Sean Penn's American dream

1/4

10 April 2012

He's used to being called the most compelling actor of his generation - now Sean Penn is being lauded as one of its greatest directors for a film he has waited more than a decade to make.

Into the Wild - to be screened as part of the London Film Festival next month - is Penn's fourth feature behind the camera, and by far his best. Telling the true story of Chris McCandless, a middle-class college graduate who renounced his privileged life to set off on a fatal odyssey in the American wilderness, it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival earlier this month to an overwhelming response. The New York Times was in raptures over its exuberant spirit, with Rolling Stone magazine calling it unmissable and unforgettable and the Evening Standard comparing Penn's vision to classic American myths such as Huckleberry Finn and On the Road. A clutch of Oscar nominations is inevitable.

The response is a wonderful vindication for Penn, who went to huge efforts negotiating with McCandless's real-life family to see the film made. It is clear that Into the Wild holds great personal significance for the actor - he is even breaking a long-standing aversion to talking to the media (he once punched a photographer) in order to promote it. "I just really care about this movie being seen," he says, chewing on a cigarette, his tiny eyes scrunched up, his face perhaps more weathered than the average 47-year-old, as he comes to life explaining the film's significance for him.

Based on the non-fiction book by Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild follows Christopher (Emile Hirsch), a 22-year-old rebel who gave away his savings to Oxfam in 1990 and took off on the road, living the life of a wanderer while he prepared to go to live alone in the wilderness of Alaska. In 1992, he arrived in Alaska and survived in the wild for 113 days before dying from eating poisoned berries. In those two years, he went under the name "Alexander Supertramp", never once contacted his bourgeois family, and told everyone he met that his odyssey was a way of rejecting the materialism of American society.

It's no surprise that the story would appeal to Penn, one of Hollywood's most committed politicos, an old-style Leftie who tells me that his ideal world is one of "socialism with an opportunity for individuality".

As McCandless travels throughout the US meeting a colourful bunch of counterculturalists and loners, Penn rhapsodises his ideal America, showing a beautiful country which we foreigners have perhaps forgotten amid images of George Bush, 9/11 and troops in Iraq. But Into the Wild is in fact less a political film and more of an individual's soulsearching journey for authenticity and value.

"The wilderness is relentlessly authentic and will strip you of whatever fraudulent qualities or discourse we have and move you to be able to feel the life you are living at the time you're living it," Penn enthuses. "Reading the book, the connection I had with McCandless was just this feeling that, you know, pain is OK and joy sure is great if you can get it but being numb is the enemy."

Penn's masterpiece came very close not to be made at all. He first found Krakauer's book in Los Angeles, read it in one sitting the same day and vowed to buy the film rights. Krakauer negotiated a meeting between Penn and McCandless's parents in 1995 and they met four further times before the family agreed to the film - before dramatically changing their minds. Chris's mother, Billie, told Penn that she had had a dream in which Chris told her to stop the film going ahead. It was agonising for Penn - but he was forced to respect their wishes.

"If I didn't respect dreams, I wouldn't make movies," he concedes. "I told them I wouldn't stop wanting to make this movie and if something changed, they should let me know." Eventually, 10 years later, Penn received a call from the McCandlesses giving him the goahead. "Some part of me was sure it would come through. It seemed his story was inevitably going to come to film."

Like McCandless, Penn is intent on challenging himself to the extreme - battling that sense of numbness - whether as an actor, film-maker or citizen. While he has avoided the promotional treadmill, he has not shied away from inserting his celebrity presence into national crises such as Hurricane Katrina or political situations such as Iraq. Not surprisingly in a country where anti-government positions are ruthlessly shot down, he has been the subject of vicious attacks.

"The backlash is irrelevant to me," he says. "We all have one thing in common: we are going to die, so if we've got something to say, we'd better say it now," he continues.

On the subject of America, the country seen to such splendid effect in Into the Wild, he is unequivocal. "I'm heartbroken," he says. "We had this terrible thing happen in this country done by vicious criminals, and we had an opportunity to pursue that criminality and still reflect on the ways we have neglected or exploited other places. We had the goodwill of the world at that time. Now we've got this devastating mess. We've got it. They've got it. Our kids are going to have it."

