskan wilderness far away from civilization.
Penn stays very true to the book with only a few alterations and ad-ons to make the movie he envisioned. Penn's film shows McCandless journey beginning as a young boy struggling with anger and rebelling against his parents and society, through his development into manhood.
There is no chronology in the movie, which jumps between past and present and often leaps back and forth between meetings with interesting personalities on the road and often flashing back to life in the McCandless house. The cinematography is amazing as it takes the audience through breathtaking landscapes across the country, through the Arizona Desert, down the Colorado River, to the Mexican Gulf, before heading north to Alaska.
Without the perfect cast, the movie would have fallen flat but the choice of somewhat unknown Emile Hirsch as Christopher McCandless proved perfect as the young actor with his baby face and uncanny charm finds his way to the hearts of the audience. The real Christopher McCandless is said to have had the same effect on people who met him along the way.
