Actor Emile Hirsch remembers sitting before a television set at age 8, totally immersed in an episode of "20/20." The show featured a story about Christopher McCandless, a graduate of Emory University, who had given up all his money for a journey into the Alaskan wilderness.
"It was an amazing episode; I never forgot it," Hirsch said in an interview at his Ritz Carlton hotel room in Georgetown. "The idea that a young man would go into the wild on his own ... it's very hard to understand when you're a kid. You're [still] nervous about sleeping with the lights off."
Little did Hirsch know that 14 years later, writer and director Sean Penn would give him the chance to play the very same figure who had once transfixed his boyish curiosity. Penn, too, had been transfixed by McCandless' story. He wanted to adapt Jon Krakauer's "Into The Wild" - the investigative work that retraces McCandless' journey to Alaska - into a movie, and he wanted Hirsch to play McCandless.
"You get itchy feet just kind of being in [McCandless' world] and reading about it or watching it," Hirsch said. "The film can kind of speak to the wanderlust in people, the sense of adventure we all have, and I think that's why the book was so infectious."
But Hirsch couldn't exercise those itchy feet of his without the proper preparation, so he threw himself into the role, physically training for the more rigorous sequences and mentally training to understand the motivation behind McCandless' departure into the wild.
"I really tried to train myself a lot before the shoot with running and weight lifting so that I would be prepared to handle an eight-month shoot with Sean kind of cracking the whip on me everyday in the middle of nowhere," Hirsch said. "Although nothing really prepared me for the cold of the snow in Alaska or the heat of the sun around Lake Mead, Arizona."
Part of his mental preparation involved interviewing Christopher's parents and sister, Carine. Hirsch met with the parents first. They are both intelligent people and loved their son very much, he said. What really changed his opinion of Christopher, though, was his interview with Carine.
"She presented a side of [Christopher] that was so much more vulnerable and so much more emotional than the book can kind of let on," Hirsch said. "And that really influenced a lot of my ideas about the role for the film."
Though the film's story line is based in truth, Penn allowed Hirsch a certain creative leverage with his role. Both men feared that too much planning would spoil Christopher's character. A free-spirited approach would produce the most natural results, they thought.
"[Sean and I] really kind of wanted the wild to speak to us and inform us," Hirsch said. "[We wanted to] let nature and the actors and the moment dictate a lot of what we did, so we weren't too chatty about it. I think that was a part of the whole idea of being a free spirit in the wild. You can't be too bogged down by structure."
To wrap one's head around Christopher's journey is to understand just how complicated a person he was, Hirsch said. Sure, Christopher made a lot of mistakes on his journey, and people will continue to debate whether his wilderness conquest was shortsighted. But what matters most is that he did something that many of us are unwilling to even consider.
"He was a very enigmatic character, McCandless, and someone who just kept me thinking ... for endless hours," Hirsch said. "[Someone could] take a lot of different meanings from [his journey]. It's a very cryptic kind of story. It's almost like a Rorschach test. You see in McCandless what you want to see."
What Hirsch hopes is that his own inspiration for the role - what personal experiences feed his creative energy - will remain just as cryptic as McCandless' story.
"I don't really like to discuss my personal life too much," Hirsch said. "I think that it weakens people's interpretation of a character. ... Acting to me is like magic. If the magician tells you how he did [his trick] afterward it suddenly sucks ... and you don't care anymore. So I feel like ... the less people know about [me], the better an experience they will have when they watch the movie"