Penn certainly isn't afraid of courting controversy. In 2002, he paid $56,000 for a full-page ad in The Washington Post criticising President Bush for his "deconstruction of civil liberties". He developed a friendship with Venezuelan president - and Bush's nemesis - Hugo Chavez, and in August this year went to Caracas to meet him. Chavez praised him for his courage in urging Americans to impeach Bush. Penn has visited Iran and Iraq and in September 2005 went to New Orleans and was seen on TV, filthy and soaked, rescuing those stranded by Hurricane Katrina. "I have never been satisfied not challenging my own comfort zone on things, so if I have any courage, it's the courage to get scared. Some people do it on rollercoasters."

Making films, he explains, is part of the same process. "I don't separate movie-making from writing from child-raising from political involvement. Once it feels like my job, I do it." He argues that he is not opposed to people with different views from his own. Rather, he says, he is fighting for a country which is oppressing its own constitutional values. "I talk about the United States as a place for individuality. You know I'm not going to be happy in a world where everybody agrees with me."

Penn has come a long way from his teen days as a surfer dude in southern California. He was born in 1960 in the heart of the film industry in LA. His father was actor/ director Leo Penn, who had been blacklisted in the McCarthy era for his own Left-wing views; his mother was actress Eileen Ryan. He grew up among film people in the wealthy enclave of Malibu and his childhood friends were Charlie Sheen, Emilio Estevez and Rob Lowe.

In his teens, he took acting classes and directed a one-act play. He also displayed a penchant for adventure, becoming an expert surfer and several times taking off in a car on Kerouac-style drives over the country.

Of his surfing experiences, he says: "I can remember so many times, so many formative moments, of looking at something that was bigger than I'd ever tried to paddle into and in shallower water over a sharper reef and I would push and push and sometimes I'd be flat out terrified. But the exhilaration that came with it was worth it."

He started acting professionally at the age of 19 on TV and was on Broadway at 21, in the same year that he made his film debut in Taps (alongside Tom Cruise). He achieved fame in his second film, Fast Times At Ridgemont High, a cult movie to this day in American schools and colleges. He played Jeff Spicoli, a perpetually stoned surfer dude not too far removed from Penn's own life offscreen.

But Penn wasn't about to go the populist route of his buddies Lowe and Sheen. He elected to take intense roles in serious films such as The Falcon and the Snowman, Bad Boys and At Close Range - but his famous three-year marriage to Madonna (1985-88) brought him the kind of publicity he wasn't looking for (one of the worst films of the Eighties, Shanghai Surprise, ignominiously teamed the newly-weds).

Incidents where he attacked photographers, a domestic-violence charge from the Madonna marriage and an assault-and-battery charge on an extra on the set of Colours in 1988 brought Penn the angry "bad boy" label which it would take him years to shake.

But by the Nineties he had calmed down in his personal life, marrying actress Robin Wright in 1996, whom he had begun dating in 1989. The couple had two children - Dylan, in 1991, and Hopper Jack (named after his friends Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson) in 1993. Around this time, his acting prowess began to win him a respect and adulation that would only escalate. He won rave reviews for films such as Carlito's Way, Casualties of War and The Usual Suspects, and made his directorial debut in 1991's Indian Runner, which was invited to the Cannes Film Festival. He won three Oscar acting nominations for Dead Man Walking, Sweet and Lowdown and I Am Sam.

In 2003 he won the Best Actor Oscar for Clint Eastwood's Mystic River - one of the few awards ceremonies he has deigned to turn up to. Eastwood, he says, is one of his key influences in Into the Wild, alongside Terrence Malick, his director on The Thin Red Line, and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, who directed him in 21 Grams.

When we talk about acting, Penn reveals his seriousness, bordering on pomposity. He claims it is "without doubt the hardest job in movies. The psychic toll that happens to an actor on any movie, serious or comedic, is a big deal." He says acting is harder than directing, which itself is "crazily difficult". But directing holds more appeal. "I love being an objective eye looking at these people I love do their thing, and I like doing it in my own clothes without make-up and emoting at an ungodly hour of the morning."

Talking to Penn is an intense experience. When I suggest he is intimidatingly serious, he takes offence. "The word most people close to me use is silly," he says. "The primary thing my children think about me is that I am funny," and he even tells me a joke (not suitable for children) to prove he has a sense of humour. Doesn't he get fed up with battling the US government, the media, the world?

He smiles, a rarity in a meeting with Sean Penn. "I think the more fed up I am, the more I feel like getting into it, and the more at peace I am, the more I want to run away."

Into the Wild will be screened at the London Film Festival on 25 and 26 October and released nationwide on 9 November.

Sean Penn's American dream

Read More