Sean Penn and Eddie Vedder Press Conference
Sean, how did you decide how objective you could be about Chris? A park ranger said Chris wasn't daring but “stupid, tragic and inconsiderate.” There was a hand operated tram nearby that a map would have shown. Did you make a conscious effort not to romanticize it?
Sean Penn: “No, I object to a person who wears a brown shirt and a patch on their shoulder and follows instructions all day. I'm not all that interested in what the park rangers have to say. I accept that there's an automatic instinct to judge those you envy and who have more courage than you do, and I think while [the ranger] rides around in his four-wheeler on a CB radio and getting fat, Chris McCandless has spent 113 days f---ing alone in the most unforgiving wilderness that God created. You just go out there and take a look at it sometime.
This is a guy that wanted to challenge himself in a way that for us to judge would just be ridiculous. When I buy a Nikon camera, I have no tolerance for the instructions. I'm ready to make some mistakes using it and get some bad pictures back until I've figured it out for myself. I guarantee that if you do it that way, by the time you learn it, you learn it better than any instructions will tell you. If that's what he wanted to do, maybe he could have put the rifle away and come out with the bow and arrow. He could have gone out there naked in the woods.
You go out there and challenge yourself the way that you want to challenge yourself. I think that this isn't about there was more equipment to be bought at Patagonia. It's about somebody who had a will that is so uncommon today, a lack of addiction to comfort that is so uncommon and is so necessary to become common, or humankind doesn't survive the next century. I'm just not willing to participate. I'll welcome anybody's criticism and they can express it any way they want to. But I would caution you on listening to people in uniforms on this issue.”
But there’s an argument that the park ranger would be involved because he’d have to go in there and rescue him.
Sean Penn: “You said the guy said he wasn't in any hazardous condition. What's the big deal of driving his four-wheeler out and rescuing him then? He didn't bring anybody into [a] hazard[ous condition] with what he was doing. We don't live our lives to avoid bureaucratic mandates and [define] your job description to go in and do something or not do something. Put it on yourself. You're going to sit there and tell me... Do you have children?”
Yes.
Sean Penn: “You never corrupted them or f----ed them up in any way with any of your s---? There's no such thing as that. All right, so who's a bigger f--- up? Chris McCandless for hurting himself or you for hurting your kids? We've all got our s---. And me too, by the way. I'm not attacking you. I'm saying the point of this thing is that the heroism of this will and courage that this young man had. All the rest of it is somebody else's folly for me.”
Eddie, in 20 years what would you say if your daughter wanted to go on a trip like this?
Eddie Vedder: “Well, the initial reaction is to send a security guard along, keeping him 50 yards away keeping an eye on her at all the time. I can only encourage that at this point. I know that no matter what I do, and already she's been provided a life of travel, I didn't get to New York until I was 25 or to Europe until I was 26, she's been to all these places six, seven times. She's already beyond me as far as her comfortability around other people to this day for me. So with all that, even though I think she's going to have a really great upbringing and I'm trying to break any kind of chain of negative parenting that I might have survived, I know that she's going to go through a time when she's going to have to assert her independence, and I'm going to have to encourage that.”
Were there areas where you felt you had to stray from the book?
Sean Penn: “No, I'm not theoretical this way. What it is is, this is how I interpreted the book, this is what I thought John Krakauer wrote and I used his prose writing sometimes, his dialogue. I'm always frustrated when somebody makes a movie out of a book and they leave the book behind, or the heart of it. But the other thing that made this really easy in a sense was that, I think it was Francis Ford Coppola was talking about the fact that the short story tends to be a more harmonious partner with film than the novel. And cinema historically wise, East of Eden is a great adaptation coming from only a few chapters of Steinbeck's book.
What happened here that in one decision, because there's condensing and things that you do to make it feel like you felt when you read it, but for film. But in Jon Krakauer's book every couple of chapters is italicized and it's John's personal experiences that give him the insight and the obsession that he has in tracking McCandless' story, so when I made a decision that my camera would be the spokesman for that person connection, and I would be taken down, suddenly I had a book that held like a pebble between your fingers in terms of its width, and that was like a novelette or a short story and so it was very doable as completely as I felt it.”
