ITALY: Rome festival warms to Sean Penn's "Into the Wild"

A young man's quest for freedom takes him on a two-year long journey from South Dakota to Alaska in Sean Penn's new film, a road movie chronicling the true story of a 24-year old adventurer who did not come back. "Into the Wild", which received a long applause at the Rome film festival on Wednesday (October 24), follows the solitary, ill-fated trip by Chris McCandless, a college graduate who at 22 left behind all comforts to reconnect with nature and live on his own terms. With only basic equipment and little knowledge of survival techniques, McCandless trekked all the way to the Alaskan wilderness, where he spent nearly four months before dying in August 1992, apparently of starvation. Director Penn said he hoped the film, an adaptation of a best-selling book by Jon Krakauer, would move young people towards "making the effort to step outside the comfort zone". "If there's anything that I'd like to see this be a part of moving young people towards , to make the effort to step outside their comfort zone. I think that it's sort of necessary to proactively pursue shedding of whatever other people told us to be as we grow up to begin to find out who we are and what we want and it seems it's like an important rite of passage to push that limit, not to the point of recommending some kind of reckless self-endangerment but certainly to a point of making your heart beat a little faster," Penn said during a news conference after the screening, apologising for looking the worse for wear after "too many rums and red wine last night". Penn said it took him 10 years to persuade McCandless's family to let him make a film about their son, whose decision to vanish without notice stemmed partly from a rebellion against his parents and their troubled marriage. Penn picked 22-year old Emile Hirsch, who recently starred in Nick Cassavetes' "Alpha Dog", to interpret McCandless and shot most of the film in the same locations where the real journey took place, going from sweltering heat to freezing temperatures. Both Penn, 47, and Hirsch said they had tried to portray the intense McCandless with all his flaws as well as qualities, rather than glorifying his character. "You know you get a greater respect for what you're doing when it all sinks in that this is real people, they're just like you or , with feelings, and you just, I looked at it differently after I talked to her at least," said Hirsch, referring to McCandless's sister who he said helped get to know Chris a little more. Hirsch said he had endured a diet and a lot of physical exercise for the role. William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden star as the dysfunctional parents and the cast includes a Grand Canyon expert with no acting experience as a roaming hippie, one of the various characters McCandless meets along the way. Looking ahead, Penn, who won a Oscar in 2004 for his performance in "Mystic River", said he was more interested in directing rather than acting. "That's something that is changed over the years," he said. "I've increasingly got fallen in love with this job of directing movies and so. The way that those things are chosen are very similar to how you choose a partner in life. You see her, you fall in love with her, you're stuck," he said. Both Penn and Hirsch appeared on the red carpet later on Wednesday for the public screening of their film.

ITN Source | October 25, 2007

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